The Seventh Annual Symposium on Benedictine Spirituality will explore the Saint Benedict of Dante’s
poetic vision. Professor Hawkins writes and speaks on a range of literary and scholarly topics, reaching broad audiences beyond the academic community.
 
Peter Hawkins, our keynote speaker, is Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. His writing and teaching have long been focused on Dante. His books include Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (1999), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), Dante, a Brief History (2006), and Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). Chapters on the poet can be found in Dante in Context, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Arts, MLA Approaches to Teaching the “Divine Comedy,” and Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s “Commedia.” He has also published on religious themes in American fiction, most recently in The Bible and the American Short Story (2018), written with Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg.
 
The Friends of St. Benedict offer a yearly symposium on Benedictine Spirituality including lectures, discussions and community gatherings bringing together lay people, monastics, and scholars to explore the ways that Benedictine wisdom can reshape our relationships with God and with our neighbors.

More information and register here.