Online ticket sales have ended. You may purchase a ticket at the door for $30 that does not include brunch. See schedule below.
Tickets had to have been purchased by 9/18 for inclusion in the catered brunch.
C.S. Lewis scholar and author of Planet Narnia Michael Ward returns to the Cathedral with a visual presentation from his latest book, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.”
Dr. Ward’s book reveals Lewis’s most acclaimed work, The Abolition of Man, which holds the philosophical framework for Lewis’s other works. Not an explicitly theological book, After Humanity “confirms beyond doubt Lewis’s stature as a genuine public intellectual for our own day as well as his,” according to former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
“The Abolition of Man–a suitably cataclysmic phrase for this war-time oration–became the overarching title for the[se] lectures when they were published in book form in late 1943,” Dr Ward writes. “Literary critic Alan Jacobs ranks it as ‘the most profound of Lewis’s cultural critiques’…… Political scientist Francis Fukuyama and novelist-environmentalist Wendell Berry have found its analysis compelling and quoted it in support of their own thinking.”
Through this work, Lewis sought to establish a baseline for what it means to be human using a wide range of metaphors and references. “Like a poet, he keeps things particular, dramatic, and easily picturable,” writes Dr. Ward, who, on the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, London.
A raffle of the book will be held for all who fill out a card.
Schedule
Registration and brunch is available starting at 9:30AM
10 AM talk: “The Continuing Relevance of The Abolition of Man”
11-11:30 break with refreshments
11:30 talk: “The Challenging Implications of The Abolition of Man”
Michael Ward’s visit is a joint presentation of Albany’s two cathedrals: The Cathedral of All Saints and the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.
Michael Ward is Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas. He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press), co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis and presenter of the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis's death Dr Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, in London. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement, England’s premier literary journal, as ‘the foremost living Lewis scholar’. Michael’s chief claim to fame, however, is that he handed a pair of X-ray spectacles to 007 in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.