October 4th, 2022
Brad S. Gregory, a well-known and widely honored historian and Reformation scholar, will give the 70th annual Menno Simons Lectures Oct. 16-17, looking at the Radical Reformation and religious freedom.
Both lectures are at 7 p.m. in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center, with opportunity for audience discussion following each lecture. They are free and open to the public.
Gregory’s overall topic for his two-lecture series is “The Radical Reformation and Religious Freedom: A Historical Retrospective.”
Gregory is Henkels Family College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2003. From 1996-2003, he taught at Stanford University.
He specializes in the history of Christianity in Europe during the Reformation era and on the long-term influence of the Reformation era on the modern world.
Gregory earned his Ph.D. in history at Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He also has two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.
He has received two teaching awards at Stanford and three more at Notre Dame. In 2005, he was named the inaugural winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 award from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States.
Gregory is the author of the award-winning books Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999), his first, and The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012).
His most recent book is Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts that Continue to Shape Our World (Harper, 2017).
The title of Gregory’s Oct. 16 lecture is “A Cherished Solution to a Reformation-Era Problem” and, on Oct. 17, “Some Unintended Consequences and an Uncertain Future.”
The John P. and Carolina Schrag Kaufman family established the Menno Simons Lectureship Endowment to promote research and public lectures by recognized scholars relating to Anabaptist-Mennonite history, thought, life and culture, past and present. Since 1997, the family of William E. and Meta Goering Juhnke has also contributed substantially to the endowment. Both families have their roots in the Moundridge area.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Known for academic excellence, Bethel ranks at #14 in the Washington Monthly list of “Best Bachelor’s Colleges,” and #24 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest,” both for 2022-23. Bethel is the only Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu