The Icelandic sagas have been used as a comparative literature for the narratives in the Old Testament ever since they became accessible in editions and translations towards the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, Gerhard von Rad, George Coats, Meir Sternberg and John Barton have all used the sagas to reflect on stories in the Hebrew Bible, ranging from single episodes like Jacob wrestling with an angel, to the entire span of the ‘saga’ of King David.

Nineteenth-century scholarship often argued that Christianity succeeded through the Hellenization of its theology, replacing Jewish national and terrestrial eschatology with Platonic spiritual interpretation. Robert Wilken's The Land Called Holy (1992) fundamentally disrupted this narrative for the patristic period, demonstrating that Christian engagement with Jerusalem and sacred geography intensified after the fourth century rather than disappearing.

Tractarianism was famous, in its own period, for the intensity of its friendships. Notably, the founding of the theological movement grew out of the friendship of John Keble with several of his students and his determination to help them develop in godliness and good learning. Several of these students, when they themselves became Oxford tutors, attempted to formalise Keble’s method of instruction; notably under Robert Wilberforce and Hurrell Froude at Oriel and under Isaac Williams at Trinity.

Applications are now open for Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods 2026!

Apply now: https://cvent.me/0EaK99

This renowned social science methods course will take place from Monday 23 March to Friday 27 March 2026, in both in-person and online formats.

Is it ethical to believe? Does believing necessarily entail ethically suspect metaphysical commitments? And if so, can one suspend all one’s beliefs? This talk explores these and related questions by reconstructing what is a hitherto largely unstudied yet highly original philosophical conception of how belief relates to ethical action. Substantively, it focuses on the foundationally important Sanlun 三論 or Three Treatises school of Chinese Buddhist philosophy.

In the era of accelerating global climate change, freshwater is increasingly becoming a strategic and contested resource. Few regions illustrate this more clearly than Tibet: the source of some of the world’s most important rivers that sustain nearly half of the global population. This lecture will explore the emotional dimensions of water politics in China–India relations, focusing on the narratives of pride, anger, fear, and national identity regarding the Himalayan region and shared river systems.

In this project, Dr Sciorati treats Silkroadism itself as a tifa (提法) - a fixed political formulation that organises and stabilises meaning across China’s external narratives. Building on previous scholarship, Dr Sciorati conceptualises tifa as discursive infrastructures: patterned, state-sanctioned formulations that make China’s governance model coherent and exportable.

As digital transformation, political pressure, and audience fragmentation reshape contemporary media environments, public service media face growing challenges in maintaining their democratic role. This talk examines how these pressures are reflected in everyday editorial choices by focusing on changes in television news at NHK, one of the world’s largest public broadcasters. Taking NHK’s flagship evening news programme as its starting point, the talk looks at how television news has changed over time at the level of topics, narrative styles, and the portrayal of political and social actors.

This symposium brings together leading experts on economic security and economic statecraft to share views on how debates and policies on these issues are evolving in different regions of the world. Over the past decade, economic relations have become highly politicized—and in some cases, securitized—due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rise of economic coercion, and the return of trade war.