"Creation and Creativity: Rock” - Graham Ward , Taylor Lecture II

Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford’s Faculty of Theology and Religion, presents the Yale Divinity School’s Taylor Lectures Feb. 7-9. His three-part lecture series is titled “Elemental Beauty: Spiritual Formation.”

Graham Ward is a scholar of theology, philosophy, and cultural studies with particular interest in the nature of religion and its relationship to anthropology, sociology, politics, gender theory, and contemporary science. He is currently pursuing on a three-volume work on a culturally engaged systematic theology. His published works include God and Beauty (Trinity Press International, 2003); Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (CUP, 2004); Christ and Culture (Blackwell, 2005), and Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t (I.B. Tauri, 2014.) His new book Another Kind of Normal: Ethical Life II is being released this month by Oxford.

Ward draws from his current project for his YDS Taylor Lectures, exploring the following lines of thought: Humans are planetary creatures, he notes, evolved from rock, sea, sunlight, and air, who do not simply adapt to our environments but are caught up within the creative processes that sustain life. “Our creativity composes an art of living,” Ward explains. “We cultivate because we are cultivated. Through this deep structure of lived experience, a pedagogy of grace operates: the Uncreated Creator within creation. God gardens and all things are shaped and shape.”

The three lectures are as follows:
Lecture 1 (Feb. 7): “Creation and the Operation of Grace”
Lecture 2 (Feb. 8): “Creation and Creativity: Rock”
Lecture 3 (Feb. 9): “Creation and Creativity: Air and Soultime”

The Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectureship in Theology was created in 1902 by a gift from Rebecca Taylor Hatch of Brooklyn, N.Y., in memory of her father, who was Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology from 1822 to 1858. A series of lectures on some theme in theology is given every second year, alternating with the Shaffer Lecture series.