Professor Stephen R. Prothero to Deliver William Belden Noble Lectures
Professor Stephen R. Prothero to Deliver William Belden Noble Lectures Nov. 18-20 at the Memorial Church, Harvard Yard, on “the Work of Doing Nothing: Wandering As Practice and Play”
Boston University Professor and New York Times best-selling author, Stephen R. Prothero, will travel to Harvard to deliver the prestigious William Belden Noble Lectures at The Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, November 18-20, at 8:00 p.m. The lecture series title is “The Work of Doing Nothing: Wandering as Practice and Play,” and the titles of the individual lectures will be, on Nov. 18, “Wandering Out: Leaving and Letting Go,” on Nov. 19, “Wandering Around: Out of Doors and Out of Mind,” and on Nov. 20, “Wandering Home: Reckoning and Return.” Professor Prothero is Chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know and American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon.
In his Noble Lectures, Professor Prothero will explore wandering as one of the great themes in the world’s religious and literary traditions, and as an antidote to contemporary obsessions with efficiency, productivity, and the purpose-driven life. Adam and Eve were wanderers, as were Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Paul, and the Buddha. Ulysses wanders across the pages of the Odyssey and the Pandhavas across the chapters of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. To wander is to move without destination into the unknown, and to open up to surprises. But wandering is often disparaged as deviation and digression. In his lectures, Professor Prothero will seek to redeem wandering from its critics by championing it as both practice and play. Although wandering aims at nothing, it is work of a sort. And on occasion, it can do some of the hardest work of all: liberating us from the tyranny of those voices – of parents and gods and friends and governments – that tell us (with authority, and sometimes coercive power) who to be, what to think, how to live.
The William Belden Noble Lectures were established at Harvard University in 1898 and claim an impressive roster of past lecturers including Theodore Roosevelt, H. Richard Niebuhr, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie. The Noble Lectures are free and open to the public. For more information contact The Memorial Church at 617-495-5508 or e-mail to memorial_church@harvard.edu.