Julian of Norwich (c. 1342 - 1416) is perhaps most widely known for her refrain "all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well" and for her image of God as mother. Both of these ideas were ultimately rooted in her understanding of the incarnation and God's "kinde love." This presentation by Julia Lamm focuses on Julian's reflections on the Annunciation, on God's eternal love for humanity in the second person of the Trinity, and on Christ's radical identity with humanity at its most vulnerable in the wake of the plague and the social upheaval it brought. The result of this incarnational theology is a form of Christian humanism. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J. moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of a two-year-long series on the Christian Literary Imagination.
Featured
Julia A. Lamm is a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and the founding director of the James M. and Margaret H. Costan Lecture in Early Christianity at Georgetown University. Lamm is a historical and systematic theologian with specializations in Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834); Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 - 1416); Christian mysticism; the doctrine of God, the doctrine of grace, and Christology; the history of Christian thought; and the relation between theology and philosophy. She is the author, most recently, of two monographs: God's 'Kinde' Love: Julian of Norwich's Vernacular Theology of Grace (2019) and Schleiermacher's Plato (2021). She is also editor of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012).
Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson's Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.
