On Monday 9th December, Upper VI A-level Philosophy and Theology students went to Oxford for a series of lectures focused on philosophy and theology. The first lecture was on different attitudes to abortion, with a particular focus on laws and when an embryo gains ‘personhood’. Professor Alister McGrath gave a detailed talk about whether belief in God is rational or delusional, and it was very impressive to be taught by such a highly esteemed academic in the field. Then followed a debate on whether Natural Moral Law is a useful ethical framework or an old fashioned idea, in which student representatives from many of the schools spoke – including one of our own from The Abbey! After that was a talk by Dr Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, who had flown in from Poland that morning, and who spoke on the cheery subject of death and the afterlife. A particularly interesting aspect of his talk involved his ideas on the rationality of grieving. Dr Slawkowski-Rode argued that although in our society death has become something that we should simply ‘get over,’ grieving is very important. We finished off the day with an excellent talk by Professor Daphne Hampson titled ‘Woman: Absent, Present, Displaced’, which was about the portrayal of women in the Bible and how that has affected modern-day understanding of gender roles. As students from a school with a feminist outlook, this was a particularly interesting and relevant talk to our lives and our studies. The overall day was very interesting – it was great to have the experience of learning in a more university style setting – and Mr Ellis and Dr Cuthbertson did a fantastic job running the trip!

Imogen, Upper VI