Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University, History of Art and Architecture In an age of mechanical, and now virtual, reproduction, we have perhaps lost sight of the basic visual unit that structures our experience of the medieval book: the opening. From the origins of codex as a medium in late antiquity, and in contrast to the scrolls […]
A Conversation with author Francisco X. Stork and editor Cheryl Klein Francisco X. Stork Author of Marcelo in the Real World, forthcoming from Arthur A. Levine Books, March 2009. Francisco Stork was born in 1953 in Monterrey, Mexico. Today he works in Boston as an attorney for a state agency that develops affordable housing. He […]
Frank Korom, Boston University, Department of Religion This presentation explores the changing worlds of the Patuas of West Bengal, an itinerant caste of scroll painters and singers who converted en masse from Hinduism to Islam in the thirteenth century. Originally working in a solely oral medium, they have gradually come to rely on other forms […]
Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University Department of English John Donne was preoccupied throughout his life with the subject of valediction. In this talk, Professor Targoff explored the ways in which this obsession with parting pervades both the erotic and devotional registers of his works, from his earliest love lyrics through his final sermons. Ramie Targoff is […]
Sharon Portnoff, Pomona College Department of Religious Studies Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man relies heavily on Dante’s Inferno to witness to his eleven-month imprisonment in the death camp Auschwitz. Beyond the more obvious trope of the journey to Hell, these two texts share the larger question: what is the human? This lecture will explore what […]
Susanna Caroselli , Luce Visiting Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts in the Department of Religion, Boston University and Professor of Art History at Messiah College “The Moralized Bible: Life’s Little Royal Instruction Book” In the early 1200s a group of lavishly illuminated Bibles was produced in Paris for members of the royal house of […]
Shelly Rambo, Boston University School of Theology Is there redemption at the end of The Road? What does it means to survive? What does it mean to be one who remains? Reading through the lens of trauma theory, this talk explored Cormac McCarthy’s vision of redemption in his searing and post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, and asked what […]
Terryl Givens, University of Richmond Department of English The Boston University Department of Religion Annual Lecture. The 19th century saw repeated calls for an authentic American Bible. When the century was over, the Book of Mormon had emerged as the foremost claimant for the title. This lecture will review that book’s history and composition, then […]
The second Amos Wilder Lecture in Scripture and Literary Arts delivered by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Franz Wright Wright will explore the idea of language as sacrament in the Christian scriptures, as well as the poetic forms used by Jesus in his teaching. He will also discuss the possibility of religious poetry in our own unpropitious time. […]
Mark Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity, Andover Newton Theological School “My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots which drink silently…” What are we to make of a poet who addresses God as “you darkness,” and proclaims his belief in nights? In an early collection first entitled Book of Prayers […]