Professor David Hempton - Networks, Nodes, and Nuclei in the History of Christianity, c. 1500-2020

David Hempton is a Senior Professor at Harvard University and Dean of Harvard Divinity School

Events Details

Dates: 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14 Oct 2021, 5.30-6.30pm.

The lectures may be followed by questions. Latest finishing time is 7pm.

Venue: The Playfair Library, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL

This event is open to all but numbers may be limited depending on Covid restrictions and a booking system is likely to be in place. More details on how to book a ticket will follow in due course.

Series Summary

Historians of Christianity, even when innovative in theory and method, have mostly written within national, denominational, or institutional frameworks.  Yet many of the most important changes and developments within Christianity have been transnational in scope, trans-denominational in character, and not easily contained within institutional or hierarchical structures.  What difference would it make to reimagine the history of Christianity in terms of transnational networks, nodal junction boxes of encounter and transmission, and a greater sense of the core memes and messages of religious traditions and expressions?  That is the principal question to be explored in the following set of lectures.

We welcome contributions to discussion about the series at the Gifford Lectures Blog.

Gifford Seminar

The Gifford Seminar is currently planned for Wednesday 6 October 2021. 

At this year's Seminar, Gifford lecturer Professor Hempton will join leading academics to discuss questions from the audience arising from his Gifford Lecture Series, “Networks, Nodes, and Nuclei in the History of Christianity, c. 1500-2020"

This event is open to all but numbers may be limited depending on Covid restrictions. More information will follow in due course.

There is no need to book.

Venue:

To be confirmed

Panel: 

To be confirmed

Chairperson: 

To be confirmed

Biography

David Hempton is the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity, and Dean of Harvard Divinity School.  He held prior appointments as Professor of Modern History and Director of the School of History at Queen’s University Belfast and distinguished University Professor at Boston University.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy.  He has delivered the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham and the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College London.

His books include Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850 (Stanford University Press, 1984), winner of the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005), winner of the Jesse Lee prize; Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (Yale University Press, 2008), The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (I. B. Tauris, 2011), winner of the Albert C. Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History; and most recently (with Hugh McLeod), Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

Series Videos

The lectures will be recorded and links will be posted in the respective pages of each lecture.

Related Links

Harvard Divinity School

Gifford Lectures Blog