Hope In A Messed Up World

A series of short evening talks in 2024/25 about how the bible has been abused in the past to justify violence and how it truly inspires nonviolence, with Revd Dr Helen Paynter.

Revd Dr Helen Paynter is a Baptist minister who serves as tutor in biblical studies at the Bristol Baptist College. She is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence, and is interested in all the ways that the Bible intersects with modern situations of violence. She is the author of a number of books including The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity (2024, co-edited with Maria Power), Blessed are the Peacemakers: A biblical theology of human violence (2023) and The Bible Doesn’t Tell Me So: Why you don’t have to submit to domestic abuse and coercive control (2020).

Each meeting will start at 7:30pm with tea and coffee available, with the talk beginning at 7:45pm, to finish by 9pm.

• 8 October 2024: a few stories from our frontlines in Exeter.

• 26 November 2024: The Bible and the Far Right.

• 28 January 2025: The Bible and Domestic Abuse.

• 25 March 2025: The Bible and the Israel-Palestine Conflict.