Date/Time
Date(s) - 08/21/2017 - 08/25/2017
9:50 am - 10:45 am
Location
W-112 BNSN
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center will sponsor three tracks at BYU’s Education Week this year. The classes will feature BYU faculty from the College of Humanities and highlight various topics. Please join us August 21 – 25, 2017 at 9:50 AM in W-112 Benson Building (BNSN).
Finding Christ in the Humanities
Tuesday — Cynthia Hallen; “Finding Christ in Emily Dickinson”
This session highlights references to the Savior in the collected poems of the nineteenth-century New England poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). The class features poems that illustrate key aspects of Dickinson’s relationship with the Lord: christening, seeking, suffering, sealing, sacrament, and salvation.
Wednesday — Elliott Wise; “’Greater Love Hath No Man Than This’: Depicting Compassion and Redemption in Renaissance Art”
Renaissance art in Western Europe (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) is famous for fervent expressions of devotion to Christ, including compassionate empathy for his suffering and soul-stirring faith in his redeeming grace. This session will examine four images that distill sacred moments from the Atonement of Christ. Created by Flemish, Netherlandish, German, and Italian masters, these works articulate the Savior’s infinite love for His friends and at the same time comment on the love of those friends—both Biblical and contemporary—for Him.
Thursday — Daryl Lee; “The ‘Empathy Machine’: Finding Christ-like Qualities in World Cinema”
Movies don’t have to depict the life of Christ or obvious Christian themes to be instrumental in our spiritual or moral development. This session will focus not so much on specific movies as on how the specifics of movie-viewing engage us in exercises of empathy. By virtue of how they position us to see and hear through others’ eyes, they challenge us but also give us opportunities to step outside of ourselves, perhaps in order to love our neighbor as much as self.
Friday — Joe Parry; “The ”Sermon on the Mount’: Jesus’s Philosophy of Being in the World”
Though we call it the “Sermon on the Mount,” Jesus doesn’t exactly address the kind of topics and doctrines we would expect in a sermon: the nature and existence of God or His children, the Fall, the Resurrection and Last Judgment, or even the Atonement itself or His role as our Savior and Redeemer. In fact, the Lord focuses primarily on our lived experience in the here and now, in our bodies and inextricably embedded in a network of relations with others. In this way, the Lord provides us with a philosophy of living well, based on a logic that informs how we determine moral action, as well as the kinds of practices and habits that help us make the Christian life my own, chosen, authentic way of being. But this philosophy also makes it progressively clear that we will not be able to be a Christian perfectly—that is, completely. Thus, Lord essentially makes the case here for our need for Him as our savior and he concludes by sketching an outline of what it will mean for us to live by faith and repentance, and to help others do so as well.
