The Laing Lectures began at Regent College in 1999 in cooperation with Roger and Carol Laing and in honour of their father, William John Laing. The purpose of the lectures is to encourage persons recognized for scholarship, wisdom, and creativity to undertake serious thought and original writing on an issue of significance for the Christian church and to promote the sharing of such thoughts through a series of public lectures.
The material presented by Laing Lecturers is intended to move beyond an analysis of historic and current concerns to provide proposals for alternative action for the Christian church. In doing so, lecturers are invited to explore in an interdisciplinary way the relationship between Christianity and culture, and to suggest ways in which that relationship might lead to greater flourishing of the church, the larger human household, and the whole community of creation.
Upcoming Laing Lectures
God and Creation: An Urgent Teaching for Today
February 4–6, 2025
Featured Speaker: Janet Martin Soskice
Lecture 1: Have We Forgotten God, the Creator?
Lecture 2: Creation and the God Who Speaks
Lecture 3: Christ and Creation: What Is It to Be Creatures Today?
Janet Martin Soskice was born Vancouver and brought up in the West Kootenays. After a BA at Cornell University, she studied at Regent in 1973–74, before doing an MA in Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield followed by a doctorate in philosophy of religion at Oxford University. After teaching at an Anglican Theological College at Oxford for four years, she was appointed to a lectureship at Cambridge University where she taught for over 30 years and was Professor of Philosophical Theology. On retiring from Cambridge, she accepted a Research Professorship at Duke University Divinity School, where she now teaches.
Her works include Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, 1985), The Kindness of God (Oxford 2008), and Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (Cambridge 2023). She has also written Sisters of Sinai (Knopf, NY, 2009), the true story of Agnes and Margaret Smith, valiant Presbyterian twin sisters who made many trips to the Sinai desert in the 19th century in quest of ancient manuscripts of the Bible.
Janet is really interested in God.
Past Laing Lectures
CHRISTIAN RACIAL RECONCILIATION
March 5-7, 2024
Featured Speaker: George Yancey
Lecture 1: Institutional Racism Past and Present
Lecture 2: Why the Current Solutions Aren't Enough
Lecture 3: Theology and Sociology of Conversation
Dr. George Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at Baylor University and the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, atheists, cultural progressives, academic bias, and anti-Christian hostility.
Neuroscience and the Beauty, Trauma & Renewal of All Things
March 8-9, 2023
Featured Speaker: Curt Thompson MD
Curt Thompson MD connects our intrinsic desire to be known with the need to tell truer stories about ourselves—showing us how to form deep relationships, discover meaning, and live integrated and creative lives.
With a keen instinct for making complex topics relatable, Dr. Thompson integrates the science of interpersonal neurobiology with Christian anthropology to help us re-establish and deepen our relationships—leading to healthier, more meaningful lives. By combining his deep insights into how brain function affects our connections with one another with practical methods for application, he helps us break free from old patterns that no longer serve us to start us on the journey toward purposeful living.
Most Entanglings: The Trinity as the Root of All Being
October 26, 2022 at 12:30 pm (Pacific Time)
Featured Speaker: John Milbank
John Milbank is an Anglican theologian, philosopher, and poet. He is a co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, which traces its origins to his seminal work, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, published in 1991. Radical Orthodoxy calls for a hopeful and constructive response to the pervasive secularism of the modern era. Rather than despair at the modern downfall of truth, Radical Orthodoxy sees within this downfall a supreme opportunity to reclaim the world by situating it again within a theological frame. Over the past decades, Milbank's theological work has integrated numerous disciplines, including political philosophy, metaphysics, and aesthetics. He has published major works on Aquinas, Henri de Lubac, and Giambattista Vico, amongst others. Milbank is President of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at University of Nottingham.
Imagining the Kingdom: Parable, Poetry & Gospel
April 9-11, 2019
Featured Speaker: Malcolm Guite
From the moment he proclaims the Kingdom of God, Jesus appeals to our imaginations. He makes this appeal through parable, through paradox, and through the enigmatic and beautiful signs he gave in his miracles. In the gift of faith, and in Christ himself, we glimpse more than we can yet understand: Our imagination apprehends more than our reason comprehends. This is not to say that the gospel is in any way “imaginary” in the dismissive sense of “unreal” or “untrue.” On the contrary, what Christ speaks is so real and true that we need every faculty, including imagination, to apprehend it. In an age of linear, one-level readings, we need to recover confidence in the baptised imagination as a truth-bearing faculty.
