BRIAN
MOUNTFORD
writer, publisher, and speaker
Welcome to my Website which tells you a bit about me and introduces what I am up to at the moment in writing and publishing and also lists some of the events I am taking part in.
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Temporary Parish Ministry
October​ 2024. I continue to cover the interregnum in the three parishes of Islip, Noke, and Woodeaton in rural Oxfordshire. As the Michaelmas Term begins we begin to prepare for Harvest, Remembrance tide in November, and even think about Christmas. The cyclic rhythm of the year is relentless - good for some with the energy of a new season and for others tinged with melancholy and worry about winter.
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Publishing News
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I am Publisher at Large for Collective Ink Books publishing under the 'Circle Books' imprint.
I am looking for books that seek to make the Christian Faith intelligible to people who are curious about the spiritual meaning of life but have little grounding in traditional theology and little interest in institutional religion. Organised religion is socially marginalised in our society and regarded by many with suspicion, yet there remains an unsatisfied thirst for purpose, moral direction, and the search for the meaning of life.
Collective Ink has much wider interests, though, across the range of Non Fiction, Body, Mind and Spirit, History, Culture & Politics, Teens & Young Adult, Transformation, Books for Writers and Paganism.
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I am currently writing
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a chapter for a sociological study, edited by Alex Fry, which seeks to understand 'more about how the various identities held by the clergy come to shape their experience of ministry in England’s Established Church during a time of significant social change and societal divisions'. Mine will an autoethnographic chapter (i.e. using one's own experiences as the basis for research) in which I look at doctrinal control. It could be entitled, 'Why do they think I'm a heretic?' But of course it won't. It will stand beside, for example, the stories of clergy who have been marginalised for their gender or sexuality.
My working title, 'God -closing the culture gap', continues to evolve, somewhat retarded by the pastoral duties associated with births, marriages, and deaths. Although the weekly sermon slot allows me to try out ideas about how intuition is at the root of religious experience and how quantum physics, and ideas about consciousness, make some some aspects of ancient religious experience seem much more up-to-date. Surely, when God speaks to Job from the whirlwind in the great poetry of creation - where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?' - God could equally have said, 'Can you not see me in E=mc squared? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.' The poetry of literature, religion and science are searching out the same truth.
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My Autobiography
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‘Compellingly readable, disjointed, amusing, wise, opinionated, radical’ – Church Times
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'Witty and captivating memoir' - Professor Jane Shaw
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'All his qualities are vividly present in this book, as well as a lively gift for scene-setting and character-drawing' - Philip Pullman
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‘I’d lay a bet you won’t find another clerical autobiography as entertaining…and disarmingly honest as this one’ Amazon reviewer
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‘Should be on the reading list at every sane theological college’ – Mari Prichard
Available on Amazon and Blackwell's.
Recording of Oxford Literary Festival interview with Angela Tilby CLICK PICTURE OF BODLEIAN LIBRARY ON LEFT
And then there's Religion and Generation Z - why seventy per cent of young people say they have no religion', a collection of essays by Oxford students, which I edited and published in 2022
Subjects include: loss of certainty, culture shift, science, being brought up Muslim, feminism, Catholicism, music, the environment, and the future of religion. This gives a platform to voices not normally heard.
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In 2017 NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey published statistics that 53% of the people in Britain say they have ‘no religion’ and that of those 70% of the 18-24 age-group claim to have no religion. This collection of essays by Oxford graduate and undergraduate students attempts to say why. The essays are individual responses rather than a systematic examination of the question. Atheist, Agnostic, Irish, catholic, Protestant, and Muslim views are represented.
Other Current Interests
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I'm also a public speaker (listen to recording above) on a range of subjects in the area of ethics, contemporary religion, and leadership, but especially on the 'problems of belief in a secular age'.
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I'm an experienced conference facilitator covering liberal arts topics.
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I am a Supernumerary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.
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Philip Pullman writes about Church Going Gone
CHURCH GOING GONE is the work of a man of great goodness, considerable stubbornness, and and not a little cunning. How can a person of liberal, humane, and imaginative instincts survive in the modern Church of England? Brian Mountford has not only survived, but for thirty years had the living of St Mary’s, the University Church in Oxford, the site of events of enormous consequence such as the trial of the Oxford Martyrs in 1555, and the centre of a busy and intellectually challenging modern parish. In the course of his life as a priest Mountford aroused enormous admiration not only for his liberal stance but also for his personal qualities of kindness and open-mindedness, and for the imaginative (and occasionally provocative) way in which he welcomed speakers from many different traditions to his church. All his qualities are vividly present in this book, as well as a lively gift for scene-setting and character-drawing. I enjoyed it enormously.
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Professor Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford
Brian Mountford has written a witty and captivating memoir. He brilliantly evokes the utterly different world of the Church of England in the late sixties and, through the story of his own ministry, offers a fascinating - and sobering - perspective on the sea changes that the Church has undergone over the past fifty years.