By Bates News. Published on March 5, 2010

In Bates College lecture, Harvard professor of religion to discuss significance of tears

Kimberley Patton, professor of the comparative and historical study of religion at the Harvard Divinity School, offers a lecture titled The Gates of Weeping Are Not Closed: The Powerful Work of Tears in Human Experience at 7 p.m. Monday, March 22, in Bates College’s Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The annual Zerby Lecture in Contemporary Religious Thought at Bates is sponsored by the Bates College multifaith chaplain’s office and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-8273.

Patton received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard. She specializes in ancient Greek religion and archaeology, with research interests in archaic sanctuaries and in the iconography of sacrifice. She also teaches the history of world religions, offering courses in cross-cultural religious phenomenology.

She is the author of The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean (Columbia University Press, 2006) and Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is also co-editor of and contributing author to three other books, including Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Comments are closed.

Categories: Events, Humanities and history, Multifaith Chaplain, Religion and spirituality, Society and culture.

Tags: crying, emotion, gates of weeping, issues of religion, Kimberley Patton.