The University Church in Oxford announces:
The Age of Hitler, and how we can escape it
This year’s lectures are given by Professor Alec Ryrie FBA, who is Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham.
The age of Hitler is not the 1930s and 1940s: it is our own lifetimes. It is the period in which Western culture has come to define its values not by Christianity, but by the narrative of the Second World War. It is the period in which our most potent moral figure has been Adolf Hitler, and in which our only truly fixed moral reference point has been our shared rejection of Nazism.
Which is good: but it’s not enough. And even if defining our values this way was wise, it’s clear that this postwar, anti-Nazi moral consensus is unravelling, and our whole system of values coming under pressure. What is going to come next? These lectures will give an account of how the ‘secular’ values of the postwar world came about, and what will happen now that the age of Hitler seems to be passing. They will show that for a new shared system of values to emerge from our current turmoil, we will need to draw creatively both on the newer, secular, anti-Nazi value system and on the older Christian value systems which remain powerfully present in European and Western culture. And they will show that such a creative synthesis is not only desirable, but also possible – perhaps even likely.
Details can be found here. The dates are 10 May and 17 May. The lectures will be live-streamed and recorded.
The Bampton Lectures
The Bampton Lectures, founded by the will of the Revd John Bampton (1690-1751), first took place at the University Church in 1780. Over the centuries, these prestigious lectures – sometimes courting controversy, always intellectually stimulating – have covered a range of theological subjects. It is a condition of the Bampton Bequest that the lectures are published by the Lecturer. These lectures are delivered in the Trinity Term every year.
Many thanks for advertising this. Perhaps links to other prestigious theological lectures (such as the Gifford lectures) can be included in the future. Prof. Ryrie is in his fourth and final year as Gresham professor of divinity, and I have attended several of his lectures (links are here: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now?subject=religion). Bampton’s will is quite emphatic: “Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects—to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics—upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures—upon the authority of the writings of… Read more »
‘SW Wiltshire’ should read ‘SE Wiltshire’: apologies.
Shouldn’t that read “The Age of Putin how can we escape it”?