‘Making Connections between Christianity and Western Culture: some challenges and resources’.
Summary of a lecture given to the Society on Wednesday 8 December 2010 by the Revd Dr Dee Dyas, Director of the Centre for Christianity and Culture (a joint project of the University of York and St John’s College, Nottingham)
Summary by David Bagchi
Dr Dyas began by explaining that the Centre for Christianity and Culture had been established in response to the widespread ignorance of the Bible, Christianity, and classical culture among the under-30s, which is so severely hampering the engagement of schoolchildren and undergraduates with much of the corpus of English literature. This ignorance also affects the more recent cohorts of schoolteachers, limiting their ability to teach the full syllabus or forcing them to adopt reader-response approaches that take no account of the author’s intentions or influences.
The first resource provided by the Centre in response to this situation was a book, The Bible in Western Culture. This contained a summary of the books of Bible, together with examples of biblical allusions in Western literature and art.
The second was a DVD entitled Images of Salvation, consisting of medieval book-illustrations with accompanying art-historical, biblical, and theological commentary. This has proved a very popular title, which churches and primary schools, as well as the target-readership of secondary schools and universities, have been buying. The Centre’s publications are all heavily-subsidized, which makes them very good value and has undoubtedly broadened their appeal.
A second DVD appeared under the title Pilgrimage. The subject was interpreted in a broad way, to include spiritual and physical pilgrimage, and pursuing the theme in many different religious and non-religious traditions.
The third DVD, The English Parish Church, was the most ambitious project to date. Taking the story of the development of the parish church through the centuries, and divided into themes including ‘daily life’, ‘art and architecture’, ‘liturgy and music’, this DVD was the result of the collaboration of 225 contributors and contains more than 2000 images. The success of this project has again exceeded expectations. In particular, it has been taken up by clergy training courses, as it has been found that many new ministers have little appreciation of the reasons for the strict rules that govern the re-ordering of historic churches.
Dr Dyas then demonstrated the DVD, giving examples from the section on liturgy and music, to the considerable interest of the audience. She explained that it had led to adaptations for specific locations, such as the touch-screen guide commissioned for Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate, York, and similar applications for Micklegate Priory, York, and for York Minster itself. A follow-up to The English Parish Church, on cathedrals and monasteries, is now in production.
