Symbolic World Summit at Pusey House, September 2026. Left to right: Dcn. Seraphim Richard Rohlin, Jonathan Pageau, Nathan Betz, Aiden Hart, Annie Crawford, Jordan Hall

A very important part of my academic work is bringing my research to popular, non-academic audiences. Sometimes this is easier said than done, as it can be hard to get a megaphone big enough to reach the right people. Fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people who would be interested in my research if they only knew about it, and there are a lot of people I want to reach with it.

Fortunately, I’ve had a couple very interesting opportunities recently. A couple months ago, I heard that Jonathan Pageau, the well-known icon-carver, public speaker, YouTuber, and founder of Symbolic World Press, announced he would be hosting a Symbolic World Summit in Oxford, where I lived and studied in 2016 and 2017. The announcement of this came on his Symbolic World podcast (listen here), and he mentioned that the topic of the Summit would be Paradise Imagined. I was waging my perpetual war against the hedges that surround our beautiful home in Abensberg, Germany, and when he mentioned paradise as the focus, I almost fell off my ladder!

This was my topic. In my old city. And in fact at Pusey House, which is a center of the Oxford Movement’s legacy and a semi-holy site for patrologists like me. I have some Pusey House stories, but I’ll save those for another time.

Anyway, after finishing the gardening, I went onto x.com (formerly known as Twitter) and found his tweet announcing it and replied, basically, that I’m a scholar of the heavenly Jerusalem and paradise and just wrote a huge book about it (and am writing another one), that I wrote some of it in Oxford, and I’d be very happy to have my publisher send him a copy. Within about 20 seconds, he’d replied with a direct message inviting me to participate in the conference as a panelist, and a request that I please bring the copy of the book myself so I could sign it for him.

I quickly scanned my very full schedule and wondered if I could find a way to do this. After all, it’s central to my mission as a scholar.

When I wrote my project proposal years ago for the current DFG project, I promised (in the form of a contract!) that I’d find interesting ways to promote and publicize my work to a broader audience. I’ve done a pretty good job of this: I’ve been relatively active on social media promoting the work, and have also been on a couple podcasts (with Jack Bull and John Solheid) to discuss my book and newer research. I’ve also set up a blog (which you’re on) and a constantly evolving website (www.nathanbetz.com) to promote my research.

But an invitation from Jonathan Pageau to appear alongside him and other well-known artists, thought leaders, podcasters, and tech leaders was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

And so—no surprise here—I said yes, and we got things squared away in a hurry. Jonathan was very kind and respectful of my full schedule, and really bent over backwards to make this happen.

To cut a very long and wonderful story short, a few weeks later, I found myself in Oxford, at Pusey House, listening to stories told by Martin Shaw, lectures on cities and the devil by Fr. Joseph Siemens and Fr. Andrew Damick respectively, jokes and moderation (in that order) by Dcn. Seraphim Richard Rohlin, and a small session with Martin Shaw and Annie Crawford about C.S. Lewis (illuminating and notable for all the poetry recited!). Paul Kingsnorth, was also there, though not as a presenter (I highly recommend his Against the Machine and his fiction)

Martin Shaw telling "The Girl without Hands" to get the Summit started; Shaw is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Liturgies of the Wild

When the last day rolled around, it was showtime for me. Jonathan had told me the day before to be ready to join a panel, and it was decided that I’d be on the large final panel to do a massive two-hour Q&A about any and all topics, both those covered at the summit and some that weren’t. All the presenters were on the panel.

Jonathan directed the first question to me, asking me about my research and how I evaluated the whole summit, and if it aligned with early Christian teaching on the heavenly Jerusalem. After that, it was on to topics like Christian art, Gregory of Nyssa, AI, modern liturgy, Orthodoxy, and much else besides. It was one of the fastest two hours of my life.

Fielding a question during the Symbolic World Summit

Group picture after the final Q&A

Looking out into the audience, the cameras, the lights, down the nave of the Pusey Chapel, I felt like this was exactly where I needed to be, and exactly at this time. The best of our scholarship is not meant for us alone. It’s meant for everyone. The trick is to always keep our theology tethered to reality and be ready and willing to bring it up or down to the level of whoever it is we’re speaking with.

That day, as I looked down the nave, where we had begun two days earlier with a beautiful evensong conducted by the Principal, the Rev. Dr. George Westhaver, I knew that I, who had begun my academic theological training only a few steps from that chapel, was at precisely the right place and at the right time, presenting with the right people to the right audience. There were 150 of that right audience—artists, best-selling authors, film-makers, Christians, Muslims, atheists—seekers all—and many of them people with whom I’d had the privilege to share a deep conversation and a pint over the previous 48 hours—probably some people reading this blog post now.

It’s for these that I do my work.

Scholarship is not just for the scholars. Theology is not just for the theologians. The New Jerusalem is not just for theology students and reviewers of DFG funding applications.

This is for everyone. It's for you. It's for your friends. It's for the guy from Montana who told me after the final session that I was saying the exact kind of things that he'd flown halfway around the world to come and hear. 

And I’m grateful to God and to you, to my funders (the DFG) and, in this instance, to Jonathan Pageau, that, for this part of my life, I’m able to do this. I’m exceptionally grateful.

Here’s to many more years, and many more stories just like this.

P.S. A couple days after Oxford, Jonathan reached out and asked if I’d like to do a podcast with him for his Symbolic World show. We recorded it a couple weeks ago, and it was launched this past Friday. If you’d like to watch it, here’s the link: 

Symbolic World appearance with Jonathan Pageau. Watch the whole thing here.