The Catholic Imagination: An Incoherent Idea?

Join the IHE and The Lamp for a discussion on “The Catholic Imagination: An Incoherent Idea?” with Matthew Walther, Jaspreet Singh Boparai, Jane Clark Scharl, and James Matthew Wilson.

A livestream is available here.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai is a former academic and a frequent contributor to The Lamp. He was trained initially as a classicist and was the final student of the late Professor Philip Ford; his was the last-ever PhD awarded in the Department of neo-Latin at Cambridge. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Warburg Institute; the École normale supérieure in Paris; and Clare College, Cambridge, where he completed a dissertation on the history of classical scholarship.

Jane Clark Scharl is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Her work has been featured on the BBC and in many journals and magazines, including The Hopkins Review, The New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and, of course, The Lamp. Her first play, a verse drama in which St. Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin, and Francois Rabelais must solve a Mardi Gras murder before Lent begins, will open as a staged reading in New York this year. She lives in Detroit with her husband and their two children.

James Matthew Wilson has published eleven books, including his most recent book of poems, The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2022). He is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas, in Houston, where he founded the MFA program in Creative Writing, the first such program to be rooted fully in the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition. He serves also as Poet-in-Residence for the Benedict XVI Institute, Editor of Colosseum Books, and Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine.