Our Speakers

Tim Gordon

Tim Gordon is a Marine Biologist and holds degrees from the University of Cambridge (in Zoology) and from Imperial College London (in Ecology, Evolution & Conservation). He is currently based at the University of Exeter where he is studying human impacts on natural acoustics in the ocean. Sound travels far and fast underwater, and many marine organisms communicate, navigate, and sense their environment by listening. Today, the natural sounds of marine ecosystems are being altered by climate change and drowned out by human noise pollution; his research aims to understand more about the likely impacts of these changes and what we can do about them. His work focuses mainly on coral reef ecosystems, combining fieldwork with laboratory experiments and computational analysis of sound recordings.

Revd Dr Malcolm Guite

Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite is Chaplain and Supernumerary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and teaches at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature and has published poetry, theology, and literary criticism and has worked as a librettist. His books include: Love, Remember (November 2017); Mariner, a spiritual biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (February 2017, paperback edition February 2018); Parable and Paradox (2016); The Singing Bowl (2013); Sounding the Seasons (2012); Theology and the Poetic Imagination (2010) and Faith Hope and Poetry (2006). Malcolm has edited two poetry anthologies for Lent and Advent: The Word in the Wilderness (2014) and Waiting on the Word (2015). Malcolm writes Poet’s Corner, a weekly column in the Church Times, and an anthology of his column’s writings, In Every Corner Sing, was published in November 2019.

Malcolm has a particular interest in the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty and continues to reflect deeply on how poetry can stimulate and re-awaken our prayer life. 

Malcolm enjoys sailing, walking, old books, live music, riding his Harley Davidson motorbike and all the varieties of the British countryside and weather. Malcolm is also part of the rock band Mystery Train, regularly performing gigs at Grantchester, Cambridge and other places around Cambridgeshire.

 Revd Ian Parkinson

Prof Keith Elliott

Keith Elliott is Emeritus Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism at the University of Leeds. During his long career he has written and edited dozens of books, and has contributed to the field with hundreds of book chapters, articles, and reviews, and he has supervised several PhD projects to completion. He is an authority in the field of apocryphal studies, well known for his monograph The Apocryphal New Testament (1993, rev. ed. in 2005). His most recent book is the second edition of A Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity and Infancy Narratives, published in 2016

He has lived in Harrogate for nearly 40 years.