Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things: A Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana. This year is the 20th anniversary of the National Book Award winning memoir by the renowned historian. The memoir is a powerful depiction of a childhood amidst the sudden changes and upheavals of revolutionary Cuba. Faced by the cruelties and wonders of childhood, Eire recalls the tortuousness of the human heart and human society. We will read the novel in light of the tradition of confessional literature extending back to Augustine’s Confessions.
In this seminar, we will explore the text’s depictions of childhood, sin, confession, and the presence of Christ in the midst of our tumultuous path through the earthly city. In considering the memoir, we will explore a variety of questions. How do we understand the literary nature of memoir? What does it mean to describe a memoir as Catholic? How does our childhood form us as persons? What is the meaning of confession in the Catholic literary tradition?
Our series will feature two sessions with the author himself, Carlos Eire, who is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. In addition to his National Book Award winning memoir, he is the author or co-author of 8 other books focusing especially on the history of Christianity in early modern Europe. His magisterial work, Reformations (2016), won 3 major academic prizes including the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association. His newest monograph, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, is forthcoming this September.
The series will be led by Katy Carl, Novelist and Editor-in Chief of Dappled Things, and will also feature among its session leaders Dr. Terence Sweeney, a scholar of St. Augustine and Theologian-in-Residence at the Collegium Institute, and Bernardo Aparicio García, the founder and publisher of Dappled Things who is completing a family memoir of Colombia.
We will meet four Monday evenings in June, 7:00-8:30pm ET on Zoom.
June 5
June 12
June 19
June 26
Registration:
Early Bird Registration ends Friday May, 12 at 11:59pm: $65
Regular Registration ends Friday, May 26: $75
Click the button below to register.