English Society Tea

Join English Society for late morning tea this semester! We will be meeting every other week on Wednesdays from 11-12 and invite all current and prospective English majors and minors, lovers of literature and creative writing, and friends to join us for conversation, literary hot takes and debates, and the occasional round of trivia! Tea and coffee will be served.

Our February teas will take place on Wednesday the 9th and 23rd.

 

Book Discussion: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

“Grace has a grand laughter in it.”

Monday, February 28th, 8:30-9:30pm
Pryz 331

"In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten."

 

For more information about English Society

Please visit our website, join the "CUA English Society" Facebook group, or follow the English department on Twitter. Alumna Isabelle Rosini also wrote about English Society in the January 2019 issue of The Annex.