Holy Cross Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture to Sponsor March Series of Public Events

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross is sponsoring a number of lectures by noted experts in the next month. The talks, which are free and open to the public, will take place in Rehm Library in Smith Hall on the campus.

March 12 at 7:30 p.m. — Rev. James Corkery, S.J., a theologian at the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology in Ireland and one of last year’s International Visiting Jesuit Fellows, returns to Holy Cross for a lecture on the Communion of Saints.

March 13 at 7:30 p.m. — Rev. Paolo Gamberini, S.J., professor of theology at the Pontifical Theological Faculty of “San Luigi” in Naples, Italy, will give a talk titled “Was Jesus in Auschwitz? Talking of God Beyond Barbed Wire.” Gamberini is also the Delegate for the Diocese of Naples for Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue; and Southern European Assistant for Interreligious Dialogue for the Society of Jesus. The event is part of the Deitchman Family Lectures in Religion and Modernity, which explores the place of religious and spiritual life in a world that is sometimes at odds with faith, other times in search of it, and always at work reshaping it.

March 15 at 7:30 p.m. — Rev. Oliver Rafferty, S.J., a historian from the British Jesuit Province and one of this year’s International Visiting Jesuit Fellows, will examine the attitude of the institutional church toward violence in the conflicts over independence in Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

March 19 at 4 p.m. — John Schmalzbauer, associate professor of religious studies and Blanche Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies at Missouri State University, will give a talk titled “The Return of Religion in American Higher Education.”

March 22 at 7:30 p.m. — Christine Bochen, professor of religious studies and William H. Shannon Chair in Catholic Studies at Nazareth College, will give a talk titled “Thomas Merton’s Letters: What Do They Teach Us About the Monk?”

March 26 at 4 p.m. — Thomas Fitzpatrick, S.J., director of the Biblical Institute in Jerusalem, will moderate a discussion titled “From Revenge to Reconciliation: An Israeli and a Palestinian Find Hope After the Violent Deaths of Family Members.” The participants are Nella Cassouto, an Israeli woman who lost her husband in the Israeli Air Force, and Ali Abu Awwad, a Palestinian from Hebron who lost his brother. They are members of an organization called Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace. They are organized on the conviction that the grief of an Israeli mother upon the death of her son is no different from the grief of a Palestinian mother at the death of her son. Through this shared grief, Israelis and Palestinians have come together to console and support one another and to seek peace.

March 27 at 4 p.m. — Virginia Raguin, professor of visual arts, and Sarah Stanbury, associate professor of English, will give a talk as part of the Faculty Book Discussion series on Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), on which they served as editors. The two Holy Cross professors collaborated with six other scholars to produce a cross-disciplinary study of gendered spaces in the Middle Ages. Raguin and Stanbury both give different perceptions on architectural space and donor representations for the widely-read text The Book of Margery Kempe. Other essays explore theater, burial customs, the power of donations, clerical exclusion of women from sacred spaces and women’s strategies for inclusion, and gendered representation in binary coding of right for male and left for female.