Anglican/Catholic Literary Encounters: A Symposium

Recent years have witnessed growing ecumenical engagement between the University Church and NINS fostered by the shared association with St John Henry Newman. St Mary’s hosted an ecumenical Evensong to mark Newman’s canonization in 2019 and more recently in 2024 a joint conference took place on ‘Newman and Preaching’ to mark the 200th anniversary of the beginning of his preaching ministry in 1824.

This Symposium, Anglican/Catholic Literary Encounters, builds on the success of this collaboration. Scheduled for late September 2027, it will bring scholars together to explore the theme of Anglican and Roman Catholic ‘encounters’ in poetry, fiction and drama in an interdisciplinary way, with contributions from theologians, historians and literary scholars. Polemical encounters are not avoided (for example, the conflict between Charles Kingsley and John Henry Newman through their fiction) but it is also hoped the weight of the Symposium will be on constructive and creative engagement between individuals, such as T.S. Eliot and Thomas Merton or Rowan Williams and Fanny Howe. We invite papers that address ‘encounters’ between contemporaries, such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Rose Macaulay with Ronald Knox, as well as posthumous ‘encounters’ such as the influence of George Herbert on Richard Crashaw or Dante on Christina Rossetti.

The aim of the Symposium, therefore, is to explore ecumenism between these two Christian traditions in a more imaginative and creative – less curated and controlled – way than that constructed by formal commissions and official statements. It will also emphasise the importance of lay voices. The chronology will spread from the sixteenth century to the present day, including Irish, North American, British and other anglophone authors.

The sessions will take place in the Old Library of the University Church, the site of the original library of Oxford University, which seats a maximum of sixty people. We encourage submissions from doctoral students and early-career scholars. There will be no parallel sessions, and as the Symposium subsidized by SMV and NINS, we ask that participants, contributors and attendees alike, attend on the understanding that they will participate in the entire Symposium, culminating in a final plenary/roundtable drawing together themes and theological and ecumenical reflections. The programme will, however, include free time and organized visits to Oxford sites on the Symposium theme as well as a ‘Candlelight Tour’ of the University Church followed by Compline led by the Vicar of St Mary’s, the Revd Canon Dr William Lamb.