Prof Michael Barnes SJ: ‘Reading the Mystery’: an Ignatian pilgrimage

Keynote given as part of the Heythrop Summer Conference, 'Let Him Easter in Us', 7th July 2018.
This lecture offers some reflections on the Heythrop legacy, the Heythrop approach to doing philosophy and theology. Using the metaphor of pilgrimage we will visit a variety of places in company with a number of ‘Heythrop saints’. We will journey from St Beuno’s where Hopkins wrote the Wreck, to Heythrop Oxon where Lonergan first started pondering ‘method’, to Cavendish Square where Copleston and Murray, Hughes and Mahoney, established Heythrop’s reputation for lively teaching and solid scholarship, and finally to Kensington Square where a new generation of Jesuits and other Religious, Catholic priests and lay-people from different traditions, forged a remarkable partnership based on Ignatian spirituality and a commitment to the work of the intellectual imagination. If there is a theme that underpins the Heythrop legacy, it is a style of pedagogy, a way of teaching and learning - or, more exactly, a way of being taught by or becoming learned in God’s Spirit.
Professor Michael Barnes is a distinguished theologian of interreligious relations. He is the doyen of Heythrop teachers.