is a Dominican-American poet, university professor, literary and cultural critic, and translator living in the United States. He has published more than 25 books of poetry, anthologies, translations, and literary criticism.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian and conflict mediator from Ireland. His work centres around themes of language, justice, story and religion. In this hour, Pádraig will explore stories of the past — of the garden of Eden, of Ireland, of gayness — and consider strange vantage points to narrate strange corners of those stories. In form and in free verse, using a musical English that is always informed by the Irish language, Pádraig’s work echoes a longstanding Irish tradition that has learnt much from midrash: ask the questions, explore the corners, raise your hand, object.

Vic Sizemore, novelist and shortfiction writer, speaks in chapel on the interesting dilemma that Christians face in writing “moral fiction.” Sizemore is on campus for the Writers Read program.

Vic Sizemore is a writer of short fiction and novels in which characters wrestle with what it means for them to be Christians in all the human messiness of life. He is also a prolific essayist, contributing frequently to the evangelical channel of Patheos.com.

Sizemore earned his MFA in fiction from Seattle Pacific University. His short stories are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, PANK Magazine Fiction Fix, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Conclave. Excerpts from his novel The Calling are published in Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review, Rock & Sling, and Relief. His fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award for Fiction, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired Reading and a Pushcart Prize. Some of his short stories and chapters from The Calling are available on his blog.

Sizemore teaches at Central Virginia Community College in Lynchburg, VA.

In his 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or Don’t Trust Anyone under 30) Dr. Mark Bauerlein argues that despite unprecedented access to knowledge and information, the latest generation of Americans appears to be “no more learned or skilled than their predecessors, no more knowledgable, fluent, up-to-date or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture.”

Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University and has taught there since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director of the Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published numerous scholarly works, including a highly acclaimed account of a 1906 race riot in Atlanta (Negrophobia). In addition, his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, where his blog eloquently promotes the humanities. A recent essay (2012) in First Things narrates his turn from atheism to Catholicism.

This event is sponsored by the department of as part of the .

Chapel begins with a  short video clip by students from the current chapel video series, “Where have you seen God?”

Penner released her debut novel-in-stories, Shaken in the Water (Foxhead Books), in April 2013. She has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Center for Mennonite Writing, Rhubarb and the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies. She won an honorable mention for the short story “Homebody” in Open City’s RRofihe Trophy contest and an honorable mention for the essay “Mustard Seed” in Bellevue Literary Review’s Burns Archive Prize for nonfiction.

Penner earned a BA in theater and English at EMU and a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She previously taught English to international students at James Madison University and currently resides in New York City.

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