Ushaw Lecture: Hensley Henson and the "National" Church of England in the Early Twentieth Century

A hybrid lecture - all welcome! If you plan to attend, either in person or online, please register at https://centreforcatholicstudies.eventbrite.com. 

Programme for the evening (all at Ushaw)

17.30 Drinks reception in the Refectory

18.00 Lecture in the Exhibition Hall

19.15 Close
 

Getting there

If you don’t have your own transport and would like help to travel between Durham City and Ushaw, please register by 10am on Thursday 28 April and selecting the appropriate ticket type. The transport details are as follows:

Outward journey: Depart from Durham Students' Union, New Elvet, at 5pm
Return journey: Depart from main entrance of Ushaw at 7.30pm, returning to Durham Students' Union with a stop at Sutton Street

For directions, please see the Ushaw website.

About the lecture

The subject of this lecture is Herbert Hensley Henson, bishop of Durham, 1920 to 1939, and one of the most outstanding figures in the Church of England during the first four decades of the twentieth century. A trenchant controversialist, he also kept a Journal that rivalled that of Pepys in the insight it provides into the great events and characters of the leading figures of the day, and in its record of conversations in high places. The lecture focuses especially on his ardent defence of the Church as a national institution, a view that informed his support for establishment before the Prayer Book crisis of 1927-8 and for disestablishment afterwards. What was his idea of the 'national Church', and what challenges did it face during his life and after his death?

About the speaker

Julia Stapleton is Professor of Political Thought at Durham University, in the School of Government and International Affairs. She has been the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, 'Church, State, and Nation: the Journals of Herbert Hensley Henson, 1900-39', from 2017 to 2022. The area of her research is political thought and intellectual life in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the editor of G.K. Chesterton at the Daily News: literature, liberalism, and revolution, 1901-13 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873; Oxford University Press, 2017).

About the Ushaw Lecture Series

The Ushaw Lecture Series celebrates the cultural and research significance of the remarkable bibliographical, archival and material-cultural collections of the Durham Residential Research Library, and the wider history of which they are expressions. The lectures cover music, art, drama, poetry and literature, architecture, material-culture, politics, science and theology.