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March 10, 2025

Life, Ideas, and Revelation: Lucy Beckett’s "A Postcard from the Volcano"

Event Series: Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference

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An aerial view of Vienna, Austria

Lucy Beckett’s A Postcard from the Volcano: a Novel of Pre-War Germany (2009) is a great intellectual novel situated in a time of massive geopolitical changes. Set in what was then Germany and is now Poland (mostly) between 1914 and 1939, young European intellectuals and artists–Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, some religious, some atheist, friends and sometimes lovers–wrestle with the great ideas in light of the real events affecting their daily lives. In this talk, Rev. Dominic White, O.P., will explore how Lucy Beckett, former head of Classics at Ampleforth College, brings together an intellectual feast of profound compassion and humanity as she unfolds the subtle and mysterious workings of divine grace. White will also look at how Beckett positions the narrative voice as a kind of “revelator” and refer to the award-winning sequel, The Leaves are Falling (2014), in which the creative possibilities of this “revelator” role are developed further.

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.

Participants

Rev. Dominic White, O.P.

Rev. Dominic White, O.P.

Rev. Dominic White, O.P., is a fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, prior of Blackfriars Priory, and a research fellow at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge. A Dominican friar and Catholic priest, he received a Ph.D. at Imperial College London. His theological interests focus especially on theology of the arts and the implications of the arts for metaphysics, liturgy, and spirituality. Fr. White is the author of The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Christian Cosmology, Contemporary Spiritualities and the Arts (2015) and How Do I Look? Theology in the Age of the Selfie (2020), for which he was awarded a Ph.D. in theology by the University of Cambridge.

Michael Scott

Michael Scott

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college advisor for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior advisor to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously served as the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University, where he is professor emeritus.