Lower than the Angels by Rev. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch

The lecture starts at 6.00 pm with registration from 5.30 pm.

Religion and sex are inextricably tangled in politics across the modern world, often in toxic ways, and the long history of that tangle in the Christian world has been fatally simplified and misunderstood. Diarmaid MacCulloch, drawing on his recent book Lower than the Angels, seeks to set up ways of understanding the past that may help us calm present-day fears.

Biography

Diarmaid MacCulloch was brought up in Wetherden (Suffolk) 1956-72; studying 1969-78 at Churchill College, Cambridge. President of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 2011-2019, he remains on the Council of the Suffolk Records Society. He is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford and of Campion Hall, Oxford. A prize-winning author and TV presenter, his History of Christianity: the first three thousand years appeared in 2009 and won the Cundill Prize, then the world’s largest prize for history, in 2010. Among other books, Thomas Cromwell: a Life was published in 2018 and Lower than the Angels: a History of Sex and Christianity in 2024. Knighted in the UK New Year’s Honours List of 2012; in 2019 the University of Tübingen awarded him the Leopold Lucas Prize, previous recipients including the President of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Dalai Lama.