Dr Rowan Williams announced as keynote speaker for UWTSD’s Religious Experience Research Centre Annual Conference

UWTSD’s Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre has announced that Dr. Rowan Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, will be the keynote speaker at their annual conference, to be held on 9 July 2022. 

Supported by the Alister Hardy Trust and The Learned Society of Wales, this year’s conference is entitled “Mystical Experiences: Past and Present” and will be held at the University’s Cliff Tucker Theatre, Lampeter and streamed live online.

Professor Bettina Schmidt, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the RERC said:

“We’re delighted that Dr Rowan Williams has agreed to be our keynote speaker this year. He will speak about the important mystic Julian of Norwich and will add insight from his own unique perspective to what promises to be a fascinating conference and discussion.

The conference will look at mystical experiences in the past and present, and from different perspectives. In addition to a reflection of medieval mystics the conference will also look at mystical experiences in Sufism."

The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, sponsored by the Alister Hardy Trust, houses an archive with over 6,000 accounts of people from across the world who have had a spiritual or religious experience in church settings as well as in nature.  Founded by Sir Alister Hardy in 1969 at Manchester College, Oxford, the RERC transferred to UWTSD’s Lampeter campus in July 2000.  The Centre’s aim is to study contemporary accounts of religious or spiritual experiences.  Professor Bettina Schmidt, added:

“Fifty years ago - in 1969 - Hardy invited scholars to Oxford to discuss whether a scientific approach to the study of religious and spiritual experience was possible,” Following this first symposium, he founded the Religious Experience Research Centre.  Now, half a century on, academics continue to engage with the study of spiritual and religious experience, albeit with greater urgency in the context of progressive secularisation.” 

Sir Alister Hardy was a renowned Scientist and approached the complex field of religious and spiritual experiences in the same disciplined and scientific manner way as he approached natural science.  Asking people to send him accounts of first-hand experiences with spiritual or religious powers he established the RERC that has since been at the forefront of the academic study of religious experiences.

The Centre’s members’ research interests range from health and spirituality; spiritual apprenticeships; religious notion of body and selfhood; mediumship and possession; cross-cultural approaches to near-death experiences and shamanism.  Their approaches vary from anthropology to religious studies to psychotherapy.

The Centre also publishes an online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal entitled The Journal for the Study for Religious Experience as well as offering a MRes in Religious Experience at UWTSD.

Programme

10 a.m. - Welcome

• Prof Bettina Schmidt, Director of the Religious Experience Research Centre
• Prof Medwin Hughes, Vice Chancellor of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David
• Prof John Harper, Vice Chair of the Alister Hardy Trust

10.20 a.m. - The Alister Hardy Lampeter Lecture

• Prof Rowan Williams, University of Cambridge
  The Soul and the Trinity in Julian of Norwich with Q&A session

11.40 a.m.

• Prof Lisa Isherwood, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
  Margery Kempe: God's wild housewife!

12.30 – 2.00 p.m.- LUNCH BREAK

2.00 – 4.30 p.m.

• Prof Ron Geaves, Cardiff University
  The “Inmost Heart” of Islam
• Prof Marta Helena de Freitas, Catholic University of Brasilia – UCB
  Brazilian psychotherapists' narratives about mystical experiences in clinical contexts
• Prof Bettina Schmidt, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
  Rudolf Otto and a reflection on mystical experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic

REGISTER for the Sir Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre conference

For further information please visit: 

https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/library/alister-hardy-religious-experience-research-centre/events/ 

Further Information

For more information please contact Arwel Lloyd, Principal PR and Communications Officer, on 07384 467076 / arwel.lloyd@uwtsd.ac.uk