Events

You’re invited to Regent's 2023 Evening Public Lecture series! Join us in the chapel or tune in online to explore theology, culture, and much more with this year’s summer faculty.

To watch this and other Evening Public Lectures online, visit rgnt.net/live.

About the Lecture

The life of faith is inevitably marked by times of affliction and hardship. Puritan writers in particular were familiar with immense spiritual and physical affliction, and their devotional literature centres on encouragement meant to guide congregations in times of deep sorrow. For the Puritans, however, hardship was not only an experience to be endured but also an important step on the path toward godliness, through which God reveals his grace and sovereignty. When viewed through this hopeful lens, affliction is “sanctified,” leading us to a deeper communion with God. In this lecture, Puritan scholar Adrea Johnson will show how Puritan devotional literature by authors such as John Bunyan and Ann Bradstreet can help us navigate hardship with the encouraging perspective of sanctified affliction.

About the Speaker

Dr. Adrea Johnson is the Puritan Project Assistant at Regent College and works with Allison Library’s Rare Books Collection. She is also an instructor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. She earned her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Alberta, where she specialized in women’s religious writing of the long nineteenth century. She also holds an MA in Theological Studies from Regent College. Her ongoing research examines the work of Susannah Spurgeon, intersecting with seventeenth-century Puritanism and the writing of John Bunyan. Her article on the hymnologist John Mason Neale appeared in Crux: A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion. She is co-editor, with Holly Faith Nelson, of Negotiating Faith and Feminism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Women’s Lives and Works (forthcoming).

Dr. Johnson is teaching Devotional Poetry: John Donne, George Herbert, and Anne Bradstreet from July 3 to 7 as part of Regent’s 2023 Summer Programs.

How to Attend

Join us in Regent’s chapel, or tune in via livestream. A video recording will be available online for a limited time after the event.