Christian Martyrdom in the Reformation Era: Reflections on Salvation at Stake (1999) after Twenty-Five Years
Brad GregoryUniversity of Notre Dame
5:00 p.m. Mass.
Lecture & reception to follow
Cosponsored by the Bollandist Society, St. Ignatius College Prep. Supported by the Fr. Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., Memorial Fund for Jesuit Scholarship at Lumen Christi.
Free and open to the public. Registration required. For questions, please contact Irini de Saint Sernin at irinidesaintsernin05@gmail.com
In Reformation Europe, several thousand Christian men and women were executed for their religious beliefs. Brad Gregory told their stories and analyzed the implications in Salvation at Stake, his ground-breaking 1999 book comparing how Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist martyrs understood themselves. His book has been acclaimed widely and has shaped how many historians now write about religious belief and practice. In this lecture, Prof. Gregory will reflect on the themes of his research on Christian martyrdom, especially in light of more recent developments that point to why the study of history and martyrdom continue to be relevant today.
Brad Gregory is a historian of Western Europe in the Reformation era whose scholarship has analyzed the effects of early modern religious disagreement and religio-political conflict, not only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also in the long-term shaping of Western modernity down to the present. In recent years the scope of his work has further expanded and takes the Anthropocene as its point of departure, while retaining an emphasis on the assumptions, ambitions, practices, and institutions of premodern Western Europeans that antedated the Industrial Revolution while fostering the anthropogenic trajectories that led our planet out of the Holocene. He is currently at work on a major project about the relationship between Western Christianity and the long-term formation of our current global environmental realities, the working title of which is The Way of the World: Power, Wealth, and Civilization from the Last Ice Age to the Anthropocene.
