Today’s event postponed
Breaking News: This event has been postponed due to weather-related travel problems.
Award-winning writer Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, will talk about his upcoming book on immigrants in contemporary New York on Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. in the Yawkey Center’s Murray Function Room. Mehta was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.
Award for Cornille
Congratulations to Theology Associate Professor Catherine Cornille whose book The Im-Possibility of Interrreligious Dialogue has won the Frederick J. Streng Award for Excellence from the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. The award is given to a work that “makes an important contribution to issues relevant to the context of Buddhist-Christian dialogue.”
Ethics and the university
BC Founders Professor of Theology James Keenan, S.J., explores the power of the word of God and the word of human being in his new book Ethics of the Word: Voices in the Catholic Church Today. A review in America magazine calls Ethics of the Word “a helpful and instructive book, given the many experiences of loss and suffering, misunderstanding and scandal that characterize much of our everyday lives.”
Fr. Keenan will speak on Nov. 18, at 5:30 p.m. in Higgins 300. His topic will be “The University in the 21st Century: Thinking about Ethics, Persons, and Discourse.” Sponsor: Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.
Before the High Holy Days
German/Jewish writer Esther Dischereit will give a multi-media presentation about “Before the High Holy Days the House was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings,” her project in the German city of Dülmen, honoring the city’s former Jewish inhabitants. The presentation will take place Nov. 15 at 4 p.m. in Cushing 212.
Dischereit, a poet and short-story writer, is a recipient of the Erich Fried Prize. Sponsor: German Studies Department and Jewish Studies Program.
Liberal arts in crisis?
Renowned scholars and authors will visit the campus on Saturday, Nov. 13 to discuss the value and future of liberal arts education in the 21st century. Featured speakers will be: New York Times contributor Stanley Fish, Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand, academic Catharine Stimpson, historian Rev. John O’Malley, SJ, and Alan Ryan of Oxford University. The forum is sponsored by the Institute for the Liberal Arts.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged curriculum, Institute for the Liberal Arts, universities
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Does a president’s faith matter?
Damon Linker will discuss and defend his new book The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders, in which he argues that certain elements of religious belief—including radical atheism—may very well be incompatible with high office, and sometimes even active citizenship, in a democracy. Commentators Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University and Mark Silk of Trinity College will critique Linker’s argument from different perspectives. Nov. 11, 5:30 p.m., Higgins Hall, room 310. Sponsor: Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.
Posted in Guest Authors
Tagged Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, faith
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Writer-in-Residence Gish Jen
Acclaimed novelist Gish Jen, author of the new book World and Town, will be a writer-in-residence at BC next week, making three public appearances. She will read from World and Town on Nov. 9 at 7:00 p.m. in the Yawkey Athletics Center’s Murray Room and participate in a book club style discussion on Nov. 10 in McGuinn 121 at 4:00 p.m. Finally, she will take part in a Q&A with BC Associate Professor of English Min Song on Nov. 11 at 4:45 p.m. Read more about Gish Jen’s residency at BC in the Boston College Chronicle.
Read the Boston Globe and New York Times reviews of World and Town. Boston College Professor of English Elizabeth Graver and Associate Professor of English Min Song offer commentary on Jen’s novel at The Arts Fuse.
Jen was named one of the eight most important contemporary American women writers by critic Elaine Showalter. She also is the author of Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land and The Love Wife, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Republic.
Sponsors: Lowell Humanities Lecture Series and the Institute for the Liberal Arts.
Posted in Guest Authors, Lowell Humanities Series
Tagged 9/11, Asian American, English Dept., ethnicity, Lowell Humanities Series
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