Poetry as a Way of Attentiveness: A Workshop


Dr. David Mahan, Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University

Join us this Sunday, November 20 at 10:00 am for a workshop in poetry as a way of attentiveness led by Dr. David Mahan of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. In this workshop we will read select poems together, practicing attentiveness to the poetry to learn how poetry nurtures our ability to be attentive ourselves. The workshop is for those who read poetry and those who do not!

Dr. Mahan is a Lecturer in Religion and Literature in the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. A graduate of Yale Divinity School in religion and literature (1995) and winner of the Religion and the Arts Prize, Dr. Mahan has focused on the relationship between works of the literary imagination and the tasks of Christian theology, teaching classes that offer theological readings of 20th-21st century fiction and poetry, and Christian poetics. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge specifically explored the connection between poetic form and the witnessing aims of a responsive theological discourse. He published his dissertation under the title “An Unexpected Light”: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (Princeton Monographs 2009). In addition to numerous papers and book reviews, his recent essay, “Revised Versions: Poetry as Bible Reading”, was published in Christianity and Literature. Having served as a campus minister at Yale since 1987, Dr. Mahan is currently the Executive Director of the Rivendell Institute at Yale, a Christian research and study center founded in 1995, where he also co-directs the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts.

You are welcome to join us in person on the Fifth Floor of the Parish House. Contact us to learn more and to join online.

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