Monday, October 21, 2013

McBride Lecture for Faith and Literature 2013

If you were able to attend the 2013 McBride Lecture for Faith and Learning on Friday evening, you know what a great event it was. 
Naomi Benaron, author of Running the Rift spoke to the campus about faith and literature from her own context. Although Ms. Benaron is not of the Christian faith, her perspective stretched and grew my faith, as I hope she did many others in attendance. 
Ms. Benaron is a secular Jew. However, this did not keep her from elucidating the importance of faith in all of our lives, as we saw in her novel. 
For Benaron, the main focus of her faith is to make the world a better place. 
"Through our actions, we must repair the world," she said. 
Her central points focus on faith and the world we live in. This is not a perfect world, and is often far from it. Because she speaks from the experience of studying the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, her perspective is shaped by the atrocities that occur all-too-often. 
"The only bridge that can take you from horror to beauty is faith," Benaron said. "Creation trumps destruction every time."
Benaron's own creation, the novel Running the Rift, certainly emphasizes this point. 
What a great night it was!

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