Amos Wilder Lecture and Friday Morning Talk with Joy Ladin, March 20 and 21
On Thursday, March 20 and Friday, March 21 The Program in Scripture and the Arts, in collaboration with the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences Academic Enhancement Fund and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies will welcome Joy Ladin to BU for two exciting events. Joy will come from New York’s Stern College/Yeshivah University to give the final Amos Wilder Lecture on Thursday, March 20, 2014. Joy is a literary scholar and also an acclaimed poet herself; she holds the David and Ruth Guttesman Chair in English at Stern College/YU.
Joy has also written about her experience as a Jewish transgender person and her decision to transition (and the impact of that decision personally and professionally) in a book entitled, Through the Door of Life; A Jewish Journey Between Genders. To learn more about Joy and her work, see here.
Amos Wilder lecture: “You are Making Me Now”: Writing God as a Contemporary American Poet
Rephrasing Robert Frost’s classic 1915 poem, “Mending Wall,” poet and scholar Joy Ladin has noted “Something there is in American poetry that doesn’t love religion, that sends skeptical ground swells under it, toppling the rhetoric of Divinity and Absolute Truth…” According to Allen Ginsberg, American poets’ “thirst for the Absolute” is in constant tension with the “aesthetics of relative truth” on which most American poetic practices are based. This talk will examine “the aesthetics of relative truth,” how they are reflected in American poetics, and how hard those poetics make it to represent one of the most fundamental human experiences: the experience of the presence of God.
When: Thursday, March 20, 2014, 4:30 PM
Location: Photonics 203, 8 St. Mary’s Street, Boston University, Boston MA
Free and Open to the Public
Friday Morning Talk: Gender, Judaism and God
This talk will take an autobiographical, phenomenological approach to examining the intersections (and collisions) between transgender identity and Jewish tradition, and the challenges and changes in the American Jewish world’s engagement with transgender Jews.
When: Friday, March 21, 2014, 10 am
Location: PHO 206, 8 St. Mary’s St, Boston University, Boston MA 02215
Free and Open to the Public