Calendar of Events

Carl Grant Events Center, Banquet Hall

Title: The Crucified Beauty That Will Save the World

This lecture will be focused on the Christian idea of beauty in all of its arresting strangeness—especially its insistence that an instrument of suffering and shame has become the Tree of Life, transforming human ugliness into divine loveliness. Specific attention will be given to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, the poetry of G. K. Chesterton, and the hymnody of Isaac Watts.

Speaker: Dr. Ralph C. Wood – University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

Bio: Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas since 1998, holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Texas A&M University-Commerce, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Baylor, he served for 26 years on the faculty of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. He has also taught at Samford University in Birmingham as well as Regent College in Vancouver, and he has held fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and Providence College. His books include The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (University of Notre Dame, 1988); Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2004); Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004); Literature and Theology (Abingdon, 2008); Preaching and Professing: Sermons by a Teacher Seeking to Proclaim the Gospel (Eerdmans, 2009); and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor, 2011).