Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
This is the third installment of a three-part series on spiritual exercises in humanistic registers. The impetus for this series derives from my interest in the nature, meanings, and forms of spiritual experience in secular as well as religious contexts. As one aspect of that wider interest, I’ve been struck by a particular appeal to …
In 1992, the American (immigrant) poet Denise Levertov received a frightening medical report: she had contracted lymphoma. Localized and not—yet—life-threatening, the illness prompted in Levertov a desire for a more vivid spiritual awakening. Having converted to non-denominational Christianity during the mid-1980s, then to Catholicism in 1989, she met with a priest and expressed an interest in …
A few years ago, I became invested in spirituality as a humanistic subject. By “humanistic” I mean a category that pertains to the humanities more than to the history of humanism per se, but also something irreducible to religion or theology, which is where one typically finds attention to spirituality. Or so one used to. …
All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. September 13 Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) “Women Mobilizing Memory” October 4 Digital Humanities Roundtable Discussion October 11 James Krause & Faith Blackhurst (Spanish & Portuguese) Moving Beyond Foreignization: Ángel Crespo’s Spanish Translation of Grande: sertão Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa November …
When I was eighteen and a freshman at UC Irvine, I was deeply unsure of what I wanted for my short- and long-term future. Of one thing I was certain: I did not wish to be a college student. Symptomatic of that wish to be elsewhere and otherwise, I made a weekly trip up to …
All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. May 17 Roger Macfarlane (Comparative Arts & Letters) “Eurydices Deserve Better: Another Look at Adaptations of a Classical Myth” May 31 Sara Phenix (French & Italian) “Bodice Politic: Fashion, Fiction, and Physiology in Nineteenth-Century France”
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 …
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 …
All Colloquia will take place in JFSB 4010 at 3:00pm unless otherwise specified. January 18 Brian Croxall (Digital Humanities) “Test Tubes, Book Spines, and Broken Contracts” January 25 Julia Lupton (UC Irvine) “Trust in Theater: An Entry into Shakespeare’s Virtues” February 15 Janis Nuckolls (Linguistics) “The Role of Onomatopoeia in Renaissance English, Radical Protestantism, …
This post was written by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director of the Humanities Center If one reads academic news media like The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed—or, for that matter, The New York Times—one quickly ascertains that these aren’t the best of times for the humanities. Lending voice to that sentiment a few years ago, in 2014, …