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June 4,
2007 
VOL.
45, NO. 11Oakland,
CA
Prolific spiritual
writer to lecture
at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga
Spiritual
writer Rosemary Luling Haughton will deliver a lecture at 7:30 p.m. June
11 at Saint Mary’s College Chapel in Moraga. Haughton, the author
of 35 books, is coming to the Bay Area as guest speaker for the 2007 Cummins
Lecture on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. The annual lecture is
sponsored by the Bishop John S. Cummins Institute for Catholic Thought,
Culture and Action.
Haughton’s talk, which will be reflections on her own faith life,
is free and open to the public.
Haughton, 80, is associate director at Wellspring House, a non-profit
organization she and a small group of parishioners from Peabody, Mass.
helped start 25 years ago. Originally established as a shelter for battered
women, it is now a multi-faceted center for education, ecologically sustainable
economic development, and low-cost housing.
Born in Chelsea near London in 1927 to a Jewish-English mother (novelist
Sylvia Thompson) and an American father, Haughton became a Catholic in
her teens.
When she was 21, she married Algernon Haughton – also the child
of English and American parents and a convert to Catholicism. He was a
professor at the Benedictine Ampleforth College in Yorkshire.
For the next 25 years, Haughton devoted herself to her growing family
– 10 children and two foster children -- and to her writing. She
began writing, first for children, then for adults on religious and theological
subjects.
“At the same time she did public ministry because being and doing
were the hallmark of her faith,” Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister
writes in the foreword to “Gifts in the Ruins,” a book Haughton
wrote in 2004.
At the root of Haughton’s theology is the concept of hospitality,
which she sees as an interdependent way of being with one another. In
her 1997 book “Images for Change,” published by Paulist Press,
she calls for the re–creation of society as the generous sharing
of the world’s resources in ways that are just, sustainable and
humanly satisfying. Those are the best solutions to bring about the transformation
of society, she maintains.
Haughton has received five honorary degrees including one from Notre Dame
University and many other awards.
In preparation for the Haughton lecture, Saint Mary’s College invited
parishes to organize discussion groups around one of her books. An ongoing
book group at the Catholic Parish of Christ the Light in Oakland is reading
“Gifts in the Ruins.” Two faith sharing groups at St. Monica
Parish in Moraga are also reading “Gifts.”
