Faith on Failure: 2025 Heythrop Institute Workshop, in partnership with the University of London

Failure is a universal human experience. It affects individuals, organisations and societies, takes many forms, and may be understood in various ways. Failure is sometimes a necessary step on the route to success, but it can also represent a threat to the identity, purpose and worldview of a person, organisation, or society. Although faith groups can, themselves, cause or experience failure, faith traditions offer teachings which claim to build resilience and prevent or overcome failure, and histories which illustrate how failure may be defined and navigated.

There are many scholarly studies and popular presentations of ways to live with and beyond failure, but few of these consider the extent to which people of faith and scholars of religion can use the texts, methodologies and practices of religion to explore ways in which responses to failure are shaped and formed.

This project was inspired by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 2023 Lent Book on the topic of what Christianity has to say about overcoming failure. The author of that book, the Rt Revd Dr Emma Ineson, Bishop of Kensington, is one of the contributors to this project, which now expands the topic to draw on the wisdom of five religions and different methodologies for studying them. It brings together a diverse group of scholars from a range of contexts to explore a variety of ways in which religions address failure.

Contributors:

Rt Revd Emma Ineson (Bishop of Kensington)

Stefano Salemi – Sydney College of Divinity/University of London

Simon Dein – Goldsmiths/UCL

Christopher Southgate – University of Exeter

Zoheir Esmail – AL-Mahdi Institute

Ankur Barua – University of Cambridge

Erica Baffelli – University of Manchester

Sarah Pawlett-Jackson – University of London

Elizabeth Burns – University of London

Joanna Collicutt – University of Oxford

Stuart Jesson – Heythrop Institute

Shanon Shah – University of London/Kings College London