"A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Christ and the Poets" Lecture and Reception

Contact anoel@div.duke.eduDuke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke Divinity School will present a public lecture by Roger Lundin, Arthur F. Holmes Professor of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill. The talk will explore doubt as it manifests in the late nineteenth-century literary-theological milieu and examine potential responses (fee full description below). The lecture will be titled "A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Christ and the Poets," and interlocutors to the presentation will include Emily Dickinson, Karl Barth, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Melville.The lecture will be followed by a brief question and answer session and a public reception at 6:45 p.m. in the Alumni Memorial Common Room (in Langford Building, Divinity School). Light refreshments will be provided at the reception. Lundin describes his talk: "This is a story of nineteenth-century longings and twentieth-century discoveries. We will explore how late nineteenth-century poetry and prose searched for a God who seemed to have abandoned the world in silence. In turn, we will consider the Christology of Karl Barth and others as a vigorous theological response to the plaintive poetic calls of these and other writers. 'Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a things,' and this proves to be as true of the exchanges between historical eras as it is of the dynamics of personal conversation and private reading."