Monday 27 March | University Church | 7.30pm - 9.00pm
Where do you call home? Turn on the television and you are bombarded with programmes on finding, designing, building, buying, restoring or furnishing your home. Meanwhile, the earth is radically polluted and millions of people worldwide are refugees. What is “home” in Christian theology and how might a theology of home point to a way out of the twin poles of consumerism and homelessness in the contemporary west? How might our theological understanding of “home” challenge the political appropriations of ‘home’ in current expressions of nationalism? Acknowledging the importance of the earth as home, and the need for people to have a specific place to call home, this lecture draws on deeper layers of the Christian tradition to articulate a theology of home that is more inclusive - and able to resist the violent implications of exclusive nationalism.
Professor Siobhán Garrigan is the Loyola Chair of Theology at Trinity College Dublin, where she is also Head of the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies. A feminist, ecumenical theologian with particular expertise in religious ritual, her last book was The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism and her next will be A Theology of Home in a Time of Homelessness. She is also the presenter of the weekly radio programme The Leap of Faith on RTÉ.
This lecture is part of the conference ‘Political Theologies after Christendom’, 27-29 March 2023, hosted by the Protestant Political Thought project (PI Dr Marietta van der Tol, Blavatnik School of Government)