Reflection from Two Research Fellows

Campion Hall bids farewell to two Research Fellows this month. We are grateful to Alex Shestopaloff and Harris Wiseman for their contribution to the Hall's academic and Community life. Here they reflect on their research and their time at Campion Hall.

Alex Shestopaloff, Junior Research Fellow

During my time at Campion, I was working at the Department of Statistics, pursuing research on two disjoint themes. The first was on computationally-intensive methods for statistical inference, known as Monte Carlo methods. The basic challenge in statistical inference is determining the best model for a given set of data. As data sets become more complex, so do the corresponding models, and the process of finding the best model can all of a sudden become very slow. Monte Carlo methods attempt to address this problem by efficiently exploring the set of possible models in a way that allows the statistician to quickly narrow down a good subset of models. Here, my work was on improving the efficiency through introducing a variety of novel computational techniques.

The second theme of my research was on network data. A network is simply a collection of nodes that are linked together in some way, with a link between two nodes representing some connection between these nodes. For instance, a link between two nodes in a social network can represent a friendship. A basic question in studying network data is the question of detecting communities --- node clusters such that the nodes within the cluster are more densely connected to one another than to nodes outside the cluster. Existing methods for community detection can find communities in a network, but not necessarily guarantee whether the detected communities are genuine. My work focused on looking at various community detection methods and rigorously determining whether their output is spurious or not.

As my next post, I will be moving to the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London as a Lecturer in Statistics. I will be joining a small statistics group in the process of turnover, within an large department, and I am happy to join just as the statistics group is beginning a new phase of expansion. One difference from any of my previous posts is that I will be working within a math department, as opposed to a statistics-only department, and I wonder how that will influence the sort of work that I do!

Being a JRF at Campion Hall was a unique opportunity for which I am very thankful, and it added immensely to my time at Oxford. By being part of the Hall community, engaging in conversation with other members and attending Hall events, I was exposed to different ways of thinking about research questions. I was better able to understand the context of my own work, and its role in the research enterprise. For example, when statisticians pursue efficiency, optimality, I am better able to ask questions and reflect on the resulting downstream effects of this pursuit, and this sort of thinking is what I hope to keep with me as I progress through my academic career. Most importantly, by being at Campion, I was able to make friendships and links that I would never had a chance to otherwise!

Harris Wiseman, Research Fellow

The sight of the red-green ivy in autumnal Oxford, bright yellow daffodils in a springtime Christchurch meadow, the mystical twilight at Baliol, and above all, Campion Hall at 3am, sat in the cozy, warm common room after yet another eve of stimulating conversation (yes, even the consequent dread walk home down Abingdon Road in the freezing winter's morning chill). All of these are amongst the many things I have to be grateful for over the course of my year in Oxford.

Yet, even though all these things are very good indeed, there is something else, theologically speaking, something more all-embracing that gratitude should point us towards - in Ignatius’ formulation: "Finding God in all things – and all things in God."

As for the theology of gratitude, Aquinas tells us gratitude is appended to justice, about regulating human moral relations (when a moral good is received, a moral good must be given, especially friendship and love). Gratitude is about returning good for good, doing so generously, and in a timely and thoughtful manner. Gratitude in this sense can always be returned and does not need to have any material cost, it is simply the expansion of goodness upon goodness.

For Barth, gratitude is the appropriate forward-looking response to God. One gives thanks for what one has not yet even received, the coming promised kingdom that one believes and accepts. Of course, gratitude is also a call to cheerful appreciation in one's present condition. Rather than constantly seeking more and more goods to take pleasure in, Barth reminds us that gratitude involves discerning what is already good in life. Life is to be appreciated, with discernment, so that it becomes a God-centred celebration of everything pleasing to God. Indeed, God-centredness is the watchword in gratitude from Saint Paul across two thousand years.

But how could one not mention Ignatius? Though my time at Campion was short, it became quickly

transparent that gratitude was, for Ignatius, a potent source of fuel, a powerful motivator of moral commitment and moral transformation. The Exercises, that tried and tested means for encounter with Christ, begins with grateful appreciation of every benefit God has given, and ends with a call to commitment – "love in action." As God's kindnesses are systematically brought to mind, God's goodness becomes the fount from which one fills oneself up to overbrimming. These are all goods which merit response. Using careful discernment, God's goodness models and drives one’s own reciprocal outpouring of goodness into the world. In the Exercises, there should be no severing of gratitude from love in action, and that love was always intended to be fueled and modeled by love received in Christ.

Such a theology of gratitude unfolds more and more, and it comes to be understood that there is no good thing that is not in some way apt for gratitude, whether it be obviously pleasing or not. And this is really the key. Theologically, gratitude comes less and less to be grounded in one’s own personal self-centred judgments. Gratitude opens up, first, towards seeing more and more of the good in things, irrespective of whether one likes them or not. The final promise of gratitude lift us up far above "this or that thing" altogether. Perhaps in its most mature stages, gratitude is about challenging oneself to stretch one's vision beyond oneself altogether. When Job bewails his awful circumstances and demands that God explain Himself, God refutes Job's appraisals from the whirlwind: "Where were you when I created all things?" This is the ultimate challenge to gratitude. There is infinitely more to this world than any of our joys and sufferings. Yes, gratitude is grounded in the everyday. But in its widest scope, gratitude challenges us to stretch our capacities for appreciation and thanksgiving absolutely beyond ourselves, to altogether relearn how to measure the good, to reconstitute our vision completely. God in all, and all in God.