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Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Primary Wonder: Spirituality, Art, and Nature” with Douglas E. Christie
February 10 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm | Humanities 1, Room 210
Join us for the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Primary Wonder: Spirituality, Art, and Nature” with Douglas E. Christie, Professor Emeritus in the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University.
“Primary wonder.” Poet Denise Levertov describes this as the feeling that sometimes arises within us when we encounter “the mystery/that there is anything, anything at all/let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,/rather than void.” It is an idea resonant with spiritual meaning, but sometimes more accessible to us through art, poetry and nature than through traditional religious practice. This lecture will consider the role art and poetry can play in helping us recover a spirituality of primary wonder–beyond traditional religious practice–especially in relation to the natural world.
Professor Christie is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-2015 he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on the desert as spiritual landscape.
This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and the Council of Provosts.