About Us

Bethan Willis heads up the Flourishing in Academia programme for the Oxford Character Project. She is also a non-residential fellow with the University of Connecticut’s Humility and Conviction programme, conducting a public engagement project on intellectual humility in public debates around gender, race and historic injustice. Bethan did her PhD at the University of Exeter where her thesis examined Miroslav Volf’s theology in relation to post-conflict justice in the Balkans. Since then she has worked with charities and the Diocese of Oxford on projects engaging churches with social justice issues. In her spare time, Bethan enjoys volunteering with community projects and embarking on mini adventures with her husband and four children.

The Revd Dr Christopher Landau joined the Pastorate as McDonald Chaplain in 2018, alongside his role as pastor to postgraduate students at St Aldates church in Oxford. A journalist prior to ordination, Christopher worked as a Radio 4 news reporter and TV News producer at the BBC, latterly as World Service religious affairs correspondent. During ordination training he resumed theological study, working on Christian Ethics, and was awarded his doctorate in 2017, titled ‘A theology of disagreement’. An honorary chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral, he values the pursuit of Christian unity across church traditions. He is married to Carolyn; their young family means being asleep at 6:30am feels like a lie-in.

Claire Shuttleworth is the Administrator/Office manager for the Oxford Pastorate. She studied English literature and theology at Oxford Brookes University and undertook postgraduate study at King's College, London. She has worked in a variety of roles in Oxford including academic publishing for Wiley-Blackwell.

Ed Brooks has worked as part of the team at the Oxford Pastorate since 2014, helping to establish the Oxford Character Project, for which he now works as Executive Director. He first came to Oxford as a history undergraduate in 1999, working in Cape Town and London before succumbing again to Oxford’s magnetic pull. He has recently completed his DPhil exploring understandings of the virtue of hope in late modernity. Much of Ed’s first Oxford life was spent on the rugby pitch; these days you are more likely to find him on a long training run in the hills around Oxford. He is married to Liubov and is kept busy by their three young children.

The Revd Dr Jonathan Brant has been the Oxford Pastorate Chaplain since 2008. He has overall responsibility for leading the team in serving the postgraduate community. He wrote a DPhil in Theology at Trinity College, Oxford which drew upon systematic theology, film theory and qualitative research in considering the potential religious impact of contemporary Latin American cinema. The monograph has been published by Oxford University Press. Prior to coming to Oxford, Jonathan worked for Anglican churches in London and South America. Jonathan is the award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction books which introduce young people to the joys and the mysteries of the Christian faith. He is married to Tricia and has a teenage son, Isaac.

Dr Robert W Heimburger is Associate Chaplain. He leads a formation group of graduate students called Christians in Academia, and he coordinates the biannual Developing a Christian Mind course for graduate students and academics. With IFES, he is Founding Editor of Word & World and chair of the Theological Advisory Group. With Fe y Desplazamiento, the Faith and Displacement Project at the Seminario Bíblico de Colombia (FUSBC), he is researching forgiveness after conflict. His book from Cambridge University Press is entitled God and the Illegal Alien: Federal United States Immigration Law and a Theology of Politics. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.