COURSE: Imagining Heaven – with the Help of the Victorians - SOLD OUT
Imagining Heaven – with the help of the Victorians
Weekend course with Ian Bradley
From 5pm Friday 24th to 26th November (ends after lunch)
The course will include access to the public lecture Falling Back in Love with Death at 5pm on Saturday 25th November. Separate tickets priced at £10 per person are available for this talk. Click here to purchase if you are NOT a course delegate.
Advent is traditionally the season when the church focuses on the ‘four last things’: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. In the season of remembrance, and when death is coming out of the closet and being talked about much more widely, this course explores ideas of heaven, especially as found among Victorian poets, preachers and philosophers.
The Victorians thought, wrote, preached and sang a great deal more about death and what might follow it than we do today. As these subjects come to be talked about again after more than a century when they have been swept under the carpet and avoided, Ian Bradley explores the way heaven was imagined by poets, including Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Adelaide Procter, churchmen, including F.D.Maurice, John Ellerton, John Henry Newman and George Matheson, intellectuals like W.E.Gladstone and those on the fringes of faith. Their approach was almost uniformly positive, as epitomised by Tennyson’s answer to his rhetorical question ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’, posed in his widely read epic In Memoriam, that they are ‘the breathers of an ampler day for ever nobler ends’.
Imagining heaven through the eyes of Victorian hymns, poems, sermons and stories, with their rich imagery and consoling messages, can, perhaps, help us overcome our own fears and uncertainty about death and what lies beyond it and contribute to the more positive atmosphere that is now beginning to surround it after decades of over-medicalisation and privatisation. This weekend offers a positive and engaging take on what can seem the rather gloomy and forbidding message of Advent’s focus on the ‘four last things’.
Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews and a well-known writer, broadcaster, preacher and speaker who has run many highly-regarded courses at the Gladstone Library. His new book, Breathers of an Ampler Day – Victorian Views of Heaven, on which this course is based, is the third in a trilogy on aspects of death, dying and the afterlife.
The course will include access to the public lecture Falling Back in Love with Death at 5pm on Saturday 25th November. Separate tickets priced at £10 per person are available for this talk. Click here to purchase if you are NOT a course delegate.
Non-resident £240 Student /clergy/SoA £208
Single ensuite £400 Student/clergy/SoA £304
Double ensuite – single occupancy £460/SoA Student/clergy £360
Double ensuite £550 Student/clergy/SoA £450 (two people in bedroom, one on course)
Double ensuite £620 Student /clergy/SoA £500 (both on course)
Join the cancellation list by emailing [email protected]. If you send a message, please include your name, contact details and preferred room type.
Programme:
Friday November 24th
5pm Welcome and introductions
6pm Dinner
7.30pm Session 1: Introduction: The Victorian Celebration of Death and Heaven
Saturday November 25th
9.45am Session 2: ‘How fares it with the happy dead’? - Alfred Tennyson and other poets
11am Coffee break
11.30am Session 3: ‘Rest without ceasing to work’ F.D.Maurice and exponents of an active afterlife
1pm Lunch followed by free time
5pm Public Lecture: ‘Falling Back In Love With Death’
6.30 pm Dinner
7.30pm Session 4: Victorian hymns about heaven
Sunday 26th November 2023
9.45am Session 5 ‘The caterpillar dies into the butterfly’ - The cycle of nature and resurrection
11.30 am Final session: ‘The heart still overrules the head’ Concluding thoughts & discussion
1pm Lunch and depart