PACT: Sir Harold Hood Memorial Lecture
The Sir Harold Hood Memorial Lecture is held most years by Prison Advisory Care Trust as an opportunity to celebrate the life and memory of the late Sir Harold Hood. This year it will take place in Westminster Cathedral Hall, Ambrosden Avenue SW1 on 24th February 2022 at 6.30 pm.
The lecture seeks to contribute to public knowledge and understanding of how we can make prisons places in which individuals can achieve personal change and growth, and leave to live good lives, in stable and healthy relationships with family and the wider community.
In 2022 the event will feature Professor Anna Rowlands, St Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University and Chair of the UK Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice.
Professor Rowlands is a political theologian who works on Christian social teaching in Catholic and Anglican tradition. She has particular interests in ideas of human dignity and the common good. She has worked with people who have been detained in the immigration system and with those living in asylum destitution to identify the changes that would bring more just and humane systems. She works closely with a range of grassroots and faith-based organisations in a theological accompaniment role.
For this lecture, touching on themes explored in her other recently published book, Towards a Politics of Communion (Bloomsbury, 2021), Rowlands asks if it is possible to have dignity in the criminal justice system and what has to change to make it happen.
About Sir Harold Hood
Sir Harold Hood, 2nd Baronet (23 January 1916 – 5 September 2005) was a devout Catholic Christian who worked in Catholic publishing for much of his life, including working on the Catholic Herald and The Universe newspapers. He was a generous philanthropist with a keen interest in prison reform and prisoner rehabilitation.
