A Bell for Nagasaki

You are invited to join Dr. James Nolan for an informative and rich discussion about the unique manner in which the Catholics of Nagasaki responded to the atomic bomb that was dropped on their city on 9 August 1945. Against the backdrop of a remarkable history of affliction and perseverance, the Nagasaki Catholics’ response to the destruction of their city and community, informed by a distinctive theology of suffering, offers an inspiring example of joyful hope and endurance. A defining symbol of this response is the Urakami Cathedral. The largest Catholic church in East Asia at the time, the cathedral was destroyed by the plutonium bomb but then, painstakingly, and in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, rebuilt by the community in the years after the war. Included in the new building is one of the original bells recovered from beneath the rubble of the cathedral ruins. The second bell was destroyed by the blast and the left tower, to this day, remains empty. Professor Nolan will discuss efforts underway to replace the bell from the left tower of the Urakami Cathedral.

James L. Nolan, Jr. is the Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College. His teaching and research interests fall in the general areas of law and society, culture, technology and social change, and historical comparative sociology. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Harvard University Press, 2020) and What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is currently working on a book about Nagasaki. He is the recipient of several grants and awards including a Fulbright scholarship and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University, Loughborough University, the University of Notre Dame, CUA, and Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University.