Catholic Arts and Artists: A Conversation

Conversation on Catholic Arts and Artists Today

10:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

St. Ignatius Church, 650 Parker Ave., San Francisco (in Fromm Hall, directly behind the church)

benedictinstitute.org/featured-events
 
The Benedict XVI Institute and St. Ignatius Parish invite you to  an extraordinary event: "René Girard and the Catholic Artist: A Conversation"
 
It begins at 10:30 a.m. with coffee and doughnuts and the opening of an art installation in Fromm Hall on the University of San Francisco campus. (Paintings by Brooklyn artist Alfonse Borysewicz will be on display there until February 28)
 
Here is your chance to converse with a Brooklyn painter whom America magazine has called a "serious artist"  and one of "the few artists" who have the courage to bridge the gap between Catholicism and the art world. Image magazine calls him one of the most important religious artists since the French Catholic expressionist Georges Henri Rouault. How does an artist reconcile modernism and the sacred?  Borysewicz has been influenced by the late Catholic thinker and writer René Girard on this question.
 
At 11:00 a.m. we move into Fromm Hall for a two-hour conversation with Alfonse Borysewicz and three more extraordinary culture creators: Poet and Villanova professor James Matthew Wilson, whose latest book of poems is The Hanging God; Girard biographer, Stanford book blogger, and National Endowment for the Humanities scholar Cynthia Haven; and Joseph Bottum, a professor at Dakota State University and extraordinary essayist, poet, songwriter, and short-story writer, whose most recent book is  An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.
 
There is no charge. To register for free tickets, click here. Donations are welcome. 

René Girard (1923 – 2015) was a professor at Stanford University from 1981 until his death. Literary critic, anthropologist, cultural critic, and Catholic, he was the author of nearly thirty books. His analysis of society, culture, and religion emphasized the fundamental nature of mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and sacrifical violence.