Join Collegium Institute & Dappled Things Magazine as we continue our Writing Between Cultures seminars.
This seminar is the third of three in the series, Writing Between Cultures: A Virtual Campus Seminar. In this series, we will look at how literature can help us understand Catholicism in global contexts. Each writer identified above wrote from and about life between cultures while also expressing differing relationships to Catholicism. Core topics we will explore include inculturation, colonization, the nature of missionary work, and the need for a more universal Catholicism. We will also be looking to see how literature can help as a guide for Catholicism in the era of the global Church. Each of these writers had deep though complicated relationships with Catholicism and found powerful ways to express that in their fiction. In October of 2020, we read Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai to see how Endō connected deep Japanese traditions with the newly arrived Catholicism of the missionaries. We will now turn to Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory to see how Greene depicts the sacramental priesthood in Mexico while asking how Greene (an Englishman) imagined the whiskey priest (a Mexican). We will end with the American/Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseilles along with his ‘Catholic’ poetry to see how his relationships with Africa, the United States, and communism connect to his eventual conversion to Catholicism. We hope these series will build on this past summer’s event Flannery O’Connor: Imagination, Solitude, and the Oddities of Life.
The Power and the Glory: Graham Greene’s ‘Whiskey Priest’ and the Way of the Cross
During Lent 2021, join us for a literary pilgrimage through Mexico with Graham Greene’s ‘Whiskey Priest.’ In our virtual reading group, open to all readers, we will explore themes of suffering and triumph and of the power of the sacraments. We will consider questions of literary inculturation in an English novel about Mexico. We will read the novel as a way of the cross marked by the paradox of sin and sanctity. When we look at the whiskey priest, where do we find either power or glory? Leading us will be scholars and writers from the Collegium Institute and Dappled Things community, as well as Nick Ripatrazone of Image Journal.
The seminar will be held via Zoom from 7:00pm–8:30pm over the course of four Thursday evenings: February 25, March 4, March 11 and March 18.
Regular registration fee: $75
Early bird registration fee (register by February 1, 2021): $65
To learn more and to register, please visit https://cidtgreeneseminar2021.eventbrite.com or click below.
The Writing Between Cultures Virtual Campus Seminar series commenced with a free virtual panel event on September 17: Writing Between Cultures: Exploring the Catholicism of Shūsaku Endō, Graham Greene, Claude McKay, and Su Xuelin. Click here to view the recording of this event on YouTube.