The Chair of Christian Thought Lebel Lecture in Christian Ethics

Crafting Souls: Mysticism and Creative Practice
Dr Harri Hudspith rethinks Christian mysticism not as ecstatic experience alone but as creative practice. Through Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Catherine of Bologna, the lecture explores how prayer, reading, and writing “craft” souls and expand embodied ways of knowing — drawing on the inspiring space of the Calgary Public Library as part of this reflection.

“Mysticism” has long been associated with notions of religious experience, altered states of conscious, and experiences beyond rational control. In a Christian context, the term conjures images of Divine union, ecstatic levitations, locutions, and ineffable revelations. Recent scholarship has rightly moved to recognise that “mysticisms” encompass far more than this narrow focus on visionary or unsayable experience. Pre-modern Christian mysticisms are recognised as being entangled with devotional and monastic practice, with actions of prayer, reading, meditation, preaching, and writing that seek to move the soul towards Divine knowledge.There is a parallel here with discussions of contemporary art, where much discourse focuses on the meaning of the art object and the experience of encountering it. There is increasing recognition, however, that for most artists or makers, the experience of making carries far more meaning and knowledge than the objects produced. Scholars of both mysticism and art often draw upon the image of ‘the artist’ or ‘the mystic’ to speak to the nature of the special kinds of knowledge produced in mystical and artistic practices. This lecture takes this comparison one step further: what happens if we think about mysticisms as creative practices in themselves?Through the work of Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Catherine of Bologna, the lecture will re-think mysticisms as practices of crafting or making souls through actions of imagination, reading, prayer, and writing. Drawing on the spectacular space of the Calgary Public Library as a vessel for this re-thinking, we will explore how the relationship between mysticisms and arts practices can allow us to attend to the creativity and labour of their work. If we approach mysticisms as creative practices of crafting souls, how might this allow us to draw on their wisdom to make space for embodied, oral, and experiential knowledge within twenty-first centuries models of knowing and learning?

Bio: Dr Harri Hudspith is an artist and practice-based researcher who uses drawing, writing, installation, and performance to think about histories and questions of language, body, and knowledge. Drawing from queer and post-humanist perspectives, their research explores intersections and tensions between female mysticisms and contemporary ideas of creative practice in relation to embodied knowledge, un/not-knowing, and entanglements with the more-than-human. Currently, they are an Associate Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England, and in 2024 they were a Javier y Marta Villavecchia postdoctoral fellow with the Haas Library at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

The Chair of Christian Thought Lebel Lecture in Christian Ethics is organized in partnership with the Calgary Public Library. If you would like to be added to the Chair of Christian Thought mailing list, please contact Dr Carolyn Muessig, Chair of Christian Thought, University of Calgary [[email protected]]. To watch previous University of Calgary, Chair of Christian Thought lectures, click here.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Calgary Public Library