OBITUARIES
Adam Monk, Mathematics, 2012 December 16th, 1993 – December 30th, 2014 Adam Monk, who died suddenly at the end of December 2014 while on holiday, was one of Mansfield’s best ever mathematics students, with very many friends both in College and back home. Adam came to us from King George V Sixth Form College in Southport. He shone at his Mansfield interview and began his mathematics degree in October 2012. It was apparent from the start that he was exceptionally talented. He was virtually never beaten by a problem. He was a very insightful thinker and wrote and expressed himself with great clarity – his work was a pleasure to read and, from a tutor’s perspective, to crib from! Tutorials with him were a delight. In fact Adam made tutorials quite taxing, as he really understood the basic material and always challenged his tutors with deeper and more interesting questions. At the same time, he was very modest about his mathematical ability and very generous in his support to his fellow students in their studies. In his first year Prelims he was placed sixth out of the 178 candidates doing the Mathematics and Mathematics and Statistics degrees in the whole University. Mansfield awarded him the Principal’s prize for outstanding academic performance across all subjects. He sustained his strong first class performance in his second year Part A exams in which he obtained an extraordinary 100% on his Topology paper – he is pictured wearing a Klein Bottle hat in a Topology tutorial. He was clearly on track for a good first in his third year Part B and his degree overall. The College has created a scholarship in Adam’s memory to be awarded annually to the Mathematics (and Statistics) student with the best performance in Prelims. Adam’s academic successes are even more impressive given his broad range of interests and his great overall contribution during his time at Oxford. A huge fan of music and football (Liverpool FC!), Adam was an extremely likeable character, and a very sociable member of the College community. A very modest and kind man, he always had the time to ask how others were and show a genuine interest in their wellbeing. Mansfield was all the richer for having Adam around. Besides his studies, Adam loved travelling. He spent the summer before his third year hitchhiking around Europe and then travelling around India for six weeks, with Mansfield friends Chris and Lettie. He spoke of these as some of the best experiences of his life. While at Oxford, Adam was involved in many student volunteering projects, most notably serving as a member of the Committee of Enactus, a social enterprise organisation run by students at the University. Adam made a huge contribution, especially to the Street View project, which aimed to improve the lives of local homeless residents by training them to become professional tour guides. To have shown such dedication whilst maintaining his superb academic record demonstrates his incredible enthusiasm and selflessness. Adam was an inspirational member of the College community, and is sorely missed by all at Mansfield and beyond. By Derek Goldrei (Fellow in Mathematics, Mansfield College) and Tom Bates (Law, 2012)
52 Mansfield 2014/15
Marcus Borg Theology DPhil, 1965 March 11th, 1942 – January 21st, 2015 I just missed meeting Marcus Borg, the distinguished New Testament scholar and Mansfield alumnus, who died in January 2015. He was working on his DPhil with Principal George Caird, while I was doing research elsewhere. But I always felt that I knew him personally. When George became my own supervisor he advised me to read Borg’s thesis, which I called up to the Duke Humphrey. (No Oxford student should turn down an opportunity to spend a few hours in that awe-inspiring setting.) Conflict, Holiness and Politics, eventually published by E Mellen in 1984, was a model of what a DPhil should be – clarity and reasonableness in the text, with the required ‘interaction with scholarly literature’ discreetly relegated to nearly a thousand footnotes. I used to own a copy but must have lent it to a Mansfield student (send it back, whoever you are, and all is forgiven). That thesis contains all the ideas about the life and words of the historical Jesus that Borg went on to popularise in a series of best-selling books, particularly Jesus: a New Vision (1987) and Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994). According to Borg, Jesus preached a divine Kingdom in opposition to Roman imperialism, and a concept of holiness as mercy in opposition to Pharisaic holiness as separation; his was a mystical and ethical message for this world, not an apocalyptic prophecy of its imminent end. Borg’s biography, like that of many an academic, was not particularly eventful. Born and raised in a traditional Lutheran home in Minnesota, he read politics as his first degree and published a book on Conflict and Social Change (1971), which provided the perspective from which he approached his New Testament studies. After non-tenured posts in Mid-West colleges, he was appointed professor at Oregon State in 1979 where he stayed for the rest of his career, becoming Head of Religion in 1989. However, the department was soon to be shut down and he was moved into Philosophy; his publications since then have reflected this move, with his advocacy of ‘panentheism’ and interest in Buddhism. He was married to Marianne, an Episcopal priest, and he joined her church himself in 1983, as a more congenial home for a theological liberal. He came to the notice of the US public through his association with the notorious ‘Jesus Seminar’, whose members voted (with a colour code) on the likely historicity of Jesus traditions – though he was less sceptical than most of his colleagues, and more reassuring to church people in his evident devotion to the figure of the Jesus he believed he had uncovered. I have often wondered what it would have been like to overhear the conversations that must have taken place in our SCR in 1922 between Albert Schweitzer, who was delivering the Dale lectures, and the then Yates Professor of New Testament at Mansfield, C H Dodd. Schweitzer was the proponent of ‘consistent eschatology’ – Jesus as preacher of the imminent end of this age, and the arrival of a new age of resurrection, with the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds. Dodd was the great advocate of ‘realised eschatology’ – Jesus used apocalyptic language metaphorically to dramatise the present moment of decision or foreseen historical events, like the fall of Jerusalem. I have also wondered what it would have been like to meet Marcus Borg in the College 50 years later and have the same conversation, probably with a similar outcome; but we would then have been able to agree to go into the Quad and smoke our pipes. By the Reverend John Muddiman (Emeritus Fellow, Mansfield College)