Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity
This series explores the place of religious and spiritual life in a world that is sometimes at odds with faith, other times in search of it, and always at work reshaping it.
Save the Date:
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Understanding the Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults in America - Christian Smith, director of the National Study of Youth and Religion, will talk on the religious and spiritual lives of teens and young adults, based on the third wave of NSYR data collection of 18-23 year olds.
7:30 pm, Rehm Library
Past Lectures:
October 5, 2009
The Mission of the Church in the Asian Context— Peter C. Phan, the Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, provides an overview of the history and current situation of Catholicism in South and East Asia and then discusses how Christian mission is to be understood in that context.
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September 28, 2009
Mystical Transfers, Local and Global: The Modernity of 'Folk' Catholicism in the Philippines — Smita Lahiri, associate professor of anthropology at Harvard University, talks about her research at Mt. Banahaw, a major center of folk-Catholic pilgrimage in the Philippines.
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March 16, 2009
The Religious Enlightenment - David Sorkin, Professor of History and Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents a comparative Jewish, Protestant and Catholic intellectual history, and suggests that the Enlightenment, which gave birth to Modernity, should best be understood as a religious, not an anti-religious project.
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February 2, 2009
Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, visits from the Vatican to talk about the church's understanding of Christian responsibility for migrants, refugees and itinerant people.
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November 3, 2008
Modern Cosmology and Life's Meaning, Rev. George Coyne, S.J., director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978-2006, and current president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.
October 29, 2008
Who's Afraid of American Religion?, Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
2007-2008
October 2, 2007
Tolerance and Intolerance, Eroticism and Asceticism, in Hinduism, Wendy Doniger, director of the Martin Marty Center and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where she is also a member of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean World and Social Thought, and the faculty of the College.
October 29, 2007
Protestant and Catholic Modernities, Fr. Anthony Carroll, SJ, Associate Director, The Heythrop Institute for Religion Ethics and Public Life, Heythrop College, University of London.
November 1, 2007
Of Golden Plates and Global Warming: Translating Mormonism in the Twenty-First Century, Dan Wotherspoon, PhD, executive director, Sunstone Education Foundation and editor, Sunstone Magazine: Mormon Experience, Scholarship, Issues and Art.
April 24, 2008
Muslim-Christian Encounters in 21 st Century, John Esposito, university professor & founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University.
2006-2007
October 19, 2006
Authority, Allegiance, and Advocacy: Religion and Politics in American Higher Education, Julie Reuben, Harvard historian of education.
November 6, 2006
Whatever Happened to 'Holy Dark'?- Electric lights, intimacy, and modernity, Rev. John Staudenmaier, SJ, historian of technology and editor of Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology.
February 13, 2007
The Dominance of the Present Over the Past: The Church's forgotten constitutionalist heritage, Francis Oakley, Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideas and President Emeritus of Williams College, former President of the American Council of Learned Societies.
March 13, 2007
Was Jesus in Auschwitz? Talking of God beyond barbed wire, Rev. Paolo Gamberini, SJ, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Theological Faculty "San Luigi" in Naples, Italy. Gamberini is also the Delegate for the Diocese of Naples for Ecumenism and Southern European Assistant for Interreligious Dialogue for the Society of Jesus.
2005-2006 Lectures
February 27, 2006
Catholics and Contraception in Twentieth-Century America, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, professor of history and director, Center for American Catholic Studies, The Catholic University of America.
March 14, 2006
Robert A. Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University.
2004-2005
October 6, 2004
Science and the Soul, Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS. One of the world's most distinguished writers on religion and science, Sir John Polkinghorne is a mathematical physicist, an Anglican priest, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a winner of the Templeton Prize.
2003-2004
December 8, 2003
Pragmatism and the Modern Self, Michael J. Lacey, Emeritus Director, Center for American Society and Culture, Woodrow Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution.
February 5, 2004
The Jesuits and Modernity: the Case of John Courtney Murray, Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, professor, Catholic University.
