Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci
Ronnie Hsia will deliver a lecture on the famous Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, SJ, on Sept. 21 at 5:30 p.m. in the Yawkey Center’s Murray Function Room. Hsia, the Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of History at Penn State, is the author of the book, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610. This lecture is being held in conjunction with the “Binding Friendship: Ricci, China and Jesuit Cultural Learnings” exhibition in the Burns Library. Sponsors: Institute for the Liberal Arts, Jesuit Institute, History Department, and Asian Studies.
The poetry of Meg Kearney
Award-winning poet Meg Kearney will read from her works on Sept. 20 at 5 p.m. in the Hovey House Library. Kearney’s collection of poems, Home By Now, was winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award; it was also a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was published in 2005, and its sequel, The Girl in the Mirror, will be published next year. Her first picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2013.
Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann, author of National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, will address the Class of 2015 and other members of the BC Community tomorrow as part of the Office of First Year Experience’s Conversations in the First Year, a program that joins together the freshman class with ritual, ideas and conversation. BC freshmen were all given copies of McCann’s book to read in advance of his visit. According to the University’s reading guide: “The gritty world that McCann depicts within this novel is filled with cynicism, dejection, addiction, self-absorption, cruelty, and loss; however, amid this seemingly more powerful world of despair, Let the Great World Spin provides a wellspring of hope that emerges through individual acts of compassion and redemption. It is within these individual acts of generosity that the themes of forgiveness, empathy, faith, and hope emerge.”
On the Constitution
Jack Rakove, one of the nation’s most respected scholars of the American Constitution, will discuss “Beyond Belief: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion” on Sept. 15 at 4:30 p.m. in McGuinn Hall, room 121. Rakove, a professor of history, American studies and political science at Stanford University,
has written extensively on the origins of the American Revolution and of the Constitution, and the political ideas and career of James Madison. His publications include James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History, and, most recently, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. Co-sponsors: Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, BC Legal History Roundtable, and the History and Political Science departments.
Do we really have free choice?
In his new book The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits (Yale University Press, October 2011), Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield shows that the so-called “choices” that confront us daily are often not choices at all. Greenfield takes a provocative and culturally savvy look at how many of our decisions are constrained, manipulated, and forced upon us by a gauntlet of biological, economical, and cultural influences. Greenfield is an expert in the areas of constitutional law, business law and legal theory. The latest Boston College Law School Magazine features a cover story on Greenfield, as well as an excerpt from his book. Listen to Greenfield talk about The Myth of Choice.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged free will, Law School, personal responsibility
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“Adulthood II”
Writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, who is a visiting scholar at the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College, was recently interviewed by the Boston Globe on her thoughts about post-retirement life, or what she dubs second adulthood. Bateson is the author of With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and Composing A Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. She will be presenting a free, public lecture series at Boston College this fall titled “Love Across Difference.”
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged aging, golden years, Sloan Center on Aging & Work
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New take on Henry James
In Henry James and the Queerness of Style, Boston College Associate Professor of English Kevin Ohi asserts that to read Henry James—particularly the late texts—is to confront the queer potential of style and the traces it leaves on the literary life. Unlike other critics, Ohi maintains that James’s queerness is found in many elements of his style, with belatedness as a thematic marker. His book presents original readings of a series of late Jamesian texts, and according to the publisher, represents an exciting possibility for future queer theory and literary studies.
CPA award for student
Boston College History Department doctoral student Peter Cajka has been awarded a first place prize from the Catholic Press Association for his article “Riding with Saint Paul in the Passenger Side: The Archdiocese of Milwaukee Enters the Automobile Age, 1920-1965,” which was published in the journal American Catholic Studies. Read more.
Posted in Boston College Authors, Students
Tagged automotive history, Catholic, history
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BC Bookmarks 