S14 E4: The One About The Sea Of Faith Network

Have you heard of Don Cupitt? Of Big Ideas for RE? Or maybe you have used the In Converstations webinars!  This only skims the surfaces of what the Sea Of Faith Network does to support the RE Community!
The Sofia publication, regional meetings, the Sea of Faith conference, Solarity...
We are so lucky to have this network who provides a space  for people to have conversations about the human experiences free from the bias' of fundamentalist thinking.
My thaks for Dave Francis for talking to the RE Podcast and to the whole network for your work!

Below are all the links referred to in this episode;

https://www.sofn.uk/
https://bigideasforre.org/
https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/
https://www.solarity.org.uk/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the R.E. Podcast, the first dedicated RE podcast for students and teachers. My name is Louisa James Smith and this is the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. My guest today is Dave Francis, who is going to talk to us about the Sea of Faith Network, a wonderful resource for RE teachers. Now, some of you might already be aware of their curriculum conversations, one of the many things we're going to talk about today. So welcome to the podcast, Dave.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Thank you. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Brilliant. Dave, will you just introduce yourself for our listeners?

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Sure. So I'm Dave Francis and I've had a career in RE teaching and advising. And I joined the Sea of Faith Network maybe a couple of decades ago now, and have been part of its trustees, group of trustees, until recently. I think my time is up, so um I've had to relinquish that responsibility. But in any case, we've reduced the number of trustees in the organisation to make it a little bit slimmer and fitter. And we're now kind of run by a steering group of which um I'm a member.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Brilliant. Now I have to admit, the Sea of Faith Network, I think, was in my subconscious, but I don't think it was in my conscious mind. So there might be people out there who also don't know exactly what it is. So let's just start with kind of how it formed and why it started, when it started.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Sure. Well, um it really started with Don Cupett, who many of uh your listeners may have heard of, philosopher from Cambridge and theologian. And he delivered some famous BBC broadcasts in uh mid-1980s, about 1984, in fact, because it's 40 years since they were first broadcast, called The Sea of Faith, in which he quoted Matthew Arnold's poem about the Sea of Faith withdrawing as he detected the fact that people were becoming perhaps less religious in Britain. And uh following that broadcast and a number of other books that Don wrote, it was decided by a few people that uh a new network ought to be formed, really looking at the future of faith, particularly to start with within the Christian tradition. Uh, it took a few years to get going, but there was a conference began in 1987, led by people like Stephen Mitchell, Ronald Pierce, David Patterson, Clive Richard, Aileen La Tourette. Um, a number of people started thinking about how we can have a faith for the modern world without the baggage of all of its metaphysical beliefs. So it began to look at religion really as a human creation and trying to work out what there was that could be rescued in Christianity to start with, and then probably religion in general, if you took away some of the metaphysical, or perhaps all of the metaphysical beliefs, and looked at uh the value of religion in terms of its spirituality, its ethical teachings, and so on. So that's really where it began. It began with a conference and a network formed shortly after that.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

And it's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think it sort of recognises the value of religion without having to subscribe to every single religious belief.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

So I think that's really interesting and probably then leads into my next question, which is sort of what is the philosophy of the network? And I think you've sort of maybe suggested that in that introduction, but maybe just to sort of clarify that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's very important, I think, first of all, that it's a network, it's not an organization with a kind of hierarchy and a system of beliefs and practices, a kind of creed or anything like that. That's really been rejected by members of the network when one or two people decided to write a tentative system of beliefs for the network. And so it's made up of individuals really with their own lives and their own commitment and practices. Some of them belong to churches or to other religious organizations, some are humanists, some are pagans, people come from all over to join the network, and there's no insistence on any kind of belief, or indeed non-belief, so it's open to individuals. But the thing about the network is that it explores and to some extent promotes religion and worldviews as human creations. And I think crucially, in the last few years, we've added the words to our statement of intent for this life. Three kind of like key words for understanding what the network is about. You know, it's for something, and it's for this life. Who knows what comes next? That's kind of like left as an open question for individuals to take their own stance on. And life. And Don Cupid himself wrote quite a lot about life, and the emphasis there of the network is on this life. What can we do for this life in this life? And leave perhaps any questions of the possibility of a next life or afterlife as an open question. And members, some of whom have take a quite atheistic view of things, and they say that really what we should be looking for is a world of atheistic Christianity, if you like, the values of Christianity, but without the beliefs in God and the afterlife. Others are a bit less certain about what might lie beyond, and so the network tends to leave that as an open question. But the key thing is we explore, we promote all those sort of human elements of life to see what can be of value and what we can make of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

