God and Our Hunger for Communion
We see strangers more often than friends, sit in gridlock more often than in conversation, and hunger for a deeper community we have never seen. Like the character Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, we know isolation far better than we know communion. Yet communion was designed to shape us as individuals and communities.
An evening with award-winning poet Scott Cairns, Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Using his own poetry and prose, Scott will explore how we can recover the crucially communal way in which we must understand our identity.
Photo Gallery
Photos copyright Lancia E. Smith Photography.
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About the Speaker
One of our most distinguished guests yet, Scott Cairns is a riveting poet who uses wit, humor, and insight to make you stop and rethink. (You can watch a short video of him here.)
Scott has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was awarded the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. He is the founding director of Writing Workshops in Greece, a program that brings writers to study and engage with literary life in modern Greece, and the author of eight books of poetry, including The Theology of Doubt (1985), and Idiot Psalms (2014). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Best Spiritual Writing and Best American Spiritual Writing. Scott earned a BA from Western Washington University, an MA from Hollins College, an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a PhD from the University of Utah. He has taught at numerous universities including University of North Texas, Old Dominion University, Seattle Pacific University, and the University of Missouri.
About the 2015-16 Series
Longing is a common theme among Americans, even religious ones.
Some of us snap up the new "life-changing" book that's hit the market each year (Purpose Driven Life, Daniel Diet, The Secret, etc.), but wonder why we always need the next one.
Others occasionally indulge in imagining what it would be like to experience a spirituality that is more connected to the past, or cared more about beauty, or had an impact that stuck with us a little further into the week.
Still others think we've found what we're searching for in some form of liturgical Christianity, but know we've barely scratched the surface of the riches before us. Or perhaps we've always been in that tradition, but wonder if its inheritance could be put to even better use.
Wherever on (or off) this spectrum you might find yourself, our 2015-16 series will explore the "more" for which you've been longing. We will explore the riches of our spiritual inheritance, using stirring visual art, writing, and music to illuminate aspects of a historic faith and inspire our imaginations to go ever deeper.
