Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons^™

Arising from my paper ‘The Sea of Faith: After Dover Beach’ (1997) this presentation to an annual conference of naval chaplains explores how water and sea might function as organizational metaphors for chaplaincy ministry. A fully revised version was published as ‘Water as an implicit metaphor for organizational change within the Church’ (2002) in the journal Implicit Religion and can be found here: https://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/IR/article/view/2946/

The metaphor of ‘the sea of faith’ comes from Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (1867) and has been explored subsequently by a number of theologians, notably Don Cupitt in his BBC TV series of the same name and the Sea of Faith Network founded to explore his ideas. This paper explores how the image of the sea functions in Arnold’s poem and his The Forsaken Merman before arguing that R. S. Thomas’s use of the sea in his poem Tidal provides a better theological metaphor than Arnold’s.