And I guess I underlying that there seems to be this sense that people sometimes throw out the sort of babe with the bathwater, you know, actually if they reject organised religion, they reject a lot of the things that are very beautiful about organized tradition in terms of a value system and an ethical code and a sense of community and a sense of purpose and meaning and belonging and all of those things. Whereas that's you're trying to say, hold on, let's just take a step back and think about this and not just get rid of everything and create a space where we can celebrate something that is accessible to all human beings that religion offers people.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Exactly. And I mean I think some people, perhaps on one edge of humanism, tends to reject religion altogether and think that humanity would be better off without it. But members of the network don't take that point of view at all. Rather, the opposite, that we see value in religion and religions and non-religious worldviews as well, and we treat all of the religious history of humankind as a kind of treasury which we can explore. And I know people are precious about their own traditions and so on, and we don't want to be accused of invading other people's traditions and lifestyles and so on and taking things for our own use, but we do want to see value in what goes on in religions and make our own judgments really about how we are more positive or negative about the individual religions and practices that we meet.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

And actually what's lovely about it is how inclusive it is, because it doesn't exclude people of faith, it doesn't exclude people that don't have faith. It's a space where theist, atheist, agnostic, Christian, humanist can all come together and find that sort of shared space, which I think is really lovely about it. And a phrase that you said when we spoke, which was lovely, is the RE teacher's religion. So just talk to us about that phrase and why it's quite a good one to use in relation to the Sea of Faith Network.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

Yeah, it just did occur to me. I was doing some work when I was an advisor. I was working in Somerset with William Bloom, who listeners may know is uh a great spiritual teacher, uh trustee of Glastonbury Abbey and so on, who writes regularly for people interested in spiritual meditative questions, holistic philosophies of life, and so on. We were doing a little bit of work together on spirituality in Somerset, and at one point he asked me what my own religious beliefs and practices were. And as I was answering him, I suddenly got the thought that actually what I was describing was religious education and that RE was kind of my religion, is what I believed in. And I do think, you know, I'll reflect on it further, and I think it's probably true of people in the CFA network as well, that we do believe in the power of education to enlighten, to provoke students and children to deeper thinking, critical thinking, and encourage them to understand the plurality and the wonders of the world. You know, get below some of the surface impressions of things. And I think that's a real contribution that religious education, or perhaps, you know, as some people call it now, religion and worldviews. I quite like that as a new title for the subject. You know, it's something to believe in, something that you think actually is going to make a difference to people's lives for the better.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And I think that's really interesting because I think as an RE teacher, you have your own personal faith or non-faith, but you hold space for all of the religions. And I don't know many RE teachers who aren't a little bit inspired by every religious or non-religious worldview that they teach. And so actually it's a really, it's a really lovely way of understanding. I will just say, I don't know if necessarily religion worldviews is as much a change of name as a change of approach. So I think it's, you know, there was a lot of debate, I think, in the RE community about whether we needed to change the name to reflect the new approach. But I think actually the name RE is that sort of consistent kind of image, and actually what goes on behind the scenes is throughout its history has evolved and changed.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

But that's right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

It's lovely when there's people that are supporting the RE community that buy into that religion and worldviews approach because I think that means that there's a much more connection and joined up thinking between what everybody's doing.

