Thomas Heffernan, director of the UT Humanities Center and the Kenneth Curry Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, has been invited to present a scholarly lecture at the International Conference on Patristic Studies, to be held at Oxford University in August 2015.
The subject is deification, that is, human beings becoming divine beings as this concept is understood in 2nd and early 3rd century Latin and Greek narratives of the Christian martyrs. The lecture reveals that while the Greek tradition did promote a tradition of Christian deification, the early Latin Christian tradition did not. The lecture will be published in a volume on the subject of human deification.