July 20, 2018
Presenter: Francine Cardman
Mary Magdalene has occupied a significant place in Christian imagination from the time of the New Testament. This celebration of the feast day of St. Mary of Magdala begins with Mass, followed by lunch and a lecture. This lecture explores key images of Mary Magdalene over the centuries, the contexts in which they appear, and the cultural currents to which they respond. According to the needs of their times, successive generations placed her in the company of or conflated her with other Marys in the Gospels, with the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet, and even with the adulterous woman. In the twentieth century, newly discovered texts and novelistic theories saw in her Jesus’s companion or wife. But through it all, Mary remained the preacher of Jesus’s resurrection and “Apostle to the Apostles”: perhaps the image most needed in the Church of the twenty-first century.
Sponsored by the School of Theology and Ministry
Francine Cardman, STM associate professor of historical theology and Church history