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A Nobel Prize winner will join an award-winning novelist and the editor of a national Christian magazine as headliners in November’s Spirit & Place Festival, produced by the Polis Center at IUPUI.
Joining 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams in a “public conversation,” considered the centerpiece of Spirit & Place, will be Middle Passage author Charles Johnson and Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis.
The eighth annual community festival will run Nov. 8-19 in downtown Indianapolis. The public conversation is scheduled Nov. 9 at 4:30 p.m. in Clowes Memorial Hall on the Butler University campus.
Author Scott Sanders, a Distinguished Professor emeritus at IU Bloomington, will moderate the public conversation. The event is free, but tickets are required and are available at the Clowes box office.
This year’s festival theme is “Remembering & Reconciling.” Reconciling diverse opinions and values will be at the heart of all events connected to the 11-day festival that focuses on the arts, humanities and religion. More than 90 workshops, exhibits, concerts and other events are scheduled across central Indiana as part of the annual event.
“Johnson, Wallis and Williams were chosen for the public conversation because they can approach the ‘Remembering & Reconciling’ theme from multiple points of view: social justice, literature, history, politics and ethics,” said Anne Laker of the Polis Center.
• Williams won the Nobel Prize for her activism in Northern Ireland, and eventually founded the World Center of Compassion for Children International, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting and educating children worldwide.
• Johnson’s Middle Passage is an historical novel set in the 1830s that won the 1990 National Book Award. It is the tale of a newly freed slave who inadvertently ends up on a ship bound for Africa.
• As editor of Soujourners, Wallis oversees the editorial content of a magazine that addresses faith, politics and culture from a biblical and social justice perspective.
At least nine 2003 Spirit & Place events will take place on the IUPUI campus, including: readings by Johnson and writer Sherman Alexie; a dialogue about death and dying from a Buddhist perspective; an exhibit and seminar about the Benedictine nuns of Indiana; a German film; a session about Arab-Americans, a juried art exhibit related to “Remembering & Reconciling,” (see Browser column, page A2) and a seminar about spiritual issues in the workplace.
Among the IUPUI units participating are: the ACT-OUT Ensemble, the Division of Labor Studies, Campus and Community Life, the Max Kade German Center, the IU Center on Philanthropy, the Cultural Arts Gallery, University Library, and Organizational Leadership and Supervision. Other participants include the schools of Law and Medicine, and the departments of English, History, Women’s Studies, and World Languages and Cultures.
“Spirit & Place is another good example of IUPUI’s civic engagement,” said Paula Parker-Sawyers, associate director of the Polis Center.
The Polis Center initiated the Spirit & Place Festival in 1996 as part of its Project on Religion and Urban Culture. It is a collaborative effort of community building among dozens of organizations, churches, arts groups, universities, museums and civic groups who sponsor individual events. The center is part of the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.
For a complete listing of festival events, call the Polis Center at 317-274-2455 or visit this Web site:
http://www.spiritandplace.org
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