Year for Priests Lecture: Rupture vs. Continuity: Cardinal Newman, Vatican II and the Church today

7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Bonfils Hall, John Paul II Center campus

1300 S. Steele St., Denver

Free and open to the public

Father Ian Ker, a Catholic priest, Oxford scholar and prominent biographer of Cardinal John Henry Newman, will offer a "Newman-esque" interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. Rev. Ker will discuss, from the perspective of Newman’s theological outlook, competing interpretations of the Council, comparing those who see it as a rupture with the Church’s past, against those who see it in continuity with the Church’s 2000+year history.

Biography: Rev. Ian Ker is senior research fellow in theology at St. Benet's Hall, Oxford and has taught both English literature and theology at universities in Britain and the United States. He has authored and edited more than 20 books on Cardinal Newman, including the Oxford Critical Edition of “The Idea of a University.”

His two most recent books are “The Catholic Revival in English literature 1845-1961” and “Mere Catholicism.” His biography of Newman, originally published in 1988, was reissued by Oxford University Press in 2009. He has also recently completed the first full-length intellectual and literary biography of G. K. Chesterton.