Anna Rowlands to speak on The Synod on Synodality

Professor Anna Rowlands will be giving this year's Mary Ward Lecture on The Synod on Synodality: Understanding our Ecclesial Times - Wednesday 17 April 2024 5pm, Wesley House, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, CB5 8BJ.

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.

Professor Rowlands 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.

Professor Rowlands brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to this discussion. She 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 in person or via zoom at this link: www.mbit.cam.ac.uk/event/mary-ward-lecture-2024/