Setting Goals in Oxford

Oxford was wintry yesterday when I arrived (despite the best efforts of the rail network completely thrown into chaos by a points failure at Slough) to fill in the gaps in my lists of Surrey clergy with a visit to the ranks of Crockford's and the Clergy List on the shelves of the Bodleian. I also wanted to look up Old Cornwall, the magazine of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, to pursue accounts of the restoration of holy wells, which meant my first-ever visit to the Taylorian Library. I was shown to the farthest recesses of the basement where there was a tiny, tiny desk at the end of a row of rolling shelves. 'I could give you directions', said the thoughtful young woman at the enquiry desk, 'but they'd be too complicated to remember'. I think she just wanted a break. On my way out I looked through a doorway and saw a bust of Voltaire seasonally-decorated.

I made my way up the Banbury Road to Wycliffe Hall to see the Principal, Michael Lloyd, who was my doctrine tutor at St Stephen's House. What's happening at Wickers these days, I asked? 'It's interesting, we have quite a number of students who regularly worship at Pusey House', said Michael, 'so we're working out how to negotiate that without losing the basic Evangelical nature of the college.'

'Our current ambition is to help renew the Church of England's engagement with society on an intellectual level - trying to do something about its current habit of anti-intellectualism. We want to encourage Christian academics who work in different fields, not just theology. Strangely though there's a lot of talk about the conflict of religion and science, there are lots of Christian physicists and chemists, but hardly anyone working in English literature or sociology. It impoverishes the Christian mind. We have a writer-in-residence here: I'd like to have an artist-in-residence, a musician, a film-maker. The Church has spent too long just talking to itself, so it's no wonder the rest of society ignores us.'

'I'm so pleased to hear that', I said, 'it's been something I've complained about for years (to myself) - that we talk all the time about engagement with the world but don't do it. All we seem to do is shout at it.'

'Yes', went on Michael, 'we're calling it "The Renaissance of Christian Intellectual Life".

'I don't know what we'll do next year.'