Tuesday, October 1 and Wednesday, October 2, 2024
Professor Douglas Christie, Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, will offer two talks at Marquette as part of the
“Thinking Like a Mountain: Contemplative Ecology in the Anthropocene”
Tuesday, October 1. 4 pm. Raynor Library, Beaumier Suites.
The environmental thinker Aldo Leopold once asked: can we learn to "think like a mountain?" That is, can we learn to recenter our thinking, our ethics, our spiritual practice—beyond our own narrow concerns and within the living world? In this moment of global climate change, we are returning to this question with a new sense of urgency, asking ourselves what it will mean for us to relinquish control and learn to live with greater regard for the natural world. This lecture will consider what it will mean for us to cultivate an ecocentric, contemplative spiritual practice in the Anthropocene.
“Contemplative Practice in an Age of Distraction”
Wednesday, October 2. 2 pm. Marquette Hall 105.
In this discussion facilitated by Professor Douglas E. Christie, we will consider how contemplative and mindfulness practice can help us recover our capacity for attention and awareness in a time of chronic distraction. Drawing on ancient Christian and Buddhist teachings about attention, we will consider what it might mean to resist the increasingly aggressive "attention economy" and cultivate a contemplative politics and spirituality.
Professor Christie is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has held fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the NEH. From 2013-15 he served as co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on the desert as spiritual landscape.
Professor Christie's visit is co-sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, the Marquette Core Curriculum, the University Honors Program, and the Departments of English and Theology.