An interview between the Revd Dr William Lamb, Vicar of the University Church and the Revd Canon Dr Jessica Martin about the upcoming Bampton Lectures 2021.
The Bampton Lectures have been delivered at the University Church since 1780. The Bampton Lecturer this year is Dr Jessica Martin, who has been Canon Residentiary at Ely Cathedral since 2016, after 6 years as Priest-in-charge of a multi-parish benefice in South Cambridgeshire. Before that, she was Fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where her research focus was on early modern piety and the early history of literary biography.
Dr Martin’s title for this year’s Bampton Lectures is Four-Dimensional Eucharist. She will be thinking about the eucharist both as sacrament and as ritual theatre, and asking some unusual questions of it. She will be considering its physicality in a time of increasing online presence, the abiding Christian tension between presence and absence it already contains, and its efficacy in a modern culture which veers unstably between scepticism and enchantment. Her range of reference will be wide, reaching from fantasy genres and virtual reality to Eucharistic theology and the anthropology of ritual.
The first two lectures on Tue 11 May, will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel. The last two, on Tue 18 May, will be a hybrid event, in the University Church and livestreamed on our YouTube channel.
Register here:
https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/content/bampton-lectures
