The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art with Christian Wiman

In this lecture, Christian Wiman explores the relation between art and faith, addressing such questions as the relation between poetry and prayer, reading secular literature as a person of faith, and what it means to read and live “poetically.”

Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of more than ten books, including Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (FSG, 2016), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013), and most recently Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, released in December 2023. Of his work as a whole, Marilynne Robinson writes, “His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world.  This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same.”  Mr. Wiman has been a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford and a visiting assistant professor of English at Northwestern, and for three years he served as Visiting Scholar at Lynchburg College in Virginia.  He is currently the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and holds an honorary doctorate of humane letters from North Central College.  His particular interests include modern poetry, the language of faith, “accidental” theology (that is, theology conducted by unexpected means), and what it means to be a Christian intellectual in a secular culture.

This event is free and open to the public and will take place in Barrows Auditorium, Billy Graham Hall, located at 500 College Avenue in Wheaton. For more information, contact Amy Park at 630.753.5040 or philosophy@wheaton.edu.