Centre for Catholic Studies Podcast

The following lecture was presented in June 2019 at the New Song Conference: Biblical Hebrew Poetry as Jewish and Christian Scripture for the 21st Century. The conference was organized in partnership by the Centre for Catholic Studies, the Durham University Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society, and Politics and Ushaw College. The lecture was given by Professor Benjamin D. Sommer, Professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and is entitled ‘Parallelism and Preaching: Poetic Form and Religious Function’

The following lecture was presented in June 2019 at the New Song Conference: Biblical Hebrew Poetry as Jewish and Christian Scripture for the 21st Century. The conference was organized in partnership by the Centre for Catholic Studies, the Durham University Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society, and Politics and Ushaw College. The lecture was given by Dr Katie M. Heffelfinger, Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Hermeneutics at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and is entitled ‘Truth and Hidden Things: Reading Isaiah 45:9-25 as Scripture’

The following lecture was presented in June 2019 at the New Song Conference: Biblical Hebrew Poetry as Jewish and Christian Scripture for the 21st Century. The conference was organized in partnership by the Centre for Catholic Studies, the Durham University Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society, and Politics and Ushaw College. The lecture was given by Dr Yisca Zimran, lecturer in the Zalman Shamir Bible Department at Bar-Ilan University, and is entitled ‘The Dynamic Relationship between God and Man in the Book of Hosea: A Synchronic Reading’

Being-in-God: Spinoza, Panentheism, and Catholic Theology Seminar by Dr Clare Carlisle Tresch (King's College London)

Staging Magic in English Catholic College Drama Ushaw Lecture by Professor Alison Shell (University College London) --About the Lecture Dramatised magic was popular in early modern theatre, and never more so than within the dramatic corpus of the English Catholic colleges set up in continental Europe after the Reformation. Many of these colleges were controlled by the Jesuit order, who played a major role in developing stage technology in this era. Written for performance by the young scholars at these colleges, these plays constitute a kind of children’s literature, and frequently draw on magical themes. They have a didactic message, pitting devil-worshippers against followers of Christ, and the fantastic element must also have appealed to the schoolboy imagination. Audiences of these popular civic events, whether or not they could understand the Latin in which the plays were performed, would have enjoyed the opportunity for spectacle provided by maguses and conjuring tricks. This lecture is organised by the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, in conjunction with Ushaw College. --About the Speaker Alison Shell was educated at the North London Collegiate School and Oxford University (B.A./M.A. and D.Phil.). After a period as Rare Books Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alison became a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at UCL between 1994 and 1997. Her first permanent academic post was at the University of Durham, where she worked between 1997 and 2010. Alison is an editor for the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies’ series ‘Catholic and Recusant Texts in Early Modern England’. She reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, the Church Times and a number of academic journals. --About the Ushaw Lecture Series The Ushaw Lecture Series celebrates the cultural and research significance of the remarkable bibliographical, archival and material-cultural collections at Ushaw, and the wider history of which they are expressions. The lectures cover music, art, drama, poetry and literature, architecture, material-culture, politics, science and theology.

Jacques Maritain, Democratic Crisis, and the Promise and Peril of a Global Catholic History Ushaw Lecture by Professor John McGreevy (University of Notre Dame) --About the Lecture Jacques Maritain is often described as the most important Catholic intellectual of the mid-20th century. This lecture describes his most important project - offering arguments from within Catholicism for democracy, even as many Catholics favored authoritarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s. Maritain's successes and failures around the world during this period - from Argentina to France to Canada - offer insight into how a global view better helps us understand contemporary Catholic history. --About the Speaker John McGreevy is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of three books. The first, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1996. The second, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, was published by W.W. Norton in 2003. The third, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global, was published in 2016 by Princeton University Press. A fourth book on global Catholicism is under contract with W. W. Norton. He has received major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the Erasmus Institute, and has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune and other venues. --About the Ushaw Lecture Series The Ushaw Lecture Series celebrates the cultural and research significance of the remarkable bibliographical, archival and material-cultural collections at Ushaw, and the wider history of which they are expressions. The lectures cover music, art, drama, poetry and literature, architecture, material-culture, politics, science and theology.

Black Dignity by Dr Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University, Pennsylvania) The idea of dignity is a common denominator of the abolitionist movement, the US civil rights movement, the black power movement, black feminist movements, and #BlackLivesMatter. To what extent is there a specifically Black understanding of dignity? How does it resonate with Catholic and secular liberal accounts of dignity, and how can it complicate those accounts? How do black organic intellectuals, such as Paul Robeson, exemplify black understandings of dignity – not only as conceptualized but as performed? I argue that a Black political-theological account of dignity is at the center of the new moral vocabulary congealing around racial justice movements today, even as that political-theological background is under-appreciated in social movements. This event is organised by the Department of Theology and Religion and the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. --About the Alan Richardson Lecture The Alan Richardson Lecture is given annually by the incumbent Alan Richardson Fellow. The fellowship is endowed to promote research into the exposition and defence of Christian doctrine within the context of contemporary thought and its challenges. The Fellowship was founded in honour of the Very Reverend Alan Richardson, K.B.E., D.D., (1905-75), formerly Dean of York, Professor of Christian Theology in the University of Nottingham and Canon of Durham Cathedral. --About the Catholic Theology Research Seminar Series The Catholic Theology Research Seminar Series is a regular forum for scholarly discussion of pertinent issues in the Catholic traditions of theology and Church. The seminar series ranges across the traditional theological disciplines (scriptural, historical, philosophical, systematic, liturgical, ethical and practical/pastoral), Catholic social thought and practice, and social-scientific approaches to Catholicism.

HE Daniel Mulhall (Ambassador of Ireland to Great Britain) James Joyce and Irish Catholicism

Dr Melanie McDonagh (London Evening Standard) Catholicism and Journalism

Anna Lawson (Durham) Shaping the Catholic Imaginary: The Work of Fenwick Lawson