SPEAKER_02 10:19

Well, you're right. I mean, the legal title is religious education, it's the internationally recognised title and so on. What I liked about religion and worldviews, which came out of the commission on RE a few years ago, and I think it was Joyce Miller who coined the term, was the idea that religion singular represents the field of study and investigation, and worldviews plural represents all of the religious and non-religious worldviews that are the subject of of study. So I thought it was a brilliant title, really. And a a worldviews approach, if you like, is something that certainly the CFA network supports.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Absolutely, because again, it's that sort of inclusive term, isn't it? So let's just now explore what the CF Faith Network provides. And I want to start with Solarity. So just explain what that is.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Well, this was a product of some thinking about the network itself and its membership. And of course, when it started, it involved a lot of Christian priests, ordained vicars and so on, who wanted to see something new in the approach of Christianity to the world. So they were mostly of a certain age, as we might say. And I was wondering how we might appeal, as we ought to, to uh younger generations of people. And we started to look into what the possibilities were. And I suggested that one of the things that we might look into is the idea of a religion and philosophy out of. And this was really prompted by my experience as an advisor going into a primary school and being advised by the head teacher that I might like to look at the school's lunchtime Bible club. So I thought, oh, that'd be a good idea, it'd be interesting to see what that's contributing to religious education in the school. And when I went in, I was really disappointed because the Bible club really consisted of a teacher asking the children, and I think there were only four or five there, to draw some pictures of Jesus coming into Jerusalem or something like that, and then colour them in. And there wasn't really any discussion about the story that prompted that, or any kind of deeper thinking. And I thought, well, there's got to be something better than this that we could offer. And so I'd started working with some teachers, people like Ed Paulson, who I think you've had on your podcasts in a previous episode, people like Johnny Lawson and Katie Snook, David Allinson in a local primary school. We started working on ideas for an out-of-school hours religion and philosophy club that would actually be interesting, provoke some thinking, and maybe support the religious education of the school. So over a period of years, really, we managed to raise some funding to pay the teachers to contribute some ideas for sessions, and this all got uploaded to a website which we've called Solarity, solarity.org.uk. And the name itself comes from one of Don Cupid's books. He wrote a book called Solar Ethics in the 1990s, with the idea that we should live like the sun in many respects. In other words, giving out generously, without thinking about anything in return. Solar Ethics was about giving, generously, forgiving, kind of like Christian ethics, really. So we thought this was a great title. Not everybody agreed at first, but people got to like it. We thought this was a great title for the philosophy class. A number of teachers who have used the materials there, both for RE lessons as well as out of school activities as well. So we've got about 40 sessions for primary and about 40 for secondary age students, and they all involve thinking, watching something, being stimulated by some kind of sometimes it's a YouTube video or a photograph or a newspaper article, a series of questions to think about and talk about. So we we kind of like that. And that was our first real contribution, we think, to education that got uh widely recognised.

unknown 14:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Do you know it's interesting? I was literally having a conversation yesterday, a teacher wanting to start a philosophy club, and he wanted my advice, and I've actually now got the answer to his question they asked me yesterday. Because I think what us teachers do is we have these ideas that we'd like to start maybe a philosophy club in school, but it's the thinking behind it that we sometimes find difficult. And so actually, we often have the great idea, but not the time to kind of make it happen. And actually, what this does is provide the structure and the resources and the thinking behind it, and you can then just facilitate it. And actually, I would imagine that once you've used all the resources, you will find it a lot easier to then apply the structure and go, oh, actually, because I watched this film or I saw this news story or whatever, and it actually is just a real jumping-off point for teachers, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Absolutely, yeah. And we do hope that people will use that structure to devise their own sessions as well, because things quickly get out of date. I mean, I've just been through all the Solarity materials and updated them because when we put them online, you know, the links that we had at the time, not all of them worked anymore, but some of them were out of date. So you need to constantly be checking to see whether things are still being linked properly.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

I mean, the more current it is, the better we think, you know, that people are using stuff that's relevant for them right now.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Yeah, amazing. I'll put a link to Solarity in the show notes so people can easily find that.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

And let's move on to another provision for RE, which is big ideas for RE, which I think a lot of people are going, oh yes, yes, yes, I know that. So just tell us exactly what this is.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Yeah, I hope so. Um it's becoming more and more well known. After Solarity, we realized that quite a lot of our sessions were actually being used to support religious education rather than out-of-school hours clubs. And uh, just judging from the figures that we'd got from which uh sessions were being downloaded, we said, well, really what CFA Network ought to be doing is supporting a program for religious education in schools. And it so happened that at the time I was working with Denise Cush, who is my wife, and uh Barbara Wintersgill, who is a former Ofsted HMI, on a program which Barbara had started called Big Ideas for RE. And this was based on an excellent uh educational philosophy started by two American academics, who are Jay McTye and Grant Wiggins, who wrote um wrote a book called Understanding by Design. Now, this is a method of designing the curriculum for any subject, which starts off with what you're hoping children will be able to know, understand, and can do, and then works backwards from there and says, well, what kind of educational program can we design in order to achieve these ends? And it's become quite a popular internationally recognized approach. And I think that the whole of the Western Australia curriculum, for example, is based on the big ideas program, and science education in this country also makes big use of the big ideas approach, which basically says, what are the big ideas in our subject that we want children to know and understand? So the team that was led by Barbara brought academics and teachers from all over the country together in a little farmhouse in Dartmoor, and she said that uh she wasn't going to let us out until we'd come up with the big ideas for RE. So we spent um a couple of nights in this cottage in Dartmoor and uh worked together quite intensively, although there were breaks for chocolate and coffee until we came up with some big ideas. We came up with six, and I mean it could be seven, it could be eight, it could be four, you know. I mean, it's all provisional and debatable. But the six big ideas that we came up with are the ideas that will help you as an RE teacher to select from the vast amount of material that's available in the world of religion and belief. And that's one of our problems, really, isn't it, in the subject? There's so much material. How do you select from it? How do you do justice to all of the religions and worldviews that children might come across? And instead of saying, okay, we need to include something like humanism alongside Judaism, Christianity, Islam, so on, just say, okay, we do want to include stuff from maybe all of these religious traditions and some smaller religious traditions as well. Baha'i, which isn't small internationally, but it is relatively small in Britain. Uh, Rastafari, paganism, you know, we want to include some of this, but how do we do it in a very, very small amount of curriculum time that's available for RE teachers? And the way to do this is to make use of the big ideas and to say, okay, what we're really trying to do is help children to navigate a complex world of belief. If they can understand these six big ideas in relation to the examples that we choose, then we're going to get somewhere. And those examples can then be chosen by individual teachers or by schools or by a local to represent their particular area and the families that they find in their schools.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

