We’ve had a lovely month at the Congregational Library, despite the darkening days and cooler weather. The unpacking continues relentlessly, of course, but it’s always so much fun: a bit like Christmas (although in mentioning that we’re obviously getting a little ahead of ourselves!), and you never know what you are going to find in a box. We’ve found several gems this month, but we won’t spoil them for you because we’ve selected 24 of them to reveal each day in December in the run-up to Christmas – a Congregational Library Advent Calendar, if you will. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to find out more!

To whet your appetite, here’s a particularly apposite book we unpacked a couple of weeks ago: the title page and frontispiece of Henry Duncan’s Sacred philosophy of the seasons, illustrating the perfections of God in the phenomena of the year: Autumn (Edinburgh: W. Oliphant, 1841) (Cong. Lib. 76.1.30).

But we’ve been doing more than just unpacking. November is, of course, the month of the Congregational Lecture. This year it took place in London on Thursday 20 November. Before the lecture, members of the Friends of the Congregational Library met at the site of the old Congregational Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street (still marked by a plaque) before being given a tour of Stationer’s Hall archive. There will be more on this in a separate blog post, but it was an excellent and informative afternoon and we all learned a great deal about licensing and censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The lecture itself took place in the evening at The St Bride’s Foundation. The Rev. Doug Gay, Lecturer in Practical Theology at Glasgow University and Principal of Trinity College (Glasgow), spoke eloquently for just under an hour on the topic of “Faithful adaptation: How God changes the Church’s mind on ethics”.

Doug set out to address the question of how the Church changes its mind about ethics, and how it decides which changes are most faithful to God. He began by pointing out that Jesus preached of the law as a guide and guardian, not as an unchanging, rigid thing, and used this as a springboard for discussing how the spirit of God can move people to change their minds on important issues – examples given included the abolition of slavery, female ministers, and same-sex marriage. Doug also discussed the role of emotion in decision-making, and how it can be as important as intellectual appeal in changing an opinion.

Doug delivered his lecture in a very engaging manner and dealt sensitively with the more delicate issues. The audience was clearly very engaged and the number of questions at the end testified to this. Overall, it was a very satisfying evening and we are very grateful to Doug Gay for sharing his thoughts and research with us.

We will be back in a few weeks with a Christmas edition of the blog, but in the meantime– as we hinted above – please follow us on Twitter and Instagram to find out what books we have chosen to highlight for our Library Advent Calendar. As always, please also visit our website to find out more about the Library and the Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, and get in touch if you think we can help with any enquiries.

See you next month!