The University of Notre Dame will host its eighth annual Catholic Culture Literature Series beginning Tuesday (Sept. 22). The opening lecture, which will focus on poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, will be presented by Dominic Manganiello, professor of English at the University of Ottawa.
Presented by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, lectures will take place every Tuesday through Oct. 13. Presentations are free and open to the public and will begin at 8 p.m. in Room 155 of DeBartolo Hall on the Notre Dame campus.
Titled “Close to Catholics: A Celebration of Kindred Spirits,” this year’s series is themed around a discussion of four non-Catholic writers whose works share common themes with Catholic theology. Each speaker will discuss the similarities and differences between the professed faith of each author and the Catholic faith and the way these differences shape each author’s work.
Other speakers are Ann Astell, associate professor of theology at Notre Dame, speaking on Simone Weil; Joseph Pearce, biographer of modern Christian literary figures and the author of “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church,” speaking on Lewis; and Robert Bird, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and associate faculty in the Divinity School at University of Chicago, speaking on Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The series was created in 2002 to engage the Notre Dame community in an appreciation of literature with a unique Catholic perspective.
More information is available on the Web at http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/.
Contact: Kathryn Wales, program coordinator, Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, kathrynwales@nd.edu