Woodbrooke announces 2025 Swarthmore lecturer
Emily Provance will give the 2025 Swarthmore Lecture
Woodbrooke has announced that Emily Provance will give the 2025 Swarthmore Lecture. The lecture will focus on the meaning of Quaker community, and how community is integral to Quaker theology and spiritual life.
A member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York Yearly Meeting, Emily Provance is a recorded minister and an associate of Good News Associates, a Christian, nonprofit, ministry organisation.
Sarah Donaldson, clerk of the Swarthmore Lecture Committee, said: ‘Emily’s rich and varied ministry means that she is well placed to explore questions around our life as Quaker communities and the Quaker testimony to community. The Committee hopes that the lecture will encourage Friends to reflect on and acknowledge our differences and to find points of unity, in both a local and global context. The wide range of Quaker and other communities that Emily has worked with, together with her knowledge and experience of different Quaker traditions, mean that she is particularly able to help Friends to engage with this subject. She has a gift for harnessing the power of stories to communicate, as well as challenging people to think. We look forward to her sharing her ministry through the lecture.’
As a full-time travelling Friend, Emily works with Quakers around the world and across the full spectrum of theological diversity. Woodbrooke said that, in her lecture, ‘Emily will engage with the challenge of how people can live and cooperate in community, especially when those communities are not ones that we have chosen’.
The lecture will take place as part of Britain Yearly Meeting 2025 (from 23 to 26 May).