So if I relate this then to this worldviews approach that we've adopted, and we've got the uh national content standard document, which is kind of the standard for what a good RE curriculum is, then there's a nice little diagram in there, like little flower. And we've got sort of these six kind of core concepts of like nature, formation, expression, organized individual, context, meaning and purpose, values, commitments, and morality, and influence and power. Is that kind of what we're talking about? That you've got these sort of big themes that then underpin your curriculum and it's how you approach the teaching the different religions so that there is structure and consistency from teaching one religion to another under these kind of broader terms.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

That's exactly it.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

Those ones in the national content standard reflect the six big ideas that Barbara Winterskill's team came up with. They're not an exact match, but you could see straight away the similarity, influence and power is the same, for example.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

We call a good life, you know, what there's also a moral and uh ethical dimension and so on. But yes, that's right, those are the priorities. And what we've done in our project, in our big ideas for RE project, is we've worked out how children can make progress in those six areas through their school career. So, in other words, what we've done is we've written age-related statements for each of the big ideas, and we've constructed lesson plans. We've now got almost a complete selection of exemplars, complete with resources and everything, on our website, bigideas4re.org. And the children's progress is related to those age related statements in each of the six big ideas. So they're not big concepts, right? They're big they are big ideas.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

They're what matters in the subject.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Brilliant. So I've got that link to put in the show notes. But also I think what's really interesting is that we see the national content standard in a context in the history of the evolution of RE, that these are not just random ideas that have been plucked. The national content standard is a reflection of work that's been done over decades to kind of really think about what RE is and what good RE is. And I think that's a really key point you're talking about there in terms of what it looks like to get better in RE and how we measure that and how we structure that. And I think that's really significant when we don't currently have a national curriculum to know what that looks like. And so I think the fact that you've thought about that, I think it's really, really helpful and really important.

SPEAKER_02 22:48

That's absolutely right. And it it reflects what the worldviews themselves are interested in. They've all got something to say, you know, about how you live a good life. All the established big worldviews have got a big picture of the universe, of life, the universe, and everything.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

They've all got something to say about how they relate to the states or nations which they find themselves. They've all got something to say about how we make sense of our experience of life and so on. So these big ideas, as you say, are not just plucked from anywhere, they reflect the world of religion. And that's why I think they're proving to be quite successful. If I can just say about the progression as well, that one of the things that Barbara has championed is a way of assessing people's progress that makes sense and is being used, particularly in the southwest at the moment, maybe some other places as well, that makes use of Bloom's taxonomy, but kind of like turns it on its side and makes all of the skills that Bloom identified for progress in thinking available at every age. So her big insight, I think, was that I don't know if you remember, we used to do can-do statements that myself and Deborah Weston worked on, in particular, a number of other people as well. But what Barbara's insight was was that if you turn the pyramid of progress on its side, then you can say, why can't the youngest children make an evaluation of something at their own level? Why can't they analyse something? These aren't just higher-level skills for key stage four students. These are things that can be done at any age at the child's own level. So that's how the assessment scheme in our Big Ideas for RE programme works. And it does work. You know, we've got examples of kind of questions that children can be asked and activities that they can do for each of our exemplars.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

It's very, very interesting. Because I think us as teachers, those I can statements didn't necessarily always fit with our experience in the classroom. And I think you're absolutely right that all children can do all of those skills. They're just age-appropriate versions of those skills. So yeah, that's really fascinating. As if that wasn't enough. That is not all. There are many other things you provide. And something that I mentioned in the introduction with the in conversations webinars. Let's talk about the sort of inception of those in terms of what their purpose are and what kind of conversations you have.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

