THE ADVENTURE OF THE UNEXPECTED

London Encounter will return for its fourth edition on Saturday, 17 June 2017, and will be held at etc.venues, 155 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3YX.

Since ancient times, humans have approached the unexpected with trepidation: we dislike the unexpected because we want to be in control. We are afraid of it because we do not want things (and people) to hit us, strike us, wound us. We fear the unexpected, and yet we cannot live without it: this contradiction is at the origin of the paradoxical aspiration to control the unexpected, to select the unexpected we want, when we want it. This is probably one of the most typical delusions of our age, similar in many respects to the myth of virtual relationships or, as Rowan Williams described last year in his keynote address, to the myth of autonomy in an interconnected reality.

Indeed, the fear of the unexpected is strictly related to that fear of ‘otherness’ which was at the centre of London Encounter 2016. This is because the unexpected is always experienced as a relationship with something ‘other’ than us, which hits us and wounds us. But we saw last year that no man is an island; and, as Rowan Williams said, this is not just a stubborn evidence of reality, but our greatest possibility to discover, with wonder, what reality is made of and what ultimately we are made for.

This year we want therefore to sail away off the island, aware of the uncertainties of our world and of our own frailty, and yet hopeful that every unexpected event, good or bad, can become an opportunity to learn something new, discover something greater, and find unexpected companions on our journey.

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”



London Encounter 2017 will include the following Exhibitions and Meetings:

• Exhibition: Eureka! The adventure of the unexpected in maths and science
  
  
• Exhibition: The embrace of the pallium: mercy and care
  
  
• Exhibition: Adventures with the saints of Britain
  
  
• Meeting: The Adventure of the Unexpected
  
  
• Meeting: Embracing the unexpected: a dialogue with witnesses
  
  
• Evening event: An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle: Les Miserables seen from the perspective of Javert