GC stands for Global Concerns, it is a special day every term when a student-organized event takes place about a global issue. On the 18th March, it was about the environment. Students organized various workshops and lectures around the topics of Land, Oceans, and Air from cooking with locally picked seaweed, planting herbs, and making art, to watching documentaries and running discussions about them. Please read the opening speech of our first year student, Vilde Helm:

“Mother Earth. Our home. A blue marble, a blue sphere out in the total darkness. A totally unique planet with the exact perfect location from the sun, creating the perfect conditions for an incredible diversity of life to thrive… I would like to ask you to just stop for a moment, and take a look at this picture. All the life we know exists within this sphere. Our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence…
But yet we too often take it and everything it gives and provides us with for granted There is not something new about the fact that the relationship we have today with nature is not sustainable
This is not about pointing out or blaming individual nations, or holding someone accountable. This is not about blaming generations that have been or putting all the responsibility on the shoulders of the generations to come. Because this challenge is something that extends far beyond any country’s borders or current generations.

It doesn’t matter from which part of the world you come from, your ethnicity, your gender, and sexuality, what socio-economic conditions you have been born into, what religion you might belong to, where you are young or old.
It’s about founding a common shared ground and realization around the fact that we are all, every single organism, life dependent on this blue small marble, this blue sphere floating in the darkness of the universe.

I’m not saying this to you as Vilde, an 18 years old girl from Sweden. I’m saying this to you as a global citizen of this planet, an individual and a human and an organism sharing this earth among millions of other species.

We are ultimately bound by and reliant upon the finite natural world about us. The relationship we have today with Mother Earth must changeAs far as we know this is the only place, the only planet with the perfect location, with the perfect atmosphere, the perfect temperature, the perfect conditions for life to exist…
Let’s all take care of our shared irreplaceable and unique home.
Let’s take care of Mother Earth…”

Between 7 and 13 March, we had the privilege to host the John Hick Centenary Conference 2022. This was an event organized by us and it is the result of well over a year of planning. Our main ambition with the event was to celebrate the memory and legacy of John Hick and, by doing this, create opportunities for interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Therefore, the week was filled with lectures, talks, and workshops meant to inspire our students to further explore religion from philosophical perspectives.

We started the week with the whole school gathering for the opening of the conference, during which we welcomed our guests and listened to an address by Professor Peter Hick (son of John Hick who was also joined by his sister Eleanor and his brother Mark) and a keynote lecture by Professor David Cheetham.

In the following days, we were privileged to be able to listen to a philosophical discussion on Hick’s pluralism and the result this hypothesis has on the interreligious dialogue between professor Cheetham and Professor Perry Schmidt-Leukel who joined us online from Germany. Later that evening the students could listen to a talk on the religious pluralism of Gandhi and Hick by Dr. Sharada Sugirtharajah and enjoy three different workshops, led by Dr. Sugirtharajah, Mr Hugh Rice and Revd. Canon Philip Lambert, and Dr. Alan Race on such diverse topics as the problem of evil, the masculine and feminine in Hinduism, and the interreligious response to the climate crisis. The conference continued on Wednesday with a lecture by Dr. Race on early, global efforts to create arenas of interreligious dialogue and another set of workshops led by Revd. Sonya Wratten (who interacted with students talking about how views on the Transcendent reality can transform through interfaith encounter), Dr. Timothy Musgrove joining us online from California (who delivered a session on the evolution of John Hick by talking about 5 major works), and Professor Schmidt-Leukel (who had a workshop on Buddhist responses to religious diversity).

On Thursday, Dr. Musgrove gave an appreciated lecture on the dialectic between religious inclusivism and religious pluralism, and on Friday, Mr Hugh Rice gave a lecture on optimism, rationality, and faith. We ended the week by the students organizing a religious “speed-dating” during which students had the opportunity to interact with many different believers from many traditions.

Our students have made us proud with their engagement, openness, and focused questions. We are convinced that they all have gotten new ideas to analyze and wrestle with and we expect that the different discussions will continue for a long time. A lot of material, including recorded sessions, will soon be available on the Centenary’s website