Yes. So this is um a fairly new innovation in some respects, really, since COVID forced everyone to do some things that didn't depend on where you lived and being able to meet up in person. So of course it's still nice to do that. So the idea was that uh we should have some regular, basically monthly, online Zoom calls where conversation could be led usually by one of the network's members, or invite somebody from outside to lead something, start off some thinking, and then allow some time for people to ask questions, make comments, and so on. And uh we've made these available for everyone who wants to sign up to it, basically. And I regularly put on our Facebook page, and I have been using X, I think we might be going over to Blue Sky as well, to make sure that people know that these in-conversation events are open to anybody who wants to say that they'll attend. So in the past, we've I did one on the Shroud of Turin, for example, which was one of my little enthusiasms.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

And other people have done stuff on psychological approaches to conflict and violence. There have been a number of other events, but really by people's enthusiasms.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

That's really fascinating. I'm I'd quite like to do an episode on the Shadow Turin, Dave. I think that might need to be a part B of our little conversations because that's one of those things where I'm like, it's the attitudes towards it have changed from it being, you know, proof of the existence of Jesus and then it was refuted, and then the evidence that refuted it was refuted in it. And so we've had this kind of really interesting history that would be really interesting to talk about. So watch this space, listeners. So that's the end conversations. How often do they happen?

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Yeah, it's a third Wednesday of the month.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

And I think there may be some months that we miss out, like holiday you know, summer and so on. But the next one, I think, is oh, it might be coming up quite soon. Is it next week? I'm just gonna check my diary. Yes, it is. And we've got Andy Kemp, one of our great members, who's gonna lead a session called You'll Never Walk Alone. Oh, I see.

unknown 27:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

As in You'll, yes, get it. That's very good. And he says, Um, why not ease yourself gently into the festive season, pondering the persistence of pilgrimage? It's all peas here, and the purported power of the dead.

unknown 27:54

Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_02 27:55

So he's going to look at pilgrimage, which I think is a great subject, of course, for our e-teachers as well. But generally in life, the whole idea of pilgrimage is one that people relate to very strongly, I think.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Gosh, we've got alliteration, we've got puns. What more can you want? Now we're recording this on the 11th of December, so you're talking about the 18th of December. Oh, yes. By the time this goes out, that would have passed. Can people listen to them retrospectively? Obviously, they wouldn't then be able to ask questions.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

Yes, they can. All of them are being recorded and they are made available. And you can get the link via the Seerface Network website, which is sofn.uk.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

And you know, listeners, what I'm doing right now. I'm finding that link and then I can put that in the show notes. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is the publication, which is called Sophia. Yeah. But before we talk about the publication, it would be interesting to just clarify the name, the spelling of the name, the significance of the name.

SPEAKER_02 28:56

Yeah, so uh Sophia, obviously you've got the goddess of wisdom with uh PH, but uh we've gone for SOF for C of Faith I A. S O F I A, Sophia. Again, another nice pun really to uh give for the title of our Four Times a Year uh magazine. It's a high quality magazine, actually. The editor for some years now has been Dinah Livingston, who is a poet in her own right, very interested in poetry, got personal enthusiasms for London and for William Blake, but invites people from all across the network and people interested in religion as a human creation generally to contribute. I've just got the latest one um in front of me, which um is looking at protest and so on. So um always full of interesting articles, thoughts, personal reflections, and so on. And they are all um archived on our website as well. People can subscribe to Sophia without being a member of the Seer Faith network as well. Although if you are a you get Sophia as part of your membership.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Yeah. And are the target audience RE teachers, or are they sort of anybody with any kind of interest in sort of philosophy and thinking and politics and they're not targeted at RE teachers at all, really.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

It's much more of a general readership of people interested in philosophical and religious issues, issues of uh value in society, ecology, as well as other scientific and moral questions feature quite heavily.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Wow. Okay. You might think we're finished. We're not. Because there's also regional meetings, and they are both face-to-face and virtual. So talk to us about these meetings. What do they discuss?

