Award-winning poet Afaa Michael Weaver will give a talk on Apr. 6 at 7 p.m. in Devlin Hall, room 101. He has published more than 10 poetry collections, including City of Eternal Spring, winner of 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and The Government of Nature, winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award. A former factory worker and son of a sharecropper, Weaver covers a broad range of topics in his poetry, including family dynamics, childhood trauma, American history and culture, and Chinese and Asian culture and philosophies. Weaver has also earned a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Fulbright Award and multiple Pushcart prizes. He is the Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons College. Sponsors: Lowell Humanities Series and Poetry Days. Read more about Weaver and his role in the upcoming Greater Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival in Boston College News.
Poet Afaa Michael Weaver
Dorothy Day
During his visit to the US last fall, Pope Francis cited activist Dorothy Day as an inspirational American for her social activism and her passion for justice. Alumnus Tom McDonough has written a new book about Day, focusing on her first job in journalism. An Eye for Others, Dorothy Day, Journalist 1916-1917 (Clemency Press, 2016) includes the 36 articles written by Day for The New York Call, her workplace during the time leading up to America’s entry into World War I. The book also includes Day’s later reflections on that time and perspectives from some of her friends. Read an excerpt of McDonough’s book.
Kaveny on religion, language and public life
There are two new books from Darald and Juliet Libby Professor Cathleen Kaveny, who is a faculty member in both the Theology Department and Boston College Law School. In Prophecy Without Contempt (Harvard University Press, 2016), Kaveny looks at the endurance of the jeremiad—a fiery brand of political rhetoric inspired by religious belief, from which it draws both linguistic style and moral substance. To employ prophetic indictment in political speech is to claim to speak from a position of unassailable authority—whether invested by God, reason, or common sense—in order to accuse opponents of violating a fundamental law. At its best, prophetic indictment can unify opposing political groups, according to Kaveny. Martin Luther King, Jr. exemplifies the use of prophetic rhetoric to facilitate reform and reconciliation rather than revenge. At its worst, prophetic indictment divides and punishes.
Kaveny’s other book, A Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality (Georgetown University Press, 2016), a collection of her columns for Commonweal magazine, examines the need to recognize the viewpoints of religious tradition and secular, liberal democratic tradition can meet for substantive, critical and collaborative discussions about the issues of the day. “Over the years as I wrote these columns, I focused on topical issues of the day and often they were infused with certain social, political or cultural tensions,” says Kaveny. “I’m interested in how in today’s society you are supposed to engage as a religious person who is an American and who takes seriously the claims on moral positions in a person’s life.” Read more about both books in the Boston College Chronicle.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston College Law School, religion, Theology Department
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Book review by Fr. Imbelli
Fr. Robert Imbelli, associate professor of theology emeritus, offers a review of Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge for Commonweal magazine. He calls her volume “remarkable.”
Historian Linda Colley
Award-winning historian Linda Colley will present “Publishing the Word: Constitutions, Print, and War in the Age of Revolutions” on Mar. 30 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Colley, who specializes in Britain, empire and nationalism, is the author of the acclaimed Acts of Union and Disunion, which examines what has held the United Kingdom together—and what might drive it apart. Her other titles include The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007, and Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, which won the Wolfson History Prize. She also writes regularly on history, politics and art for such publications as The Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and New Republic. Colley is the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series
Bancroft Prize
Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention by Professor of Law and Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar Mary Sarah Bilder has been named one of the winners of the 2016 Bancroft Prize, considered to be among the most prestigious awards in the field of American history writing. Bilder’s book uses digital technology and textual analysis to study how James Madison revised his notes on the event, thereby challenging the belief that Madison’s version of the 1787 Constitutional Convention was an objective contemporaneous account. The annual Bancroft Prize was established at Columbia University in 1948 .Winners are judged in terms of the scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation they present in the areas of American history and/or diplomacy. Read more in the New York Times and Boston Globe.
Posted in Awards/Honors, Boston College Authors
Tagged American history, Boston College Law School
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Bill Clinton’s presidency
Professor of History Patrick Maney offers an in-depth perspective on the 42nd president of the United States and the transformative era over which he presided in his new book, Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President (University Press of Kansas, 2016). Maney examines Bill Clinton in all his guises: the first baby boomer to reach the White House; the gifted politician with an inexplicably careless and self-destructive streak; the “Comeback Kid” survivor; and, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, part of the most controversial First Couple since Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. But Maney goes beyond personality and politics to also examine the critical issues of the day: economic and fiscal policy, business and financial deregulation, healthcare and welfare reform, and foreign affairs in a post-Cold War world. Maney was interviewed about his book for the Boston College Chronicle.
Book award for Hunt
Assistant Professor of English Aeron Hunt’s book, Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2014), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015. Among Hunt’s areas of expertise are Victorian literature and culture, with particular interest in the relationship of literature and economic life. In Personal Business, Hunt argues that an emphasis on abstraction and impersonality as the crucial features of the Victorian economic experience has led to a partial and ultimately misleading vision of Victorian business culture. She asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls “personal business” — the social and interpersonal relationships of Victorian commercial life in which character was a central mediating concept. Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries, is the premier source for reviews of academic books and digital resources of interest to scholars and students in higher education.
How to teach about slavery
How can teachers get students to understand the racist underpinnings of slavery—and to acknowledge its legacies in contemporary America? Understanding and Teaching American Slavery (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), co-edited by Associate Professor of History Cynthia Lynn Lyerly and Bethany Jay of Salem State University, offers college and high school teachers guidance on explaining the insidious institution of slavery and its continuing ramifications within American culture. The book address topics such as, slavery and the nation’s founders, the diverse experiences of the enslaved, slavery’s role in the Civil War and the relationship between slavery and the northern economy. Contributors offer ideas for teaching through slave narratives, runaway ads, spirituals, films and material culture.
Poet Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens worked most of his professional life as an insurance executive, yet is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, winning a Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards. In a new biography, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (Simon & Schuster, 2016), University Professor of English Paul Mariani shows how, through his poetry, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime. “Wallace Stevens was a poet of the imagination. And for him, the imagination was the ultimate reality,” said Mariani, who has been called the “biographer of poets” for his previous volumes on Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and John Berryman. More from the Boston College Chronicle.
BC Bookmarks 