Alumnus returns for special lecture

Nipissing University welcomes alumnus Dr. Michael Agnew back to campus for a special lecture on Monday, January 30, 5 – 6:20 p.m. in room A137. Dr. Agnew graduated from Nipissing in 2008 with an honours Bachelor of Arts in Religion and a minor in History. He has since completed his PhD in Religious Studies from McMaster University.

The lecture, titled, “This is Where Heaven Touched Earth!”: Pilgrimage and Authenticity at Lourdes, is part of Nipissing’s first-year Religions and Cultures course, Pilgrimage.

The lecture is free of charge and all are welcome to attend.

Here’s an abstract about Dr. Agnew’s lecture:

Based on fieldwork conducted with pilgrims travelling from the United Kingdom to the Catholic shrine of Lourdes in southwestern France, this lecture examines the experience of contemporary pilgrims to Lourdes and the motivations that inspire them to visit the famous healing shrine. Believed by Catholics to be the location where a teenage girl witnessed a series of visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858, the pilgrimage site now attracts an estimated six million visitors each year from a diverse range of geographical, social, and religious departure points.

From volunteer caregivers striving to “be as Christ” through their assistance to sick pilgrims, to shoppers purchasing glow-in-the-dark statues of the Virgin Mary from a vending machine, this lecture will discuss a wide range of pilgrim experiences. While such experiences underscore the inherently multivalent nature of pilgrimage, this lecture will show how the trope of authenticity recurs frequently in the narratives and discourse of pilgrims who undertake the journey to Lourdes. Experiences described by pilgrims as “authentic” are critical in informing their engagement with the geography of the shrine and with fellow pilgrims, and often inspire return visits to Lourdes in subsequent years. This lecture will suggest that from the perspective of pilgrims, Lourdes is often understood as a “thin space” which affords the authentic possibility of transcendence, of collapsing the boundaries between self and other, human and divine.