Convocation: Rei Berrora

Convocation is partnering with Writers Read to host Dr. Reo Berroa for the convocation address: The Earth Belongs to Each and All of Us.Dr. Rei Berroa’s work centers around language, building peace and dissent, ethics (the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth), social justice, gender and racial diversity and equality, ecopoetics, and compassionate....

Writers Read: Pádraig Ó Tuama

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian and conflict mediator from Ireland. His work centres around themes of language, justice, story and religion. In this hour, Pádraig will explore stories of the past — of the garden of Eden, of Ireland, of gayness — and consider strange vantage points to narrate strange corners of those....

“Writing Moral Fiction” – Vic Sizemore

Vic Sizemore, novelist and shortfiction writer, speaks in chapel on the interesting dilemma that Christians face in writing “moral fiction.” Sizemore is on campus for the Writers Read program. Vic Sizemore is a writer of short fiction and novels in which characters wrestle with what it means for them to be Christians in all the....

“The Dumbest Generation” – Writers Read with Dr. Mark Bauerlein

In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or Don’t Trust Anyone under 30) Dr. Mark Bauerlein argues that despite unprecedented access to knowledge and information, the latest generation of Americans appears to be “no more learned or skilled than their predecessors, no more knowledgable,....

“The Ordinary Instant” — Jessica Penner ’01

In her powerful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.” Jessica Penner, author of Shaken in the Water, talks about what she is learning about the art of memoir-writing and the need for a writer to make an ordinary extraordinary for the reader. She also....