2025 ZERNOV LECTURE
The lecture will be followed by a cheese and wine reception
All welcome
The Zernov Lecture 2025 will be given by the eminent theologian, the Rt Revd Dr Rowan Williams PC, FBA, FRSL, FLSW.
Dr Williams served as 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012) and afterwards, until 2020, was Master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He was appointed a life peer in 2013 and sat in the House of Lords until he retired in 2020. He now continues his work as a poet, writer and public intellectual, broadcasting, preaching and lecturing internationally.
Dr Williams is a distinguished thinker with a wide range of scholarly interests, including an interest in the Christian East, about which he recently published in Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2021). He wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford on the twentieth-century Russian émigré theologian, Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958), whose Essai sur la théologie mystique de l'Église d'Orient (1944) contributed an important and influential articulation of Eastern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century.
Dr Williams will be revisiting his early interest in Vladimir Lossky in this year’s Zernov Lecture. The lecture will consider Lossky's war-time journals, published as Seven Days on the Roads of France, June 1940 (St. Vladimir 's Seminary Press, 2012). A French citizen and a francophile, Lossky spent the war years in France.
Lossky also participated in some of the early conferences of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius in England, which were pioneering in providing opportunities for theological exchange between Eastern and Western theologians. As Patron of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Dr Williams himself provides continuity and valued support to the Fellowship's ongoing work, to provide a forum for such East-West theological exchange.
The Zernov Lecture is an annual event hosted jointly by the House of St Gregory and St Macrina Oxford https://hgmoxford.co.uk, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius https://fsass.org/ and the St Theosevia Centre for Christian Spirituality https://sttheosevia.org/ charities working in the field of Eastern Christian studies. It honours the memory of the Orthodox theologian, Nicolas Zernov (1898-1980), Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture at the University of Oxford, whose vision and work for Christian unity lay behind the founding of these charities. The charities are pleased to be collaborating for this lecture with the Maison française d’Oxford (https://www.mfo.ac.uk/), especially given Zernov's connections with the Paris School of Theology, connections which he continued to represent and sustain in Oxford.