Theological Existence Today
March 20–22, 2018
Featured Speaker: Stanley Hauerwas
Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity & Law at Duke Divinity School, is one of America’s most influential and respected public intellectuals. He has a reputation for speaking honestly and incisively into some of our time’s most pressing issues. His numerous publications have advocated for nonviolence within warring societies and the pressing need for virtuous Christian communities. Recent works such as War and the American Difference (2011) have brought him to the forefront of public discourse regarding the relationship between politics and faith. In 2001, Time magazine named him “America’s Best Theologian.” He famously responded that “‘Best’ is not a theological category.”
Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope & Love
Date: February 8–10, 2017
Featured Speaker: Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson was born and raised in Idaho, where her family has lived for several generations. She received a BA from Brown University in 1966 and a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in 1977. Housekeeping, her first novel, was published in 1981 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the American Academy and Institute's Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award. Mother Country, an examination of Great Britain's role in radioactive environmental pollution, was published in 1989. Dr. Robinson published the Pullitzer-Prize-winning Gilead in 2004, Home in 2008, and Lila in 2014. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her family.
"God, the Brain, and Paradox"
Date: March 9–10, 2016
Featured Speaker: Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist came to medicine from a background in the humanities, writing about issues in literature and philosophy. He trained in medicine because of an interest in the mind-body problem and practised in psychiatry and researched in neuropsychology, including neuroimaging. He seeks to understand the mind and the brain by seeing them in the broadest possible context—that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise. His most recent book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, explores the nature of the brain's two hemispheres, their relationship to one another, and their link to the creation of our consciousness and our culture. He is working on books about creativity and mental illness and the current plight of the humanities, and is one day hoping to complete a short book of reflections on spiritual experience.
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"Settling in to a Decadent Decline"
Date: Oct 22–23, 2014
Featured Speaker: Ross Douthat
Five years ago, our civilization experienced a massive economic crisis, but our current political, intellectual, and social climate has changed much less than one might expect. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat states, “This is not the stability of a flourishing, resilient society. It’s the peace of a decadent one.” Join him at the 2014 Laing Lectures to learn what decadence means, why it’s so dangerous, and how we might escape it.
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"Christian Theology as a Guide for the Emotions"
Date: February 19–20, 2014
Featured Speaker: Dr. Ellen T. Charry
Regent College is pleased to welcome Dr. Ellen T. Charry, the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, as the speaker for the 2013-14 Laing Lectures. For Dr. Charry, theology is not a theoretical enterprise. It is an eminently practical and religious undertaking. "Theology is about knowing and growing in the love of God and our neighbor so that we flourish in the destiny that God has in mind for us," she once wrote. A quick examination of her writing confirms her passion for human flourishing. Whether in the classroom at Princeton or the pages of her publications, she pursues answers to the question of how Christian beliefs and practices can nurture people intellectually, morally, and psychologically in the course of everyday life and work. She will continue to pursue this question at the Laing Lectures as she explores the interface between Christian doctrine and emotional formation.
"FROM DOCTRINE TO DOCTRINES: THE HOLLOWING OUT OF THE CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS"
Date: October 25–26, 2012
Featured Speaker: Rex Murphy
Has modern secular thought assumed the authority and deference of “doctrine,” supplanting traditional faith? Rex Murphy thinks so. Over the course of three lectures, Mr. Murphy offered an account of how the Christian understanding of life was pushed back, was attacked by, and in some cases surrendered itself to purely secular imperatives. He remarked on the great voids left by this retreat, and how in some cases secular understandings, such as the prevailing socio-political thought of many Western nations, have occupied the empty terrain and even taken on the character once owned only by religious belief—but without its philosophical foundations. Finally, Mr. Murphy examined two cases that illustrate this perspective: the advance of environmentalism as an ersatz-religion, and the phenomenon of political correctness, and its heavy-handed corrections, which amounts to another form of orthodoxy.
Previous Laing Lecturers: Neil Postman (2000), Charles Taylor (2001), Peter Berger (2002), Margaret Visser (2004), Miroslav Volf (2006), Nicholas Wolterstorff (2007), Walter Brueggemann (2008), Susan Wise Bauer (2010), Albert Borgmann (2011).