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Yeah, so we have a number of regional meetings. Um, they're quite thinly spread on the ground these days. Um, I think that since we've gone more online, people have joined in with things like the London events online and so on. But there are regional groups in the Northwest and the Midlands and the Southwest. The one I go to is called the Wessex uh group, it meets in Bradford on Avon, but people come from quite a long way away to come to the meetings. And we have some online and some in person, and they're rather like the in-conversation events, are led by the members themselves. Our next meeting, for example, in the Wessex Group, we're all going to talk about a book that has meant a lot to us or made us change our minds about something in recent years, just talk for a few minutes each on that and then exchange some views. But we also have some regular books as well, like the philosophy of uh naturalism and so on, as well as reflecting what might happen at our conferences.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Do you know what? It's really interesting because even you just telling me the title of one of those meetings, my brain is going, Oh, what book have I read that has changed the way I've thought about something? And I knew exactly what it was. I've mentioned the book a lot on this podcast, is A Hopeful History by Rutka Bregman. And it was not only life changing because it inspired me to write the first episode for this podcast. It gave advice that has improved the quality of my life. And it was don't listen to the news. And it reframed a lot of my preconceived ideas about the nature of humanity in a way that was like actually, we are actually phenomenally beautiful and good, and we're just being given a biased, kind of slanted history. And it just kind of takes a lot of these kind of tropes that we are naturally selfish and actually turns them on the head. So yeah, that would be my one.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

That sounds absolutely marvelous. I haven't read it myself, but I I'll make a point of looking at that.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

And it's very, very easy to read, it's not very long, it's phenomenal. And actually, I know that Ridger Breckman at the moment is doing a lot of work sort of globally on the sort of concept of ethics and sort of redefining what we mean by ethics in the 21st century. So, yeah, a great, great, great person. Why do you think these meetings are so important? Why do you think it is important for people to have a place to meet to discuss kind of the big questions that are sort of separate from maybe organized religion or a narrow way of thinking?

SPEAKER_02 33:29

Well, yeah, I mean it's a good question because when you belong to a particular religious tradition, it's not always the case that you get the opportunity to discuss things in that kind of unthreatening way, where decisions don't have to be made that go forward to some synod or something like that, having been on a PCC in the past. You get a chance to talk about things, but they're in a certain kind of context. I mean, this is like the flavor of a network, really, where you can get together and the subjects are really come from the membership themselves. It's not dictated by a hierarchy or whatever's uh affecting a particular institution at a particular time. It's much more to do with what people are interested in and what people think is of value to themselves to uh to discuss. Exactly like the book you were talking about. You know, that would be a great topic for one of those meetings. And people do like meeting in person still. You know, we often have this discussion about whether all meetings should go online so that people don't have to travel great distances to meet up. But people do value the face-to-face contact, you know, the sharing a cup of coffee, the in-between moments that you have, aside from the actual business of the meeting. All of those kind of personal things are important, I think, in these networks. And so people have hung on to them. Even when numbers reduce in in some areas, people still want to be part of that because it's the often their only opportunity to discuss things which are big questions and big issues, you know.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

That's really interesting, and actually, you know, talking as someone who's a bit new spicy, my memory is much more efficient if I'm physically in a room with somebody. So because memory and I think emotion are very much connected, you feel disconnected when you're talking. I know that's what we're doing at the moment, but you know, you feel slightly disconnected when you're on a screen. And I think that stops you from really encountering in a deep level what somebody is saying or how someone is thinking. It's engaging a lot more of the kind of human experience when you're face to face. But I think it's nice that online spaces become much more inclusive. And so people that are maybe socially anxious or, you know, have restrictions on their time or finances or have commitments can also still engage because there's online provisions that you have as well. And so, you know, as I'm listening to you, what I'm really struck by is the variety of ways in which you support people or to create this space. You know, that you've got a publication and you've got resources and you've got face-to-face meetings and you've got in conversations webinars, that you're creating a lot of different medium to connect people together and connect people to kind of big ideas. And I think that's really incredible.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Yeah, thank you, Louisa. I mean, they are different things, aren't they? Meet the face-to-face meeting and the online meeting, and they they each have something to be said for them. But I think the combination, you know, is the way that we're working now is to have one or two meetings online and two or three in person. And that seems to get the best out of out of both worlds, really.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

And I think sometimes we always have these conversations about which one's better. And actually, quite often the answer is both, you know. You know, it's not necessarily an either-or thing. Finally, then, finally, there is the Sea of Faith Conference. So, what it might be quite nice to do is just name some of the speakers that have spoken at this conference so we can kind of see the richness and wealth of this as an opportunity for people.

