Making sense out of suffering
Scholars unite for spring symposium
February 20, 2007
Rhoda Dyck, Staff Writer
This spring, Trinity Western University’s English Department will be hosting “Though a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime.” This conference on Christianity and literature will take place on May 10-12.
The conference will be hosted in conjunction with The Conference on Christianity and Literature. It will feature approximately 80 guest lecturers including five keynote speakers, making it one of the largest of its kind ever hosted at TWU.
Dr. Richard Kearney of Boston College is one well-known intellectual who will be acting as a keynote speaker. Author of more than 20 books on European philosophy, Kearney is “one of the most significant philosophers of our lifetime,” said Dr. Holly Nelson, who is organizing the conference along with Prof. Jennifer Doede.
Also to be featured as keynote speakers are Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey and Dr. Maxine Hancock, award-winning authors in the areas of literature and theology. Several of TWU’s most notable scholars, including Dr. Jens Zimmermann, Prof. Lynn Szabo, and Prof. Erica Grimm-Vance will also appear as plenary speakers.
According to Nelson, the conference will feature a series of panels seeking to integrate “people from across the disciplines: philosophy, literature, fine arts.”
“We want to see how they work together to address the suffering and the sacred,” she said.
Funding from The Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust has supplied conference planners with the needed resources.
“[Stanford Reid] was trying to merge faith and learning, and that is what we’re trying to do with the conference,” said Nelson. “Without the funding we could not have run the conference.”
Nelson noted the conference will seek to explore “ways in which religion helps us to make sense out of suffering.”
“We have to try to give it a voice without oversimplifying it,” she said. “We hope that TWU can offer faith not as a crutch, but as a form of hope and healing.”
Nelson has devoted much of her study towards the area of trauma as featured in 17th-18th Century literature.
“I am very interested in how stories and narratives give meaning to our lives,” she said. “The notion of trauma over the past decade has become an important topic, not only to me but to the broader community.”
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