Jesuit scholar Fr. Paul G. Crowley, faculty member of Santa Clara University and visiting professor at Stanford, to deliver Fairfield University's Bellarmine Lecture | Press Releases

The 2013 Bellarmine Lecture
"The Elusiveness of God in a Wary Age"
Paul Crowley, S.J., Professor of Religious Studies, Santa Clara University
Wednesday, February 13, 8 p.m.
Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business Dining Room

Image: P Crowley What has become of God?

For many Catholics, the current ecclesiastical "winter" has led not only to alienation from religion but to a sense of deep loss, according to author and Jesuit scholar Fr. Paul G. Crowley, professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. He'll delve into this issue at Fairfield University on Wednesday, February 13 at 8 p.m. when he delivers the 2013 Bellarmine Lecture.

Free and open to the public, the talk, "The Elusiveness of God in a Wary Age," will take place in the Dolan School of Business Dining Room, on the Fairfield campus.

Fr. Crowley said that God has become elusive, and belief itself a problem. "Dogmatism, Catholic identity movements and religious nostalgia cannot reach the depths of this situation," he noted. "We need to rediscover an approach to believing that could recover an authentic sense of the divine transcendence and immanence within the reality we actually inhabit, not in a mythic religious past that offers only false assurances. We need to rediscover God."

This lecture explores possibilities in the theologies of Karl Rahner, Jean-Luc Marion, and Kathryn Tanner.

Fr. Crowley, the Santa Clara Jesuit Community Professor in Religious Studies, teaches at the Santa Clara University Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. He is a visiting professor at Stanford University. He holds degrees from Stanford, Columbia University, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and the Jesuit School of Theology. Fr. Crowley is the author of articles and books, including "Unwanted Wisdom: Suffering, the Cross and Hope" (Crossroad/Herder), and the forthcoming "Robert McAfee Brown: Spiritual and Prophetic Writings" (Orbis).

The Bellarmine Lecture series was set up to bring distinguished Jesuit scholars to deliver a public lecture at Fairfield, and is sponsored by Fairfield's Center for Catholic Studies, which is directed by Dr. Paul Lakeland, the Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J. Chair in Catholic Studies.

For more information about other events sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies, visit http://www.fairfield.edu/cs/ .