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September 9, 2026
18:00
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September 23, 2026
18:00
Murdoch's most admired early novel, The Bell gathers together an assortment of outsiders into a fragile lay religious community and watches as its members fail, in very different ways, at the work of being good. Beneath the country-house drama lies her lifelong subject: the gap between the rules we profess and the flawed, particular loves we live by.
October 13, 2026
18:00
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October 27, 2026
18:00
The second, and probably the most imaginatively convincing of his 'Cosmic' trilogy, Perelandra is also a sustained exploration of Lewis's theological convictions, exploring the connections between love, trust and obedience in the divine-human relationship, and the nature of sin and fallenness.
November 10, 2026
18:00
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November 24, 2026
18:00
Romulus, My Father began as an eulogy, written by the moral philosopher Raimond Gaita for his father, and was subsequently developed into a memoir of Gaita's early life in rural Australia. But the book is much more than that, and when read alongside his more philosophical work, can be seen as a serious reflection on the nature of moral goodness, vulnerability and compassion.
December 8, 2026
18:00
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December 15, 2026
18:00
The first of the Barsetshire novels, The Warden turns a minor scandal over a clerical sinecure into a quietly devastating study of personal morality and conscience. Trollope's gentle Mr Harding is one of fiction's truest portraits of an ordinary man trying to do right when worldly justice and personal integrity pull in opposite directions.
January 12, 2027
18:00
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January 26, 2027
18:00
A landmark of modern Israeli literature, written in Hebrew by a Palestinian Christian, this 1986 novel braids together two interwoven strands: The Tale, tracing the saga of the Shammas family across generations in the Galilee village of Fassuta, and The Teller, following the narrator as a writer traveling among literary circles in Paris and Iowa. Memory and invention, history and fiction, fold into one another like the intricate patterns of its title.
February 9, 2027
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February 23, 2027
18:00
A collapsing collective farm in a remote Hungarian village waits for deliverance, and a charismatic swindler returned (apparently) from the dead duly arrives to provide it. Structured like the dance of its title Satantango is a mud-soaked parable of false messiahs and misplaced faith, and the bleakest of meditations on humanity's hunger to be saved.
March 9, 2027
18:00
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March 23, 2027
18:00
Bishop's first collection is the self-portrait of one wrestling with doubt, the limits of knowledge, the silence where God might be. From the precarious sleeper of ‘The Unbeliever’ to the denial-and-repentance of ‘Roosters,’ these poems describe a faith which lies just beyond the reach of the writer.
April 13, 2027
18:00
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April 27, 2027
18:00
Simone Weil reads Homer's epic as scripture for the afflicted and a treatise on force - the power which turns human beings into things - and its universal dominion over victor and vanquished alike. Brief and clear, it reworks this ancient text as a new revelation, and a work of moral theology in its own right.
July 13, 2027
18:00
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July 27, 2027
18:00
Bulgakov's subversive masterpiece sends the Devil and his retinue into atheist Soviet Moscow, and Pontius Pilate into his reckoning with Christ. A dazzling satire on cowardice, art and faith, it strains in every sentence against censorship and tyranny of all kinds.
Join us as we explore, grow in and discuss spirituality through novels, biographies, and accounts of personal spiritual journeys.
We meet every month to discuss a novel or work of creative nonfiction. The works which we read are not (usually) explicitly theological in nature. However, we work on the assumption that all works of human creativity are essentially or implicitly theological: they have something to say about human beings and their relationship to the divine.
Each month the book that is being read will be accompanied by a lecture, exploring the theological significance of the text given by Dr Aidan Cottrell-Boyce. You are invited to join the group in person on the second Tuesday of every month, or online on the fourth Wednesday of every month. Please note that both sessions will take place on Wednesday in September. The online meeting will take place in the third week.
The reading group runs from September to July.
Discover our amazing library which specialises in theology and philosophy in the Catholic tradition.
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