March 24, 2004
The Falsification Challenge Revisited: Religious Principles and Historical Evidence, Terrence Tilley, professor of religous studies, University of Dayton.
2002-2003
April 8, 2003
Terrorism and War: Struggles with Apocalyptic Violence, Robert Jay Lifton, Harvard Medical School
September 23 2002
March 12, 2002
Newman and the Restoration of the Interpersonal in Higher Education, Michael Buckley, S.J., professor of theology, Boston College
March 18, 2002
Whose History?--Spinoza's Critique of Religion as an Other 'Modernity', Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, associate professor of philosophy, Vanderbilt University.
Prior Religion and Modernity Lectures:
R. Scott Appleby
Cushwa Center for American Catholic Studies
University of Notre Dame
"As if in Prayer": Against the Consolations of Virtual Catholicism
Mary C. Boys
Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology
Union Theological Seminary
The New Testament and the Jews: A New Lens on Problematic Texts
Marek Chojnacki
University of Fribourg
Visiting Scholar, Harvard Divinity School
Rethinking the Idea of Transcendence: New Perspectives on Religion in Modernity
Rémi Brague
Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris I, Sorbonne
Worldly Wisdom Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J.
Centre Sevres, Paris
The Christian Critique of Societies: Just or Unjust?
Robert Coles
James Agee Professor of Social Ethics
Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities
Harvard University
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Moral Life of Young People
John Elder
Steward Professor
Departments of English and Environmental Studies
Director, Environmental Studies Program
Middlebury College
"Stay together/learn the flowers/go light": Education in a Time of Environmental Crisis
James Carroll
Columnist, Boston Globe
National Book Award Winner
The Passion of the Earth: Politics, Faith, and Sacred Violence
Lee Cormie
Faculty of Theology
St. Michael’s College
The Future of Liberation Theology in a Postmodern Globalizing World
Louis Dupré
Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Religion
Yale University
Religion at the Dawn of the Millennium: The Crisis and the Challenge
Werner Jeanrod
Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Lund, Sweden
Call and Response: The Challenge of Christian Life
Lawrence Langer
Professor Emeritus, Simmons College
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
The Chosen People and the People Chosen: Jewish Promise and Jewish Loss in the Paintings of Samuel Bak
Rev. Mark S. Massa, S.J.
Professor of Church History, Fordham University
The New Anti-Catholicism, the Old Anti-Catholicism, and the Analogical Imagination
Peter Matthiesen
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Journey to the Buddha
Colman McCarthy
Nationally Syndicated Columnist, The Washington Post
Founder and Director, Center for Teaching Peace
Radicalize Your Life While There’s Still Time: Non-Violence, Service, and Prayer in Daily Life
Heather McHugh
Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
University of Washington
Fastenings in Dickinson (or, How Spirit and Letter Come to Coincide)
Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Professor of History, Hunter College
Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM
Professor of New Testament and Spirituality, Jesuit School of Theology
Vilma Seelaus, OCD, Carmelite Monastery, Barrington RI
Margaret Susan Thompson
Professor of History, Syracuse University
Nuns: A Vanishing Species in the Catholic Church?
David O’Brien
Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies
Department of History
College of the Holy Cross
Catholicism, Modernity…and Holy Cross
Barry Sanders
Professor of English and the History of Ideas
Pitzer College
The Church, Chaucer, and a Joke or Two
William Shea
Saint Louis University
Evangelicals, Catholics and Modernity: Growing Up in the Brave New World
David Tracy
Distinguished Service Professor
Divinity School
The University of Chicago
The Surprising Return of God in Contemporary Thought
Mary Evelyn Tucker
Department of Religion, Bucknell University
Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions
Harvard University
The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology
James Turner
Department of History
University of Notre Dame
Catholic Intellectual Traditions and Contemporary Scholarship
Cornell West
Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion
Harvard University
Race Matters