News in Jesuit Studies
The following are notices of significant events related to the field of Jesuit Studies.
The notices appear chronologically, and all entries are indexed into the Portal’s search capabilities.
To contribute news of significant publications and events, both recent and forthcoming, please contact the Portal’s editors (jesuitportal@bc.edu)
On May 4, Columbia University hosts “From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue: A Symposium on the History of Art, Science, and Religion in Jesuit China.” Daniel Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara, both Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at Columbia, have organized the event.
Speakers at the symposium are:
— Florence Hsia of University of Wisconsin, Madison, “On the Side: Mapping China from the Margins”
— Kristina Kleutghen of Washington University of St. Louis, “Language Barrier: Reintegrating French and Chinese Sources on Qing Painter Jean-Denis Attiret”
— Walter Melion of Emory University, “Image Theory in the Annotated Manuscripts of Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia”
— Eugenio Menegon of Boston University, “Revisiting the Four Churches: Urban and Suburban Life and Networks of European Missionaries and Christian Converts in Qing Beijing”
— Jeffrey Muller of Brown University, “‘Mine Eyes and Taste are grown a little Chinese’: Jean-Denis Attiret, S. J., Recognizes the Eqial Value of European and Chinese Art”
— Daniel Greenberg, Columbia University, “Images of the Mongol Qing: Painting, Chengde, and Ritual in the Court of Colonial Affairs”
Menegon is also a Collaborative Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, and Muller was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute in the fall of 2016.
Abstracts for the presentations are available online.
“From Rome to Beijing” is sponsored by Columbia University’s Dept. of Art History and Archaeology, Dept. of Italian, Dept. of Religion, and Dept. of East Asian Languages and Culture, the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art, The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Additional information is available at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s website. A one-page summary of the event is available online.
On April 24, the new Jesuit Archives and Research Center hosts a symposium on “Jesuits and the Sciences” as part of the bicentennial celebrations of St. Louis University. The symposium features a keynote address by P. David Brown, S.J., a Vatican Astronomer and the caretaker of the telescopes at the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo, Italy.
The schedule of events for the symposium is available online and features:
9:00 a.m.
— Introduction and Welcome: David Miros, Ph.D., Director, Jesuit Archives and Research Center
— Invocation: Steve Schoenig, S.J., Department of History, St. Louis University
— Presentation: Kaitlyn Centini, undergraduate student, Lindenwood University (history, religion and art history), “Matteo Ricci: Leader of the Jesuit Mission in China”
— Presentation: Kieran Halloran, S.J., doctoral candidate, Department of Philosophy, St. Louis University, “Laudato Si: A Jesuit Engagement with Technology”
10:30 a.m.
— Keynote address: P. David Brown, S.J., Vatican Observatory, “Jesuits in Science as Arising from the Spiritual Exercises and Greater Catholic Milieu: The Ongoing Mission of Jesuits in Astronomy”
11:00 a.m.
— Roundtable discussion: P. David Brown, S.J., Kieran Halloran, S.J., Kaitlyn Centini, and Jeffrey P. Bishop, Ph.D., Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at St. Louis University
— Benediction: Jeff Dorr, S.J., Jesuit Archives and Research Center
Oxford University Press has published English translations of six sermons by Jesuit missionary António Vieira. Mónica Leal da Silva and Liam Brockey edited and translated António Vieira: Six Sermons.
Vieira was born in Portugal in 1608 and worked in both Europe and Brazil as a Jesuit, long remembered for his sermons on “social and spiritual matters.” According to the publisher, the new publication provides the “first English translation and annotations” of “Vieira’s sermons on slavery, colonial society, and the art of preaching.”
The six sermons profiled in this new book are
- Sermon for the Success of the Arms of Portugal against those of Holland (on God’s “apparent abandonment of the Portuguese”)
- Sermon of St. Anthony (on the “inequities he witnessed in Brazil”)
- The Sexagesima Sermon (on a “more effective, if harsher, style of preaching”)
- Sermon of the Good Thief (a rebuke of imperial officials seeking personal enrichment)
- Sermon XXVII of the cycle called Maria Rosa Mística (an attempt to comfort African slaves and to admonish the brutality of their Brazilian masters)
- Arm, Sermon IX of the cycle called Xavier Acordado (a tribute to Francis Xavier that recounts “the story of the relic of Francis Xavier’s arm sent from India to Italy in 1614”)
More details about António Vieira: Six Sermons are available at Oxford University Press.