Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri. A librettist, essayist, translator, and author of a dozen poetry collections, he has long been a distinguished voice in American religious poetry and an influence on many of the poets we have featured on this podcast. We’re talking today about his latest collection, Correspondence with My Greeks, published this fall by Slant Books.

Hello listeners, we wanted to let you all know of a new podcast series from the Center coming this Monday, January 25th 2021, called “Faith and Imagination.” This new podcast series will feature interviews between Dr. Matthew Wickman, founding director of the BYU Humanities Center, and various scholars and others who address the cross sections of religious and spiritual life both creatively and insightfully. The podcast explores questions such as “how do we envision our highest ideals and deepest commitments? How do we name and express our most expansive sense of who we are?” You can subscribe here, or else search “Faith and Imagination” in the search bar of your favorite podcast distributer or else go to our website, www.humanitiescenter.byu.edu, and you’ll be able to subscribe to the new “Faith and Imagination” podcast feed, the first episode of which will be out this coming Monday, Jan. 25th.

We also wanted to let you know that the feed for this show, the BYU Humanities Center Podcast, will continue to publish episodes and interviews with scholars, guests, and friends of the BYU Humanities Center, so keep your eye on this feed in addition to the new one. Thanks again for listening.

Intersections between areas of scholarly inquiry and areas of creative expression are both fraught with complexity and ripe with opportunity. Where and how these spheres of academic, intellectual and creative work inform each other is often unique to the individual performing that work. But what happens when these two areas—the academic and artistic—also engage the work of advocacy, of inspiring social and political change?

Our guest on this episode of the BYU Humanities Center Podcast is Professor Cherene Sherrard, the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. She is the author of many important scholarly pieces that take up questions of belonging and global black identity, most recently through the theoretical frameworks of Archipelagic American studies and eco criticism. These topics are similarly considered in her excellent creative publications, including a recently published collection of poetry titled Grimoire, published by Autumn House Press, as well as an engaging essay titled “Saltworks” published in Terrain magazine. We spoke with Professor Sherrard about how these pieces and their associated areas of inquiry speak to the current and urgent conversations about race and racism in the United States, and how harmony between these areas of academic and intellectual work can forward the nation’s and world’s progress towards greater racial equality and justice.

Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director BYU Humanities Center, and Sam Jacob, BYU Humanities Center Intern.

Produced and edited by Brooke Brown and Sam Jacob.

Poetry represents perhaps the most elegant use of language, the most delicate expression of the wide range of moods and feelings that make us most deeply human. For that reason, poetry can move us to think differently, behave differently, even sometimes believe differently. In this episode, we spoke with David Marno, Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley, about his beautiful book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago UP, 2016). Marno takes as his subject a stirring sonnet of the English poet, John Donne, and shows how Donne’s poem works to focus our attention as it stirs our souls. 

Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center.

Produced and edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob.

What is the role of religious universities like BYU? How should they resemble or differ from secular universities, and has their role evolved in the past few decades? Or will it? Our guest on this episode of the BYU Humanities Center Podcast is John Tanner, former Academic Vice President of BYU and, most recently, President of BYU-Hawaii. John has devoted decades to the subject of education and in 2017 he published a book titled Learning in the Light, a collection of his speeches given at BYU. We ask him about what surprises him about how BYU has changed over the years and what challenges he envisions for it in the years to come. We also speak to him about the educational ideals of BYU and what it would mean to realize them more fully.

Interview by Matthew Wickman, founding director of the BYU Humanities Center.

Produced and edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob.

Contemplative studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field in universities. It explores the intersection of what we learn with how we learn, asserting that minds that are aware of their own processes, minds that take a contemplative approach toward learning, not only digest facts but also undergo transformative experiences. In most universities, contemplative study fuses brain science with techniques of Eastern meditation, often inspired by Buddhism. Our guest is Jacob Sherman, a professor of philosophy and religion and chair of the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sherman is the author of an article titled “On the Emerging Field of Contemplative Studies and its Relationship to the Study of Spirituality” which was published in the volume The Soul of Higher Education, edited by Margaret Benefiel and Bo Karen Lee. What does Sherman like about contemplative studies, what worries him, and what’s missing?

Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center.

Produced and Edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob.

What is literature? For much of western history, the word simply designated “educated writing” or “discourse,” a meaning it still retains. However, since the turn of the nineteenth century, literature has usually meant “imaginative writing,” and some kinds of literature, like the genre of romance, is more, shall we say, “literary” than others, more rooted in imaginative flights of fancy. Our guest is Scott Black, Professor of English literature and chair of the English department at the University of Utah. Professor Black is the author of Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction, published in 2019 by the University of Virginia Press, and it makes the compelling case that literature, especially in its most playful, most unrealistic, most imaginative, most romantic forms is precisely what we need today.

Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center

Produced and Edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob

Scotland is a small nation that has exerted an outsized influence on the modern world, an influence ranging from politics and economics, to university disciplines, the arts, and even the study of literature. But Scotland also bears a fascinating history within Britain, a history of influence, resistance, and self reflection. The guest of this episode of the BYU Humanities Center Podcast is Professor Cairns Craig, the Glucksman Chair of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Over a long and distinguished career, Professor Craig has written widely about Scottish literature, culture and history. He’s the author most recently of The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture, and Independence published in 2018 by Edinburg University Press. Professor Craig talked to us about what Scotland’s rich history can teach us about the modern world and about the role of the arts in forming our identities, culturally and even nationally.

Interview by Matthew Wickman, Founding Director, BYU Humanities Center

Produced and Edited by Brooke Browne and Sam Jacob