Newman's Marian Idea of History | Dr. Rebekah Lamb
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
This lecture was given on April 26, 2022 at Oxford University. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Rebekah Lamb specializes in religion, literature and visual culture from the long nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites as well as their affiliate circles and inheritors. She joined the School of Divinity in 2018. Prior to St. Andrews she was an inaugural Étienne Gilson Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (St Michael's College). Dr Lamb received her PhD in Victorian and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature as well as her Masters in English Literature from Western University (London, ON, Canada). During her doctoral studies she was a Kuyper Emerging Scholar and an Ontario Graduate Scholar. She holds an Honors BA in Liberal Arts Studies, with special emphasis on English Literature and the Humanities, from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (New Hampshire, USA and Rome, Italy). Dr. Lamb frequently writes for public-facing journals and magazines, including Church Life Journal, Convivium: Faith in Our Common Life, The Catholic Herald, and The Scottish Catholic Observer. She has featured in public programs for BBC One & BBC Scotland, the Christian Heritage Centre (Stonyhurst) and the McGrath Institute at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). She is often invited to speak on topics relating to her research and broader, theological and cultural themes—especially as informed by Roman Catholic approaches to aesthetics, cultural studies, and formation. She delivered the 2020 Cardinal Winning Lecture (Glasgow University) on St. Thérèse of Lisieux's status as a Doctor of the Church for our times and in 2018 co-taught the University of Toronto’s first Gilson Seminar in Faith and Ideas in Rome, Italy with Randy Boyagoda. She is the co-founder of the annual St. Margaret of Scotland Lecture Series at the University of St. Andrews, which launched in 2020.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at |
| 0:06.0 | tamistic institute.org. As already noted, my talk today is Newman's Marian idea of history. |
| 0:17.0 | Before I get into the weeds of what that means, I would like to set the stage first a little bit. |
| 0:23.4 | This topic grows out of a few larger projects that I'm currently working on. |
| 0:27.4 | One of them, as already mentioned, is a special issue co-edited with Michael Hurley for the journal |
| 0:32.6 | religion and literature, which reassesses aspects of Newman's thought in light of his recent canonization. And especially |
| 0:39.7 | invited contributors to look at different areas of his thought that might not have received as much |
| 0:45.1 | examination. And so hence my interest in turning to the Marion influence in Newman's thought. |
| 0:52.1 | And the more I looked at it, the more I discovered that |
| 0:54.4 | it is a very informative and often kind of subtle, an almost hidden influence on much of his thought, |
| 1:02.0 | which I think is actually quite appropriate. His Marian influences are also kind of Marian in character. |
| 1:08.4 | They're slightly hidden and humble, and yet profoundly, I would say, |
| 1:12.7 | essential to his thought as a whole. And particularly in terms of his understanding of history, |
| 1:19.3 | though I do also think that his aesthetics was profoundly influenced by his Marian devotion as well. |
| 1:25.9 | I'm also working on a project with Rutledge on Victorian assessments of history. |
| 1:30.0 | And I think especially in the time when there was a kind of emerging discourse of power politics, |
| 1:35.3 | it's quite interesting that Newman repeatedly turns to an idea of history |
| 1:40.0 | where the most important things are always already happening offstage, |
| 1:43.7 | very often on the sidelines |
| 1:46.9 | in areas of life and throughout salvation history that people might not necessarily notice, |
| 1:52.6 | especially if they're in places of, in positions of power. Another thing that I think is very |
| 1:58.4 | important is if we look to Newman's time in Oxford, |
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