Interview

Belief

Creed

Leading

S&U interviews

18 June 2025

9 min read

The quantum of leadership: how to flourish in science

Resolving the big questions - a conversation with Andrew Briggs, quantum technology pioneer.

Pawel Puczkarski and Michał Łuczewski

Pawel is a fellow at Oxford University. Michał is a sociologist at the University of Warsaw.

A professor stands next to experimental equipment.

Andrew Briggs beside quantum research equipment.

Professor Andrew Briggs has been at the forefront of quantum technology for decades, pioneering the use of AI and machine learning in quantum computing. Two technologies that will shape our world.

Andrew has been a leader in a demanding and cutting-edge academic field. In this interview the Oxford-based academic shares his insights on how to lead scientific endeavours and flourish in life.

Pawel Puczkarski: We meet on Northmoor Road, which, more than any other street, embodies the spirit of Oxford.

Michał Łuczewski: I sense here the presence of all souls.

Andew Briggs: Indeed! The Tolkien family first lived at number 22 before moving next door to number 20. Just opposite, in the garden shed of number 27, is where Sir Martin Wood built the first magnets for what was to become Oxford Instruments. Another neighbour was Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes.

MŁ: High culture, big business, top sports. What about science?

AB: Just across the street, Sir Rudolf Peierls spent his final years. He transformed our understanding of nearly every application of quantum theory, including materials science and nuclear energy. Nearby, Erwin Schrödinger was living at number 12 when he received the news that he had won the Nobel Prize; he later moved to number 24. It was also here that he conceived his famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, which illustrated the fundamental insight of quantum physics—that quantum objects can exist in two states at once. The inspiration for the fictitious cat—both dead and alive—was quite alive. Schrödinger’s own cat was allegedly called Milton

MŁ: What is your main driver in your manifold leadership roles?

AB: The desire to contribute. And pure curiosity. I am absolutely fascinated by big questions.

PP: What’s the biggest question that remains for you unanswered?

AB: I suppose it might be, “How can I be more loving?”

MŁ: That’s a big question, how about big answers?

AB: One thing I’ve learned over time is the ability to live with unresolved big questions while maintaining the curiosity to understand them better. Take quantum physics. Among scientists, there’s still no agreement on what exactly happens during the act of measuring a quantum system. And measurement is the most basic thing we do in experimental science. So, are we being intellectually irresponsible? Now take prayer. I don’t think there’s consensus among people who pray about what exactly happens when they do. I certainly don’t yet have a fully satisfactory answer. But I long for better understanding. Quantum technologies have too much potential to walk away from the mystery. Likewise, prayer is too important to abandon simply because I don’t fully comprehend it.

MŁ: What is your own understanding of prayer, then?

AB: Prayer is about developing a relationship with God, just as conversation is part of building relationships with people. Of course, relationships involve more than conversation. But if you never talk to someone, you’re probably missing out on something. There are many ways to engage God. It is our love for God and our experience of His love. Being kind to people is part of our love relationship with God.

MŁ: How come such a hard-nosed scientist like you speaks about God so openly?

PP: It brings to mind a story that stretches across more than a century. In 1874, physicist James Clerk Maxwell founded the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Carved on its entrance doors, he placed a passage from Psalm 111 in Latin.

AB: As the first Cavendish Professor, Maxwell personally oversaw every aspect of the lab's creation. He was a man of deep Christian faith.

PP: Fast forward to 1973—you, as a young research student, proposed to the departmental committee carving the same quote in English above the entrance to the new Cavendish Laboratory: 'The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein'.

AB: To the Head of Department’s surprise, the committee not only did not reject my audacious idea, but they enthusiastically supported it.

MŁ: Another half-century passed…

AB: And that quote still serves as a motto for the next generation—it suggests that those inside the laboratory are discovering how God makes the world work, and that this pursuit is deeply joyful. Science is a God-given resource for faith and for the work of the Church. If the Church is here to serve the world, it must engage with the world as it is. For example, during the pandemic, scientific knowledge was essential in caring for people at risk. Conversely, faith offers wisdom and a voice in public discourse.

MŁ: What does leadership personally mean for you?

AB: Leadership, whatever its tools or styles, is ultimately about choosing what values to lead with. You can exercise leadership in many areas. Each of us does it in our own way, within our sphere of influence, using our unique talents. I'm distinguishing between the tools of leadership—whether oratory, intellect, money, or whatever—and the deeper question of which direction you want to lead. The real question is: What kind of leadership will you exercise?

MŁ: Is that where my responsibility lies?

