Winter 2023: Poetics of Faith with Sarah Bachelard

The BYU Humanities Center welcomes Jennifer Frey as our Faith and Imagination lecturer on Thursday, March 23, 2023. Title: Poetics of Faith Sarah Bachelard is an Anglican priest and theologian based in Canberra, Australia. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, with special interests in philosophy, ethics and spirituality. She is …

Fall 2022: Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor: The Necessity of Vision in Life and Literature with Jennifer Frey

The BYU Humanities Center welcomes Jennifer Frey as our Faith and Imagination lecturer on Friday, December 2nd, 2022. Title: Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor: The Necessity of Vision in Life and Literature Jennifer is currently an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she is also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in …

Fall 2018

The big symposium our Humanities Center hosted in September introduced a range of perspectives pertaining to the theme of vulnerability.  This follow-up event will attend primarily to what vulnerability means relative to our teaching practices, especially regarding the interplay of faith and intellect. Our guest, Bo Karen Lee (of the Princeton Theological Seminary), will give a brief …

The Grace of Divine Union

Winter 2018 In this lecture, Andrew Prevot shares some new research about the reception of Christian mysticism in contemporary theology and philosophy. He argues that certain postmodern ethical discourses about the self’s experience of being flesh and the self’s porosity to the other can be traced back to mystical sources in the Christian tradition. Yet what is …

Fall 2017

Romana Huk, Notre Dame University Title: “Sacrament as ars: Down-to-earth devotion in the poetry of David Jones (pursued through a reading of ‘ A, a, a Domine Deus’)” November 10, 2017 In this excerpt from a lengthy chapter on David Jones in her current book project, Romana Huk re-reads the implications of this major modernist’s “theopoetics” and raises …

Winter 2017

Jeffrey Kosky, Washington & Lee University Title: “Portraits of Enchanting Secularity: Notes on faces, prayers, and criticism for those disenchanted with disenchantment” May 12, 2017 Ever since Max Weber, in 1917, famously characterized “the fate of our times” with the memorable phrase “the disenchantment of the world,” it has been customary to equate modernity, secularity, …

Fall 2016

Matthew Mutter, Bard College Title: “‘What is Joy?’: Yeats, Paganism, and the Passions” November 3, 2016 W.B. Yeats claimed that the governing tension of his poetic imagination could be characterized as a competition between the “swordsman” and the “saint.” His writing figures this tension in multiple ways—Oedipus v. Christ, Homer v. von Hügel, Michael Angelo …