SPEAKER_02 37:10

Sure, yeah. I won't be able to remember them all, but I know we've had philosophers like Mary Midgley and Julian Bugini has uh spoken, as well as people like uh Keith Ward, Don Kupert himself used to speak at the conferences, uh Lloyd Gearing, Mary Warnocker was at uh previous conference, Stephen Batchelor, the Buddhist, David Bolton, who was the producer of World in Action, Philip Poulman, that I mentioned, has spoken in Yasmin Alibi Brown as well, Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh. And Michael Rice. We've had a few scientists as well who've spoken at conferences in the past. People from the humanist uh side as well, people like Keith Portius Wood of the National Secular Society, journalists as well, like Andrew Brown of The Guardian, quite a few people of uh national repute and note. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, I remember, gave a great talk as well. Should have won a Nobel Prize, probably, but uh she talked a lot about how women were sometimes sidelined when it comes to these great honours and awards.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

Right, yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

Oh, Jonathan Porrett spoke as well, a great environmental thinker. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

I mean it's such a diverse and rich group of people that were spoken. And I think what's unique about it is it's not just people in the RE world, it's people that are in politics and people that are in journalism and as well as people representing faith as well. So I think that's really lovely because I think it sees religion and faith and worldviews in context. These are not you know separate from the rest of the world. Everything is interconnected, and I think that's what's really lovely about that. Who would be your ideal guest? Is there somebody you'd love to speak at this? Because you never know who's listening. Yeah, you never know who might be able to connect you.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Yes, well, I know you did a podcast with Steve Chalk a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed him. I think he would be a great speaker at our conference as well. I think next time we're going to focus on education as a kind of theme as well. So uh that might be nice to get Trevor Cooling or Stephen Pett along.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

I haven't approached them yet, but um might be nice to get them along as people who've led this latest development from the Religious Education Council into the worldviews approach and providing different frameworks to illustrate what might be done in in future religious education.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Well, I'm sure Stephen and Trevor are regular listeners to the podcast and they may contact you.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

And what I will say actually with Steve Chalk, he's just opened the first secure school in the UK, and so it is a school where young offenders go, which might kind of fit quite nicely in terms of education, in terms of a way out of crime and actually how young criminals need to be treated. Yeah. And that education really is the key to that. Because obviously, you know, crime is a very complex issue, and there are many factors that lead to it. And actually, there are statistics that show that education is a way out of a sort of criminal lifestyle. So that could be quite interesting.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Well, I'd like to see some people from different religions as well joining our conferences. We've had a few people in the past, Alam Shaha, and so on, and it would be great to get more people from different faiths to see what we're up to and to contribute to our thinking as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Is there a particular faith group that maybe hasn't been represented as much as you'd like?

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Well, probably all of them. We've had pagans, we've had Buddhists, we've had Jews and Muslims in the past. But it would be great to have more representation there as well, I think.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Okay, open invitation people. Now, you've hinted at this a few times, which is that many of the members of the Sea of Faith network are well, I was gonna say nearing retirement age, but beyond retirement age. Yeah. And actually, what we need to be aware of is just that it's such a beautiful resource that's and the space that's been created, and actually we want to try and support that. If there is somebody that is listening to this episode today and they think, actually, I'd really like to be part of the future of this network, what could somebody do?

SPEAKER_02 41:25

Well, I've been thinking about this as well, and I think one of the things that's great about the network is that people can join at their own level, if you like. So with websites and the internet and so on, people can lurk around, can't they? So they don't need to make themselves known. They can make use of the big ideas, material if it's useful. They don't have to tell us who they are, they don't have to register their name or email address or anything. They just go to the website and download whatever they want. It's always nice though if people send us a message saying, you know, we've used this or we've done that. Things they can do. They can be part of the in-conversation webinars. Again, they just have to join that via the website, via the Sea of Face Network website, and follow the links to the in-conversation bits. They can come to conferences, they can subscribe to the Sophia publication without becoming a member. So, in other words, the great thing I think about the network is that you can get involved at your own level. You know, you can go for it and become a member, get all of the applications and everything that we produce, or you can just lurk around and see what's interesting, you know, be part of a conversation on uh on our um Facebook page or or wherever. So go to the website, see what's there, and join at any level that you feel you are able to do. It's always nice to hear from people there.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

But are you really looking for people that maybe help run it?

SPEAKER_02 42:49

Sure, yeah. I mean, um we have got a good group of people on our steering group at the moment. We've just been noticing that at the moment, it hasn't always been the case, but at the moment they're pretty much all men. I think we've got one woman on our steering group at the moment. So that would be really nice to have uh more involvement from women in our there are women in there are probably equal numbers of men and women in in the network, but not so many have uh put themselves up at the moment to be part of a steering group. So that would be great. And we've got uh a few people who are younger than retirement age as well, who are part of that steering group and uh a part of the network generally.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

But actually, you never know who might be listening to this going, actually, I think I want to be part of this steering group. This feels like a wonderful thing to be part of. So you never know.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

You never know. Any final thoughts for the listeners just as we end the episode?

