![[University of Waterloo]](/goldbar.gif)
| Friday |
Monday, August 25, 2003
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Editor: Chris Redmond credmond@uwaterloo.ca |
Fall term classes start Monday, September 8. Fee payments for the fall are due September 3 if they're made by bank transfer, or today (today!) if made by cheque.
Faculty members who still need courseware for the fall term are asked to contact the graphics department as soon as possible. The university's Access Copyright (formerly Cancopy) license expires at the end of this month, and after that date graphics' staff cannot guarantee how quickly they will be able to clear permissions for copyrighted material outside of our license.
Incidentally, graphics' Davis copy centre will remain closed today and tomorrow, and will re-open on Wednesday at 8 a.m. If you have urgent copying needs in the meantime, Carbon Copy (E2 2353), Express Copy (LIB 218), Pixel Planet (MC 2018), and the main graphics centre (COM) are all still open.
It's going to be a big and busy fall term, and not just because of the enrolment boom and the opening of a new building, the Centre for Environmental and Information Technologies. Here's a list of just a few of the major events worth noting on the calendar as the term gets rolling:
Manning will speak October 31 on "Living the Interface Between Faith and Politics," a topic much like the one Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark addressed at St. Jerome's in September 2002. And like Clark, Manning is coming to the St. Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience to give its annual Wintermeyer Lecture.
The centre has just announced its series of lectures for 2003-04. Says its web site: "Over the past century it has become the conventional wisdom in Canada that faith should be a private, not a public, matter and that the separation of church and state meant that there was no legitimate place for faith perspectives in the public square. Mr. Manning argues that in practice it is neither possible nor desirable to keep faith and politics in separate water-tight compartments. In a country like Canada, with its deep religious traditions, it is not possible to discuss current public perceptions of morality and ethics while denying the religious dimension."
As with all the centre's lectures -- which start at 7:30 p.m. in Siegfried Hall at St. Jerome's -- admission is free.
One of the lectures in the coming season will touch on St. Jerome's and UW directly. Rev. Jim Waal, retired history professor and former president of St. Jerome's, will speak November 7 about "The Birth of a Catholic University: St. Jerome's and the Kingsdale Years,," recalling the period in the 1950s when the college was housed in south Kitchener, in a building near what's now Fairview Mall.
The overall theme for the 2003-04 lecture series will be "From Hate to Love: Are There Pathways to Peace?" Centre director David Seljak writes: "If one ought to see God in all things, how does one account for the existence of pain and disease, for war, prejudice, and interpersonal conflict? How can we unite our yearning for love, peace, and human harmony in a world so torn by conflict and contradiction? Are there pathways to peace that one might find in spiritual or psychological reflection, in liturgical celebration or in institutional renewal?"
On November 14, Cynthia Mahmood of Notre Dame University will speak on "Understanding Terrorists and Martyrs: Personal Encounters with Religious Militants". And on March 26, psychologist Christopher Burris will give the annual Waterloo Region Catholic School Board Lecture, discussing "hate" and offering "a psychogical definition intended to aid in recognizing and responding to hate in its various forms."
Other topics this year will range from "The Next Pope and the Future of the Church" to "Pain and the Soul." Altogether the season will include 10 lectures and two special workshops, one of them led by prominent Roman Catholic activist Mary Jo Leddy on November 15.
The winning entries are as diverse in genre -- including fiction, poetry, theatre and letters -- as they are in tone and scope, ranging from "the serious to the comic, the poignant to the profane." Rooke himself sent in seven stories under a variety of comic pseudonyms, later modestly explaining that "Such is the power of language that almost any dashing phrase or image can excite the writer's mind and send us hopping to the page." Three of these stories appear in the issue.
Editor Kim Jernigan describes the "Bad Men Who Love Jesus" contest as "a bit of a lark: irreverent, but not too irreverent. In fact, if we thought of the religious implications at all -- and I can't say that we did -- we would have found them quite conventional. . . . Don't most of our stories, both religious and secular, turn on the theme of human imperfection, the quest to know and the courage to act upon the good, or, failing that, to find forgiveness and redemption?"
However, there was a moment when it looked like "Bad Men Who Love Jesus" would not come to be. When the 9/11 tragedy occurred just before the final selections were made, the editors were forced to rethink the project. "Suddenly there these bad men were, strutting the world stage," Rooke explains. "It took a raft of splendid submissions to revive us." In the end, the editors decided to add the "Apocalypse" section, a series of four pieces originally broadcast on CBC ("Loss & Legacy: September 11th"), as a means "to incorporate something that would give a sense of the moral climate in which the issue would be received as well as the one in which it was conceived."
The publication of such a stunning, provocative and unique collection could not have come at a better time for The New Quarterly. "Bad Men Who Love Jesus," issue 86, is the first issue to come out since the magazine's impressive showing at this year's National Magazine Awards. The small literary mag, published out of St. Jerome's University, swept the literary categories at this year's Awards, taking the gold for Fiction (for Anne Fleming's "Gay Dwarves of America") as well as the gold for Poetry (for Alison Pick's "Question and Answer"), and beating out much better-heeled publications.
"Bad Men Who Love Jesus" hit the newsstands mid-July and will be formally launched on Saturday, September 6, at the Eden Mills Writers Festival by its guest editor, Leon Rooke, and editor-in-chief Kim Jernigan. Several writers will be reading from their contributions to the collection.
CAR