“If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religions for presenting the full symphony of humanity.”
-Shūsaku Endō
Join the Collegium Institute and Penn's Program for Research on Religion & Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) for an online evening panel discussion as we look at how literature can help us understand Catholicism in global contexts by exploring the complexity of living and writing between cultures: Writing Between Cultures: Exploring the Catholicism of Shūsaku Endō, Graham Greene, Claude McKay, and Su Xuelin.
Endo, Greene, McKay, and Xuelin wrote from their own experiences of transnational life while also expressing differing relationships to Catholicism. Each of these authors had deep, though complicated, relationships with the Church and found powerful ways to express that in their writing. We hope, in looking to these writers, to see new ways of dealing with contemporary issues, while also dealing with the beauty and meaning of their literary creations. Core topics this event will explore include the Catholic literary tradition, inculturation, colonization, racism, 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 in order to understand the diverse symphony of humanity.
We hope this event continues conversations from this past summer’s event Flannery O’Connor: Imagination, Solitude, and the Oddities of Life.
Panelists will include:
Mark Bosco, SJ (Georgetown University)
Cecilia Moore (University of Dayton)
Stephanie Wong (Valparaiso University)
Nick Ripatrazone (Image Journal)
Moderated by: Jessica Sweeney, Managing Director of Collegium's Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative
This panel will be moderated by Jessica Sweeney. For more information, please contact Jessica Sweeney at jferro@sas.upenn.edu.
Date: Thursday, September 17, 2020
Time: 7:00 PM-8:30 PM ET
Location: Zoom
Registration: This webinar is free and open to the public. Click the button on the left to sign up.
This event is co-sponsored by Image Journal, Dappled Things, St. Thomas Catholic Studies Graduate Program, Studies in Catholic Faith and Culture at the University of Dallas, Beatrice Institute, Ekstasis Magazine, Georgetown English Department, and the Genealogies of Modernity Project.
This webinar was recorded. To watch the video on our YouTube channel, click the button on the right.
This virtual panel will serve as the opening event for the ongoing seminar series Writing Between Cultures: A Virtual Campus Seminar. Click here to learn more about the first seminar in that series, The Samurai: Endō's Search for Christ in Japan and Beyond, beginning on October 1.