“Figuring the Kingdom: The Substance of Things Hoped For”

Description:

In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI proposed that the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love really are the “substance,” the presence in the soul, of “things hoped for. The Kingdom of God is at once present to us now even as it has not yet arrived. How does the Church figure, or imagine, this in-between state? In this lecture, we’ll consider the testimony of saints, popes, philosophers, and poets (Benedict, St. Augustine, Jacques Maritain, and Thomas MacGreevy) all of whom found different ways to figure the kingdom, to express the relationship of our presence, here in a particular place at a particular time, and the everlasting kingdom of God.

Biography:

James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature, the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing , at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, TX, and Catholic Studies Scholar in Residence at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on all manner of subjects secular and divine, and especially on those where we see the two in their intrinsic relation, as truth, goodness, beauty, and being disclose themselves in art and culture, in the political and intellectual life, in our quest for self knowledge and the contemplation of God.  His scholarly work especially focuses on the meeting of aesthetic and ontological form, where the craftsmanship of art-work discloses the truth about being.

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