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Well, uh as I say, it's always nice to hear from people. So if, for example, you are an RE teacher who has made use of our Big Ideas for RE exemplars, there is a contact button on the Big Ideas website. You can let us know which of our exemplars you've used or enjoyed. There is actually a little bit of funding for people who want to actually write an evaluation of one of our exemplars. A few hundred pounds available for people who volunteer to teach one of the exemplars and to write us an evaluative report. So again, contact us via the website if you're interested in taking up that opportunity. I think we've still got a few people who said they could do that, have been unable to follow it through. So I think we have places for people who want to do that. And they are only exemplars, you know, people will adapt them and adopt them as they see fit for their context.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

So they're not a pick-up and plug-in ready-to-go type thing. It's actually it provides a structure where people can then adapt those to their context.

SPEAKER_02 44:42

Well, they can just pick it up and use it as it is. Yeah, it's all described lesson by lesson, point by point, complete with the resources that you need to teach it. But inevitably, the evaluations that we've had so far, inevitably, people do adapt them for their own classes. You know, they might say, Oh, that's a bit too difficult for this class, or we could maybe extend that a little bit further.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

Brilliant. And Dave, if you could wake up tomorrow and one thing was different about the world, what would you want it to be?

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Well, can I have a couple of things? Of course. One is for Southampton to be top of the Premier League instead of bottom.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 45:19

Yeah, well, there is a long way to go in the season, and they'll probably still be relegated even if they were up there from tomorrow. But I think my in terms of RE, what I really like to see is some government support for the REC's national plan for the subject. You know, we've had no real resources given to religious education for many, many years. And even what there was in the Labour government a long time ago, we didn't really have the best use of that. You know, we need more teachers doing RE, we need more specists, we need training, we need continuing professional development for those who are doing the subject or interested in doing the subject. And that would be really, really nice to see that there's some support from the government for the REC's national plan.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

And what do you think that looks like? So, what does that support look like? What do we really want our government to do? So we obviously know that we've got a recruitment crisis and we need more teachers. How would you propose that the government would tackle that problem?

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Well, it's been good that some of the bursaries have been restored for learning to teach RE. That's fine. But there needs to be a proper programme of continuing professional development for those already in the profession, for those who already teach the subject and for those who are interested in teaching the subject. There were fairly small scale attempts to do something via Cullum St. Gabriel's programmes and so on, which are really, really good and to be recommended. But we need something that will be of a national scale, something that brought me into RE advisory work back in the 1990s. It was called the GEST or guest program, government in educational resources for teaching, and then an opportunity for everybody teaching RE to take part in a program to enhance their skills. So you need to put a bit of money, you know, fairly small beer, really, compared with the amounts of money that go to some of the government's programs to support that kind of thing. But also to support this, it's essential that we do have this new national standard for religious education that people can relate to. It doesn't have to be too much detail to it. We don't need to identify all of the content of the subject. That can be done by people on the ground. But it we do need a kind of national set of standards for religious education that all schools can relate to and adopt for themselves so that we can see that there's progress being made in religious education for every child.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

And actually there's a consistent standard rather than a bit of a postcode lottery in that Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And what's crazy is that they obviously you've mentioned the bursaries there, but then they've taken away the subject enhancement courses.

SPEAKER_02 48:05

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

So you now have, you know, these attracting people to teach, but not giving them the substantive knowledge training that maybe they need, because actually most people don't come from a theology or religious studies background. And so it's crazy. Yeah. So let's, you know, we're in a really exciting time where there's conversations being had between the DFE and the RB community, and let's just hope that the outcome of that brings our subject forward and actually in line in parity with other subjects, so that there isn't this kind of hierarchy of support and investment, which is what we have at the moment. Yes. I think everybody's going to be nodding, going yes over with you. Not so much about Southampton, but definitely. Oh goodness, thank you so much. Thank you, not just for this episode, but actually for what you do through the Sea of Faith Network. Because as we've seen through this episode, you didn't need to do this. You know, you really didn't need to do this. And yet you have and you are. And and everybody, you know, a massive thank you from the RE community to you guys for what you've created, what you've achieved so far. And, you know, we really want to see this continue because it's just a really lovely space and very unique provision that you're providing. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 49:21

Yeah, we think so. Thanks, Louisa. It's been a pleasure to be part of it.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the RE podcast. The podcast for those of you who think ORI is boring, but it's not. It creates a space for people to connect to ideas bigger than themselves about community and hope and values and wisdom. But thank you so much for listening to us all the life out of you.