In September, Seminary of the Southwest’s Dean of the Chapel and Duncalf-Villavoso Professor of Church History, the Rev. Benjamin King, Ph.D., made two meaningful appearances at Oxford University in the U.K. King is also currently serving as Interim Academic Dean at Southwest.
First, as an internationally recognized expert on John Henry Newman, the Rev. King was invited to give a keynote lecture at a conference celebrating the bicentennial of Newman’s first sermon given in 1824. Although Newman is now a Catholic saint, he began his ministry as an Anglican priest in Oxford and King’s lecture focused on his Anglican sermons.
The conference was attended by scholars from across Europe and North America; the other two keynote lectures came from professors at Cambridge University and Duquesne University.
“The invitation for Dr. King to lecture and preach in Oxford was a great honor to him (and by extension to us!),” said Dr. Scott Bader-Saye, dean and president. “Dr. King’s work on John Henry Newman is highly regarded in both the academy and the church, and it opens onto his wider research on the Oxford Movement which is the focus of his groundbreaking new book, The Oxford Movement and the People of God: Enslavement, Establishment, and Empire.”
Separately, King was also invited to preach at the Sunday Eucharist of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, where Oxford University began in the twelfth century and where Newman was Vicar in the nineteenth century. You can watch his sermon here.
“It was amazing to preach on Sunday in the same pulpit where Newman had delivered the very sermons on which I was lecturing at the conference,” said King. “I got a new understanding of the subject of so much of my research by standing where he stood.”
