Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Johnson
Live in Oxford September 15 & 16, 2025
Things we deem ‘inevitable’ we rarely credit with merit or worth.
In my corner of the world there’s a long list of inevitables that to us, without effort, like weather, rise and prevail. It includes death, taxes, the new/improved of everything, being human, ancestors … And culture.
Culture’s a given of human presence, as humans ourselves are a given of life: that’s a creed, not an observation.
To me, culture is properly found on a long list of things that are wrought – sometimes well-wrought, sometimes overwrought.
Culture doesn’t happen because people stop milling about and congregate for a while. It doesn’t happen because most people in a given place believe in the same thing, or believe in believing in the same thing.
If it happens at all, it happens by distillation, by alchemy, by good luck, by the catastrophe of ancestry, by the parabolic mad reckoning of soothsayers and elders, by the layering up of tragedy and working wisdom. In such places and times ‘public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law …’ (Seamus Heaney, in ‘From The Republic of Conscience’). In such places culture is the arche, the distillate and the fundament of human grace under pressure. The very earth beneath and within us is fed by human culture-making. That feeding is the work of patrimony, and of matrimony.
In Oxford, U.K., on 15/16 September, Kimberly Johnson and I will undertake some of that reckoning. There’ll be some calling in of the saints. There’ll be some murmuration of unwritten law.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
