Why the World?

In June 2025, Wayfare editor Rachael Johnson and Mark Wrathall co-hosted an interdisciplinary conference at Oxford University on materiality, embodiment and religion. Caroline Walker Bynum, a renowned historian of medieval material and religious culture, delivered one of the keynote addresses— a gorgeous, insightful and provocative comparison of the writings of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich and contemporary American ecological writer Annie Dillard, relating to questions of suffering, love, redemption, and creation. The Anglican Theological Review recently published her remarks and has generously granted Wayfare readers access to the full-length text for a limited time.

[...I begin my talk today by considering] how concepts of and assumptions about not only objects of devotion but materiality more generally underlie and permeate the writings of two of my favorite mystics: Julian of Norwich, an anchoress associated with the church of St. Julian in Norwich, England, who lived circa 1342–1416, and the prolific twentieth-century writer, Annie Dillard, whose Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. These two case studies raise larger questions about how assumptions about the world (which I include under “materiality”) and religious experience (which includes mysticism, spirituality, and religious life) intersect.

I will not be arguing that Julian and Dillard have similar responses to the world or are embedded in it in similar ways. In fact, as we shall see, Dillard explicitly rejects Julian’s response to the complexity of physical experience. Rather, I am going to ask similar questions about the context of their nature-imbued mystical experiences: how is their understanding of the world in all its complexity related to ideas about nature and matter contemporary with their visions; what understandings of art—devotional and secular—inform their mysticism; does it enrich our understanding of mystical experience when we notice that each wrote in a period in which religious and ethical writing by women flowered? Indeed, I shall suggest that the fact that they differ so radically in both the materiality with which they engage and the ways in which they respond to it helps us understand the complex and multiple ways in which a religious self can be embedded in the material world.

Before I begin, a word about the texts I am discussing.

First: Julian. There are two versions of her Revelations or Showings, written in Middle English, which recount her series of visions that began with one of the dying then glorious Christ and of