Speaker Series: Dr. James Matthew Wilson
July 22, 2017
James Matthew Wilson
Associate Professor of Religion & Literature in the Department of Humanities & Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University
“Beauty, the Foundation of the West”
11:00 am, St. John Cantius, Auditorium
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Synopis: Western civilization has been both attacked and defended for a range of reasons, but none of them discern the principle that has made that civilization what it is. This lecture proposes that the West must be understood as participating in a Christian Platonist tradition that is guided by six great insights and none greater than that the world as such is ordered by and to Beauty.
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Bio: James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published six books, including most recently the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015), a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things, and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Wilson is the Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, and also serves on the boards of several learned journals and societies.
Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. He joined the faculty of Villanova in 2008.
You can read more about James on Front Porch Republic.