AB: Yes, and to implement that responsibility using whatever talents and opportunities we have. If you're a professor at Oxford, you have to excel in your field. But Oxford is full of opportunities beyond academia, and I feel both a responsibility and a pleasure in engaging with the wider implications of my work.

PP: You were deeply involved in the rapid development of quantum technologies and quantum information processing, within the evolving landscape of Oxford itself. We're no longer solely a research university. There's been a growing emphasis on scientific entrepreneurship and spinning out companies.

AB: You're absolutely right–it's been a significant cultural shift at the university. In 2021, in my lab we realized that many people wanted to use our techniques, but we had reached the limit of our capacity to help others from our own resources. As academics, we love collaborating and helping, but we hadn’t even begun to meet the commercial need. So, we worked with Said Business School to conduct market research, which confirmed there was a viable market. That’s when we spun out the company, QuantrolOx.

MŁ: In his recent book From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks argues that our careers will end much sooner than we expect and asks how we should prepare for that. It seems you’ve figured that out. You seem to go from strength to strength.

AB: Arthur is a valued friend. He spoke at the U.S. launch of the Human Flourishing book in Harvard. And was kind enough to host the U.S. launch of Penultimate Curiosity, the book I co-authored with the eminent artist, Roger Wagner.

PP: I see his painting behind us.

AB: Yes, Roger used to have his studio in this house. As you might have noticed, Arthur has been lately placing more and more emphasis on the role of faith for human happiness.

MŁ: Through his works, Brooks has been undergoing a kind of spiritual conversion. He makes it clear now that the goal of life is happiness and human flourishing, which starts with meaningful work, friends, family and most importantly - faith. For him personally means renewing his Catholic faith daily, moment by moment.

AB: And he’s been speaking about that in a way that is completely genuine and comes from the heart.

MŁ: I think there’s a similar kind of scholarly conversion in your life, where Christian renewal meets the Greek ideal of kalokagathia—the unity of the transcendentals, also reflected in your books. Penultimate Curiosity explores beauty. It Keeps Me Seeking explores truth. Citizenship in a Networked Age explores justice. And beauty, truth, and justice find their unity in your last book: Human Flourishing. How do you see your life?

AB: I want to keep contributing for as long as I have the energy and the wherewithal. But life is nonlinear and stochastic.

MŁ: Professor, pray elaborate!

AB: We make choices and we are subject to events each of which could have been otherwise, and the consequences are often out of all proportion to the causal factors. Randomness is fundamental in quantum theory where the uncertainty is very mathematically rigorously described. I sometimes wonder if today’s rising generation struggles with stress because they expect too much control over their own destiny.

MŁ: No doubt.

AB: And that’s where Providence comes in. What traditional spiritual English calls Providence—from the same root as to provide—is, I believe, essential to making sense of a world that is both stochastic and nonlinear. This confidence in Providence, in the idea that we can navigate a world that is chaotic and still thrive, is profoundly important. If you look at the Gospels, when Jesus called people to follow him, they took a risk. They could have been wrong, following someone who was a spoof, but they made a decision—and it turned out to be a good one. And I think it's true of deciding to follow Jesus Christ. Could I be wrong? I suppose so. I don't think I am, but I could be. I don’t have certainty, but I choose.

MŁ: And how do you know it?

AB: Think of flying. You prepare as much as you can, but unexpected situations always arise. Air traffic control sometimes tells you what to do, but mostly, they ask what your intention is. You can’t hesitate when you're flying a plane. You can't just say, well, I'm not going to decide. That's not an option. You try to make them safe choices. You try to make them wise choices. But you have to make choices. Same with life. Thinking is good. But thought must lead to action. Some say I live my life by my transferable flying skills!

MŁ: And your final destination?

AB: Heaven, I hope. I believe this life isn’t all there is. I believe in a future with Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—free from pain and suffering. The risk is to focus too much on going to heaven. I think the emphasis should actually be on the other direction: heaven coming to us. 'Thy Kingdom come!' That gives dignity to this world.

MŁ: This conversation was a foretaste of a heavenly banquet!

AB: More like Spanish tapas—small plates, not a grand feast.

PP: A series of little courses?

AB: Exactly. And when you write this up, make it look like there was a plan.

MŁ: In your nonlinear, stochastic life, we’ve already found a hidden pattern. A kind of Da Vinci Code of Andrew Briggs.

AB: And the code is…?

PP: Have you ever thought about combining your book titles into a life motto? Imagine it inscribed over your Northmoor Road house: Penultimate Curiosity… Keeps Me Seeking… Human Flourishing.

AB: Perfect! I love it. That’s my code.

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Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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