Faith and Imagination

Winter 2019 The Humanities Center welcomes Dr. Peter Howarth, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature and National Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, as our Faith & Imagination guest lecturer on Friday, April 12th. There will be two events held during the day, the first being a book discussion and the second, a lecture …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …