We are eager to host you in Dallas for the fourth biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, and registration is now open but limited. Please reserve your spot as soon as possible. Our keynotes will be staying at the Marriott in Las Colinas, also the location of our Friday evening banquet and performance by Helen Sung and Dana Gioia. The cost of registration for attendees is held low by generous donors. If you would like to be a sponsor for the Catholic Imagination Conference, please contact us by email at CIC2022@udallas.edu.
Also on Friday, you will not want to miss a reading and workshop led by Uwem Akpan, whose first novel Say You’re One of Them was an Oprah-book club selection. Fellow Catholic writer Mary Karr said of the novel, “I can’t shake this book and shouldn’t.” I (Jessica Hooten Wilson) found the book gritty and visceral, read best in small sittings rather than all at once. Here’s an excerpt.
Of Akpan’s recent novel, Fr. James Martin, SJ, calls it “a superb story by a super writer.” Akpan is a Nigerian Jesuit priest, who writes honestly of misery and poverty and human struggles. He writes in America magazine of his hope to “reconcile [his] African and Western inheritance,” comparing his balancing act to the image of a fiddler on a roof: “I hope to remain an African who is steeped in other traditions, if only to be harmony with my world—my diverse world.” I will be first in line for his fiction workshop.
Akpan is being sponsored by the Hank Center for Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University of Chicago, directed by Michael P. Murphy, who hosted the third CIC in 2019, and who is a renowned scholar of the Catholic Imagination. His book A Theology of Criticism engages Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Imagination. Check out the Hank Center’s video archives from the previous conference. If you are interested in pursuing work in the Catholic Imagination, consider their Graduate Summer Institute.
Hope to see you in Dallas this fall!