The Trials of Desire: Conversations in Honor of Denys Turner
If I might, I would like to interrupt these proceedings to bring you a special bulletin that may be of interest to dotCommonweal readers. In two weeks, a friend and I will be hosting a gathering of Professor Denys Turner‘s friends, students, and colleagues to mark his retirement from full-time teaching at Yale. Denys’ book, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, was recently reviewed (subscribers) in these pages. The event will run from March 22-24 at St. Thomas More Chapel and Center at Yale, and it will include three public lectures from Cyril O’Regan, David Burrell, and Terry Eagleton on each evening of the conference. There will also be twelve other paper sessions as well as an opening reception, a closing dinner, and various other opportunities for toasting and general merriment. You can find a full list of speakers and events on the conference website. If you register by March 15, you will be able to reserve meals, and March 21 is the deadline to receive the papers, which will be pre-circulated so that we can make the most of our time together. Thank you for your attention. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Sounds like a splendid three days. Will Turner return to England?
Thanks for the commendation. I think that Denys will be going back to England initially, but with an open invitation to return to teach at Yale for a semester here and there, which I’m sure he will take them up on in the near future.
Eric –
This would be an odd thing to try, but ask him for me – :-) -to do a comparison of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Buddha. He’s not a Buddhist scholar, but surely he would have some interesting thoughts about the “negativity” of both, even if he worked from translations of the Buddha.
Ann, actually there is a very interesting book by a scholar of Buddhism at the University of Bristol, Paul Williams, called “The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism” (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), which Williams dedicates to Denys. He also specifically cites Denys’ “The Darkness of God” (Cambridge, 1995) as influential for his own appreciation of the connections between Christian and Buddhist “mysticism.” Denys hasn’t, as far as I know, explicitly engaged Buddhism himself, but Williams does some of the work you might be looking for.
The conference looks like a wonderful tribute to Denys Turner, with a variety of wonderful speakers! God bless all of your efforts at organizing this scholarly review!
Thanks, Eric. That looks like it is right down my narrow alley :-)
I’ve been very surprised at how little interest the Church has shown in the beliefs and intellectual milieu of the various Eastern country. The Jesuits have had conversations with Hindus, but who else is interested in what the Orient thinks? I suspect there would not be as much persecution of
Catholics/Christians if there had been dialogue earlier.
Eric:
Congratulations! Denys Turneris not only a great scholar but a great man and a wonderful conversationalist. I treasure my memories of him when he visited us as a visiting teacher and lecturer.
Larry, Thanks so much for your good wishes. I will certainly pass them along to Denys. Of course, feel free to join us, if you can!
Ann, The opportunities for inter-religious dialogue are few, but of course, Thomas Merton was very interested in Eastern spirituality. More recently, David Tracy also seems to be engaging with Buddhist thought. In the book, “Saints: Faith without Borders,” which I am reviewing for Commonweal, he has an essay comparing the bodhisattva to the Catholic saint and the Greek tragic hero. Wild stuff!
Eric –
Thanks. I’m familiar with a good bit of Merton’s work. He was indeed a pioneer. But sometimes I think he was a bit too optimistic about how much agreement there could be. On the other hand, he was himself born Protestant, so he probably brought a perspective to Gethsemanie that was somewhat different from the usual Catholic ones. I’ll be interested to see what Tracy has to say.
As for the comparison of the pseudo-Denys and the Buddha, no, though I have often been puzzled by the question, I have never learned enough about Buddhist “no self” to know whether what the Buddha calls for the progressive ascetical denial of is the same as what Hume says does not exist anyway, so does not need to be denied otherwise than philosophically (there is no such thing as the self, the self is not a thing) and whether either is the same as that which Thomas Aquinas says we can know only in our awareness of the world, but never as itself an object of thought, or as the pseudo-Denys’ self-that-becomes-indistinguishable-from-God….all I do (seem to) know is that none of these are very friendly to very modern ideas of “the self” as the most immediate object of cosnciousness, the substance of the “I”, or the “I” that is the substance of me….All very puzzling. Indeed, perhaps the best thing to say is that we are right to be puzzled and it’s as well not to yield to Descartes’ certainty of the self….