Diarmaid MacCulloch
Thursday 17th October
St Cuthbert's Church, 5 Lothian Rd, Edinburgh EH1 2EP
7pm
7.30pm
Few matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex and religion. Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. This October, join us as we welcome bestselling historian Diarmaid MacCulloch to Edinburgh to hear all about his latest Lower than the Angels, a major new assessment of one of the most controversial topics in history.
Lower than the Angels
In Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch asks why questions around love and sex have pushed many in today’s Christian Churches into anxiety, fear and rage. The rate of change over the last half century in attitudes to sexual matters and norms is unprecedented. While long-standing negative attitudes to illegitimacy, for example, have been widely discarded, anxieties about gender or same-sex relationships are more prominent now than at any time in the Church’s history.
In the New Testament Jesus condemned hypocrisy and greed; but was silent about homosexuality and was notably forgiving of sexual sin. As MacCulloch shows, thereafter Christian opinions, neuroses and obsessions around questions of sex, marriage and gender were formed among a surprisingly small number of male theologians and then hardened into doctrine.
Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges across two thousand years of history around the globe to survey Christian attitudes to love, and what human beings do about it. He chronicles how such variables as personal belief, political ambitions, male perspectives on women and the tendency of believers to treat metaphor as fact, have often driven Churches into most un-angelic behaviour. Yet, this profound, wise history also shows that even the most entrenched of attitudes can be softened by humanity and tolerance.
About Diarmaid MacCulloch
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (2004) won the Wolfson Prize and the British Academy Prize. A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC television series, was awarded the Cundill and Hessel-Tiltman Prizes. He was knighted in 2012 and was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2022.