Thinking allowed

Common Worship Almanac for 2021-22

on Monday, 11 October 2021 at 9.48 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as elsewhere on the net, liturgical news, liturgical texts, liturgy, software

My Alman­ac for the litur­gic­al year 2021–22, the year begin­ning Advent Sunday 2021 is now avail­able. The Alman­ac is a com­plete and cus­tom­iz­able down­load that can be added to the cal­en­dar on a desktop/laptop, a tab­let or a smart­phone provid­ing a fully-worked out cal­en­dar and lec­tion­ary accord­ing to the rules of the Church of Eng­land. Sev­er­al down­load formats are provided, giv­ing access to most cal­en­dar soft­ware on most devices.

As before, down­load is free, and dona­tions are invited.

What's new?

The Alman­ac is also avail­able as a web page that can be installed as a web app on smart­phones and tab­lets for easy access to all the data. New fea­tures include

• the Down­load tab now shows a live pre­view of the data that will be added to your cal­en­dar; as you select options from the menus the live pre­view auto­mat­ic­ally reflects your choices
• in the View tab you can toggle the dis­play of verse num­bers in the read­ings, mak­ing it sim­pler to copy and paste pas­sages to oth­er doc­u­ments in the desired format
• in the View tab the bible read­ings now have an addi­tion­al link to the NIV text at Bible Gate­way, as well as dis­play­ing the NRSV text (or the Com­mon Wor­ship psal­ter for psalms)
• a new short­er format for sub­scrip­tion links (old-style links con­tin­ue to work as well)

Donations

This Alman­ac is offered free of charge, and without war­ranty, but as you might ima­gine it takes some effort to com­pile. If you would like to make a con­tri­bu­tion to my costs then dona­tions may be made via PayP­al at paypal.me/simonkershaw. Altern­at­ively, Amazon gift vouch­ers can be pur­chased online at Amazon (amazon.co.uk) for deliv­ery by email to simon@kershaw.org.uk .

The Alman­ac has been freely avail­able for over 20 years. There is not and has nev­er been any charge for down­load­ing and using the Alman­ac — this is just an oppor­tun­ity to make a dona­tion, if you so wish. Many thanks to those of you who have donated in the past or will do so this year, par­tic­u­larly those who reg­u­larly make a dona­tion: your gen­er­os­ity is appre­ci­ated and makes the Alman­ac possible.

An act of iconoclasm

on Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 4.28 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as personal

There’s lots of talk at the moment of top­pling statues and remov­ing items com­mem­or­at­ing his­tor­ic­al fig­ures with what is now seen as a dubi­ous past. Here is a little story that has nev­er been told before.

Wadham Col­lege Library

In June 1980, 41 years ago, I was an under­gradu­ate at Wadham Col­lege, right at the end of my three years at Oxford. I lived in a room in a small court­yard on top of the then-new col­lege lib­rary. The lib­rary, opened three years earli­er, had been sig­ni­fic­antly fun­ded by a dona­tion from the Ira­ni­an imper­i­al fam­ily, and was named after the twin sis­ter of the Shah, Prin­cess Ashraf Pah­lavi, and there was a plaque com­mem­or­at­ing this ded­ic­a­tion over the inside of the main entrance. The fund­ing and the ded­ic­a­tion had been fiercely cri­ti­cised by the stu­dent body and oth­ers, and a num­ber of protests took place while I was at the col­lege. In Feb­ru­ary 1979 the Shah had been over­thrown and had gone into exile, as had his sis­ter, but the lib­rary ded­ic­a­tion remained, and so did the plaque.

Although not to everyone’s archi­tec­tur­al taste, I liked the new lib­rary build­ing (by Glas­gow archi­tect Andy Mac­Mil­lan of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia), and knew every pub­lic corner of it. There were also parts that were out of bounds to under­gradu­ates, and even­tu­ally I dis­covered that at the dead of night when there was no one else around then you could ven­ture unchal­lenged through any “no entry” signs or unlocked doors. In par­tic­u­lar, there was a spir­al stair­case lead­ing from the down­stairs read­ing lounge up to the lim­ited-access Per­sian sec­tion. The Per­sian sec­tion had anoth­er access door from the floor on which it was, but my recol­lec­tion is that that door was nor­mally locked.

It was dur­ing one of these night-time explor­a­tions that I dis­covered (as you do) that the Pah­lavi plaque over the main door was very simply fixed to the lib­rary wall, with just a couple of key­hole slots on the back that fit­ted over some screws in the lib­rary wall.

And so an idea formed in my mind, as I was near­ing finals that June. Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to remove the plaque? But how to dis­pose of it? The idea sat in my head for a few weeks as I revised and sat my finals. Many sub­jects held their finals early in the sum­mer term, but for my sub­ject, phys­ics, finals were right at the end of term, and after­wards nearly all under­gradu­ates left Oxford. I had already arranged to stay in col­lege for a few more days.

One night after the end of term, when all was quiet, I went down­stairs from my room into the lib­rary. I walked all round to be sure that there was no one else in the lib­rary, and I checked the place where I had thought of put­ting the plaque. All was deser­ted. Back at the entrance I reached up and gently lif­ted the plaque from off the wall over the door. It was about 3 feet or so long, 10 inches high and per­haps an inch or two deep, sol­id oak and mod­er­ately heavy. Across the lib­rary and up the spir­al stair­case, and I was into the closed Per­sian sec­tion. The book­cases here were tall, over 6 feet, and I care­fully placed the plaque on top of one, where it could not be seen from below, and where it was not pos­sible to look down from above. Or, and here my memory is a little hazy after all these years, did I come out of the Per­sian sec­tion and into the upper level of the lib­rary and place it on top of a book­case there? Either way, it would not be found accidentally.

Was it a protest at the Ira­ni­an regime, or a stu­dent prank? A little bit of both I sup­pose. I had thought of put­ting a sign in its place with words such as “the Ayatol­lah Khomeini Lib­rary” – that would cer­tainly have made it a prank in my eyes, but I did­n’t carry through with that.

It was a couple of months later, in mid-Septem­ber, dur­ing the long sum­mer vac, and before I star­ted my first job, that I returned to Oxford for a few days. Wan­der­ing round the col­lege I bumped into the chap­lain (Peter Allan, later a monk at Mir­field) and we arranged to have lunch the next day, at the Trout at Wol­ver­cote, if I recall cor­rectly, or was it the Perch at Bin­sey? “Did you hear,” he asked me, “that someone had removed the Pah­lavi plaque from the lib­rary, and it had dis­ap­peared?” “And what,” I said as inno­cently as I could, “is the col­lege doing about it?” “They’re just relieved that they don’t have to decide what to do with it,” he replied. So much, I thought, for my little act of rebel­lion. But I stayed silent. And I have stayed silent until today.

I’ve nev­er heard wheth­er the plaque was found, though some time later I left a note in the lib­rary say­ing where I had put it. Sev­er­al years later the lib­rary was renamed the Fer­dowsi Lib­rary after the Per­sian poet Abul-Qâsem Fer­dowsi Tusi (c.940‑1020), a much less divis­ive figure.

This dia­gram­mat­ic view of the lib­rary shows how the dif­fer­ent levels inter­act (and the default view shows the entrance door, over which the plaque was sited, and the spir­al stair­case up to the Per­sian section)

https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/…/virtualtour/mezzanine.html

These pic­tures show the exter­i­or and inside of the lib­rary, and apart from the pres­ence of com­puters, it was pretty much the same in 1980.
https://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/…/a‑day-in-the-life-of…

Two fur­ther links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_MacMillan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashraf_Pahlavi