About The Edward Cadbury Centre for Public Understanding of Religion
The Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion was established in 2014 to enhance the public understanding of religion regionally, nationally and internationally through distinctive, strategic and engaged interdisciplinary research.
The Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion was established in 2014 to enhance the public understanding of religion regionally, nationally and internationally through distinctive, strategic and engaged interdisciplinary research.
We deliver innovative, interdisciplinary, impact-driven and internationally-excellent programmes exploring the significance of religious belief and practice for public and professional life, working with faith communities and policymakers to develop informed agendas for social transformation. We combine academic rigour with a commitment to positive advocacy of the vital contribution that religion can make to public life.
Our Centre’s goals include:
- Undertaking distinctive education and engagement activity to support our core agenda
- Cultivating far-reaching partnerships across a variety of sectors; working collaboratively both institutionally and more widely
- Enabling and empowering faith communities to reflect critically upon their beliefs and practices and expound and interpret them to a wider public
- Creating and distributing resources, and organising public lectures, educational programmes, and other strategic events and activities to enhance the understanding of religion and religious affairs, for education, policy and professional development and commercial contexts
The Centre, named in honour of the Quaker economist and humanitarian who supported the establishment of the University’s Department of Theology and Religion from its institution, is led by a small core team, supported by doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, drawing as required upon wider expertise from the Department of Theology and Religion, bringing in additional specialists for particular projects and collaborating with other University of Birmingham researchers and research centres to deliver its goals effectively.
The Centre is ideologically and methodologically committed to interdisciplinary and collaborative research and seeks to build a reputation as an international centre of excellence in this field. The Centre is hosted within the Department of Theology and Religion of the University of Birmingham, which came second on GPA in the 2014 REF for the discipline and was rated extremely highly for its outputs and very strongly for its impact. Our work combines research of the highest international quality with an engaged and community-focussed approach, which undergirds its academic rigour and objectivity but anchors its work in the real world.
Who was Edward Cadbury?
Who was Edward Cadbury?
Edward Cadbury (1873-1948) was the grandson of the founder of the famous chocolate company, rising to become its managing director and later chairman. A committed member of the Society of Friends, his faith shaped his professional interests (and, famously, the operational and organisational culture of Cadbury’s) as well as his personal concerns.
Cadbury was an enthusiastic advocate and generous supporter of education, social welfare and the study of religion, and a major benefactor of the University, most prominently in his support for the establishment of the University’s chaplaincy, St Francis Hall, and investment into what are now the Department of African Studies and Anthropology and Department of Theology and Religion, for both of which he instituted an annual series of public lectures which continue in his name to this day.
- Information on the Cadbury Lecture series in Theology and Religion
He also established and endowed the Chair of Theology at Birmingham and was instrumental in recruiting the eminent theologian H.G. Wood as the first holder of this world-renowned post (the present postholder is Professor Candida Moss).
Edward Cadbury’s passion for education, religion and social wellbeing were evident throughout his life and continue to be demonstrated in the grant-making strategy of the Edward Cadbury Trust which he established, and will, we hope, be reflected in the mission and work of the Centre that is proud to bear his name.
The city of Birmingham
The city of Birmingham
The City of Birmingham is a significant and important context for the Cadbury Centre’s work. England’s second city, a strategically-significant and prominent member of the Core Cities network and Europe’s largest local authority, Birmingham is the youngest major city in Europe, with under 25s accounting for nearly 40% of the city’s population.
Most of the substantial immigration into the city region from the 1950s onwards was from Commonwealth countries, including particularly the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, and rather less of it from Europe than in some other parts of the UK. It is also one of Europe’s more interreligious cities, with one of its main streets being labelled ‘the most religiously diverse road in Britain’.
Birmingham can lay claim to being the current focal point of interfaith and ecumenical activity in the UK, since the establishment of the Birmingham Faith Leaders’ Group after 9/11 and because of the close collaboration between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Archbishop and Bishop and their dioceses. There is a strong case for suggesting that England’s second city is very much a reflection of the Commonwealth in miniature, therefore. For all these reasons and more, Birmingham is an excellent location for the Cadbury Centre.