Abbeys are places of intense prayer and the continual worship of God. They are also places of intense scholarship and the creation and preservation of culture. For many centuries, intellectual investigation, beauty, art, and scholarship have all found a cradle and a home in our Order's houses.
Here at St. Michael's Abbey we continue this noble tradition, and our Chadwick Special Collections Library is a special locus of this intellectual and cultural monastic work. In it, we house two very important special collections - that of Sir Henry Chadwick, the great English academic, church historian, theologian, and Church of England priest; and that of Thomas C. Oden, the American Methodist theologian and religious author, who worked notably on the Fathers of the Church.
To celebrate these special collections and to foster the continued scholarship that is so much a part of our monastic life, we are inaugurating an academic lecture series: the Chadwick-Oden Lecture Series. The inaugural Chadwick-Oden Lectures will be here at the abbey on Saturday January 21, 2023.
Our inaugural lecturer is none other than Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, the famous Welsh Anglican Bishop, theologian, and poet. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012.
Lord Williams will be delivering two lectures on topics pertinent to a new book he is writing on the great St. Augustine of Hippo.
