The Mary Ward Lecture – The Synod on Synodality: Understanding our Ecclesial Times
The Mary Ward Lecture is a distinguished event organized every year by The Margaret Beaufort Institute, which seeks to illuminate the complexities and richness of our faith and its expression in contemporary society. You can join us in this event to delve into a topic of profound significance for the Catholic Church and its faithful across the globe: “The Synod on Synodality: Understanding our Ecclesial Times.”
This lecture will reflect on the major themes that have emerged from the Synod on Synodality, and offer some critical reflections on what these emerging themes and experiences of lived synodality tell us about the ecclesial times we are living in. The lecture will highlight both the renewing drive of the Synod and also explore, echoing Pope Francis’ own vision of distinguishing productive and unproductive conflicts, some of the Synod’s fruitful and more problematic tensions.
Our esteemed speaker, Professor Anna Rowlands, brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to this discussion.
About the speaker:
Anna Rowlands is the St Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University, UK and a member of the Centre for Catholic Studies. She is currently seconded to work with two Vatican Dicasteries for two years: the Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops and the Dicastery for Integral Human Development (IHD). She is a governing Member of the Dicastery for IHD. She is a political theologian who works on the traditions of Catholic and Anglican social teaching/thought, theologies of human migration, concepts of human dignity and the common good, and the social philosophies of Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Gillian Rose. She is the author of Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (Bloomsbury, 2021), which won the 2023 Expanded Reason/Ratzinger Foundation Prize. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Religion and Contemporary Migration (OUP, 2024). She is a Visiting Scholar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge for the Spring of 2024, where she is working on her next book.
You can join us in person or via zoom.