The mission of the Center for Spiritual Life is to challenge the mind, nurture the spirit and develop the talents of all those who utilize the services of the Center.
Read Our CovenantBurchenal Lecture Series
Celebrating the 2018–19 College Program Series Theme:
Citizens: Activism, Poetry & Art
The World Is Wrong: Microaggressions, Poetics and the Problem of Evil in Citizen
Daniel Spoth, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Literature, Eckerd College
Thursday, September 20, 2018 – 7:30 p.m., Fox Hall
This lecture places award-winning poet Claudia Rankine both within and outside of the broader traditions of American lyric poetry and critical writing about race—showing how her focus on small secondhand experiences of racism leads to a more expansive concern with the ideals of “post-racial” America and, still more broadly, the many social, political and environmental issues that afflict the world today.
Daniel Spoth, Ph.D., is associate professor of literature at Eckerd College. A native of Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley (famous for giant cabbages and vice presidential hopefuls), he has been steadily working his way southward since birth, receiving his B.A. from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, before teaching at Eckerd. His work has appeared in ELH, Mississippi Quarterly, Journal of Ecocriticism, Americana and The Eudora Welty Review, among other publications. He is particularly interested in how historically misused environments are reimagined in modern and postmodern contexts, and is currently at work on a manuscript on that subject
A New and Unsettling Force: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Fight to End Poverty
The Rev. Liz Theoharis, Ph.D, Presbyterian Minister, Social Activist and Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2018 – 7:30 p.m., Fox Hall
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis will speak on the long-term work of organizing a movement of the poor and dispossessed, the roles religion and a liberation theology have in advancing transformative change in this country, and the recent efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
The Rev. Liz Theoharis, Ph.D.,—co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—has spent the last two decades with grassroots, community-led antipoverty organizations working to build the movement to end poverty. In her book, Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, she argues that ending poverty is possible and that a theology that suggests otherwise has stifled the growth of a transformative movement to end poverty.
Previous Burchenal Lectures
- Shaved Heads and Celibate Bodies: Gender and Freedom in Female Buddhist Monasticism
Amy Paris Langenberg, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Eckerd College
Tuesday, March 27, 2018, 7.30 p.m., Fox Hall
