Dr Rowan Williams: ‘R.S. Thomas, Christianity and Buddhism’

Dr Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and former Archbishop of Canterbury, will visit Bangor University on Wednesday 11 December to deliver a public lecture entitled ‘R.S. Thomas, Christianity and Buddhism’.

Arranged in conjunction with the University’s R.S. Thomas Research Centre, Dr Williams’s address is the 2013 Annual Archives & Special Collections Lecture, and is free and open to all. It will be held in the University’s Main Arts Lecture Theatre at 5:30pm.  

2013 is the centenary of the birth of R.S. Thomas (1913–2000). A major twentieth-century poet, Thomas’s life was a complex one: a fierce advocate of the Welsh language and its culture, he could write poetry only in English, his first language. He served for some 40 years as a priest in the Church in Wales, and yet his religious thinking was frequently unorthodox.

Dr Jason Walford Davies, Senior Lecturer in the School of Welsh and one of the R.S. Thomas Research Centre’s Co-Directors, comments: ‘It is a great pleasure to be able to welcome Dr Rowan Williams to Bangor. He is one of our major religious thinkers and is himself, of course, a distinguished poet. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate figure to discuss the work of Wales’s finest modern religious poet’.

Publication date: 2 December 2013