SEPTEMBER 26, 2019
The 2019 De Lamar Jensen lecture will be presented by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 11:00 AM in 2107, Jesse Knight Building. This lecture is free and open to the public.
Wiesner-Hanks’ lecture will discuss how the voyages of Columbus and the religious changes of the Reformation that are often seen as ushering in the modern world, but they are usually examined separately. Her lecture will bring them together, discussing religious changes around the world in the sixteenth century, some of which occurred because of the interactions between cultures that resulted from the voyages of discovery, but many of which grew out of movements of reform within various religious traditions as highly-educated thinkers and ordinary people changed religious beliefs and practices and sought to redefine the relationship between the divine and human. These will include the creation of Sikhism by Guru Nanak, reforms in Confucianism, the spread of Kaballah, Shi’ite Islam in the Safavid Empire, among others. Seeing the Reformation with the context of religious transformations across the globe does not diminish its importance, but allows us to understand it in a new way.
The annual De Lamar Jensen lecture is presented by the Department of History in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, and was established to honor Jensen, who joined the BYU history faculty in 1957.
