Brad S. Gregory Delivered Annual Surtz Lecture on Oct 22

Brad S. Gregory will deliver Loyola University Chicago's annual Edward Surtz Lecture on Tuesday, October 22nd, at 7:30 p.m. in Piper Hall, Lake Shore Campus.  His talk is entitled: "Buying In: The Reformation Era and the Makings of Modern Consumerism." The lecture is free and open to the public.

Brad S. Gregory is Professor of History and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he has recently been named the Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.  From 1996-2003 he taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001.  Professor Gregory was the recipient of two teaching awards at Stanford and has received three more at Notre Dame. Before teaching at Stanford, he 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 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Professor Gregory 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. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards. In 2005, he was named the winner of the first annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, a $50,000 award given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States.  

Professor Gregory's most recent book is entitled The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012).

He is currently working on a history of conceptions of human nature from the Middle Ages to the present, the working title of which is “Embodied Souls and Their Rivals.”

Listen to Professor Gregory discuss The Unintended Reformation .

Watch Professor Gregory speak on The Unintended Reformation with responses by Professors Mark A. Noll (University of Notre Dame) and Rachel Fulton Brown (University of Chicago).

Inaugurated in 1976, this series of annual lectures honors the memory of Fr. Edward L. Surtz, S. J. (1909-1973), one of Loyola Chicago's most distinguished teachers and scholars.  Fr. Surtz was a professor of English and, for a time, chair of the department. Throughout his twenty-five years of academic service at Loyola, he exemplified the highest standards of scholarship.  

He received his doctorate from Harvard University, and over the years was awarded fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. He was the author of a number of books and articles on Thomas More and other Renaissance humanists, and co-edited the Yale edition of More's Complete Works. Fr. Surtz was not just an eminent scholar; he was also a beloved teacher, and his accidental death in 1973 was a great loss to his students, to Loyola, and to the profession.  

The Edward Surtz lectures were founded as a testimonial to Fr. Surtz's commitment to the preservation of the best in our culture and our lives.  These lectures are meant to continue and encourage the tradition of Christian humanism and scholarship so well exemplified in his life and work.