A new online course with Rev Dr Sarah Bachelard

This online course is based on five talks with the overarching title “A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time”, given by Sarah Bachelard at the John Main Seminar in 2019. The talks take on the most urgent issues facing not just the future of the Church and Christianity, but also that of the world itself. Sarah’s contribution to the seminar was described by Laurence Freeman OSB as “a breakthrough in the understanding of modern Christianity”.         

Sarah reviews the history of the Christian contemplative tradition, paying particular attention to its revival over the past sixty years. She examines its current place and function in the life of the church. This proves to be a starting point for an even wider and more radical analysis of the role of Christianity in our increasingly secular times – in a world which, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, has come of age. What kind of claim – if any – does the Christian narrative have in such a world, where it seems to have lost not just meaningful authority, but any purchase at all? This is the central question to which Sarah’s talks constantly return her listeners, encouraging us to take nothing for granted, to be ready to surrender our perhaps long-cherished ideas and models of reality which might, however, be no longer valid or effective in the world. Helping us to see through the strategies of both a nostalgic conservatism and a potentially infantilising liberalism, this redefining of contemplative Christianity makes it inspiringly clear that our practice of Christian meditation might just be the great gift of hope that the world now so desperately needs.

To enrol on this course click here. You can take the course at your own pace and in your own time. We wish you all the best and trust that the course will help to deepen your faith and practice.