Curating Spaces of Hope: Co-creating radical responses to the poly-crisis
Join us for a series of three Deanery Evenings with Dr. Matthew Barber-Rowell on October 2, October 7, and October 8.
Location
The Deanery
Virginia Theological Seminary Deanery Drive Alexandria, VA 22304Good to know
Highlights
- In person
About this event
Biography
Dr Matthew Barber-Rowell is an Independent Scholar, Northern Temple Network Lead for the William Temple Foundation, and Founder of Spaces of Hope. He was invited to become a Dean’s Scholar at VTS in 2024, where he spent time in residence completing his first monograph. In 2025 he curated the Communicating Radical Hope in an era of poly-crisis conference at the Inner Temple, London, which was a partnership between VTS, Spaces of Hope and the William Temple Foundation, and saw a keynote address from VTS Vice-President for Communications and Institutional Advancement at VTS and GTS, Nicky Burridge. Matthew is returning to VTS this fall, as part of a Research Fellowship with the Susan Wesley Foundation to curate a series of Deanery Dialogues where we will co-create radical responses to the poly-crisis. Matthew lives in North West England, with his wife Phoebe and their two children.
About the lectures:
In this series of three Deanery Dialogues, Dr Matthew Barber-Rowell is going to guide us through a hopeful learning process, where we diagnose the nature of the poly-crisis shaping our context today, understand something of our own experience of this in terms of radical living, and develop our responses using principles for transformational leadership. The approach which will be used is within the William Temple Tradition of Public Theology and draws on Dr barberRowell’s first book Curating Spaces of Hope: Transformational Leadership for Uncertain Times. The Chair of the Board of the William Temple Foundation as cites this book as “reinterpreting or even reinventing the Temple legacy for the first half of this century”.
October 1st: Curating Spaces of Hope: diagnosing the poly-crisis in context
In the first session we will focus on how we characterise the nature of poly crisis, both in terms of the different crises that make it up, and in terms of how it relates to our current moment. Isn’t this just the same as every era and the kind of challenges that face each of those? By the end of the session delegates will be located and will be ready to turn to themselves to understand what they have to bring to the response.
October 7th: Curating Spaces of Hope: a turn to the radical
In the second session, the focus will be on individuals and their own lived experience and on what it means to be radical. This sense of being radical is not drawn from a sense of radically left nor right, but is located as a centred and ordinary positionality, which draws on the content and expressions of our being, from root to fruit. By exploring what it means to be radical, we will begin the process of ‘curating’ Spaces of Hope, exploring principles of freedom, relationship and service.
October 8th: Curating Spaces of Hope: an authentic and radical response
In the final session, we will, in light of the outcomes from session 2, turn to the affect that the poly-crisis can have on us and the things that we do; it might offer space for progressive steps forward or regressive steps back, or both. We will explore the steps we can take to form a new narrative, in order to live out an authentic and radically hopeful life together in our context.
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