“The influences of Catholicism can be found in the vocabulary, rhetorical structures and syntax and the very substance of every poem I write,” said Lawrence Joseph, a professor of law at St. John’s University and author of five volumes of poetry. Joseph listed several artists who drew heavily from their Catholic roots, including novelist Don DeLillo (FCO ’58) short-story author Flannery O’Connor, film director Martin Scorsese and Pulitzer Prize-Winning historian Gary Wills.

Scorsese, Joseph said, found “a strong sense of the oscillation between the sacred and the profane” in Catholicism and Wills called the religion “its own field of tangible and intangible truths . . . not a bad world for a poet to have been born into or to have grown up in.”

The discussion of “The Indelible Mark: The Writer and a Catholic Childhood,” was preceded by the authors’ individual readings of their work. Panel member Stuart Dybek, distinguished writer-in-residence at Northwestern University and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, read sections from his short story Thread, about a fourth-grade boy who accidentally swallows a gold thread from his Knights of Christ uniform sash during Mass and suddenly realizes he has broken his fast. As he stands before the priest for communion, he realizes that receiving communion without having fasted would be a mortal sin; he doesn’t know what to do.

Dybek outlined two approaches that Catholic writers can take toward their religious upbringing. Writers, he said can embrace the mythos of Catholicism, so that their own writing mirrors the religious in its primitivism, incantation and metaphor. The second approach, he said, is writing from a point of view of “the rational mind realizing how the faith of religion is not living up to itself.”

“In my story, the moment the kid loses his faith is when he realizes the ridiculous stuff he has to go through because he’s swallowed a thread,” Dybek said.

He cautioned, however, that it’s hard to put religious influence into categories. He cited several Jewish writers whose work inspired him to write some of his best work on his relationship to his Catholicism.

“If I had to divide things up, though, I’d divide it between fundamentalism in all religions and liberalism,” he said. “[Approaches] to religion have more in common with each other than individual religion.”

Patricia Hampl, a memoirist and the McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, moderated the event. Hampl questioned whether Post-Vatican II writers would experience the same nostalgia for Catholicism as previous generations of Catholic writers, and whether a strong Catholic identity was beginning to slip away in younger generations.

Panelist Valerie Sayers (FCLC ’73), author of five novels and recipient of the Pushcart Prize for fiction, said that creative writers would always step around the rational to get to the religious mystery of something in their work.

“When I was a child, I thought it was very clever [of the Catholic Church]that whenever you had a question, it was a ‘mystery,’” she said. “What a great church.”

“But I embrace it now,” she added.

WHO:         Fordham Center on Religion and Culture
WHAT:       The Indelible Mark: The Writer and a Catholic Childhood
WHERE:    Fordham University, Pope Auditorium, 113 West 60th Street
WHEN:      6 to 8 p.m. | Tuesday, December 9, 2008
RSVP:       Free and open to the public [email protected], (212) 636-7347

Patricia Hampl, poet and memoirist, author of A Romantic Education, Virgin Time and most recently The Florist’s Daughter. She is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the English department’s MFA program.

Stuart Dybek, author of three collections of short stories, I Sailed with Magellan, The Coast of Chicagoand Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, and two collections of poetry, Streets in Their Own Ink andBrass Knuckles.  His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic and in Best American Fiction and Best American Poetry. He is distinguished writer in residence at Northwestern University, and was a 2007  MacArthur fellow.

Lawrence Joseph, poet, critic, essayist. His books of poetry include Into It, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos, Before Our Eyes and Shouting at No One, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. He teaches law at St. John’s University School of Law and wrote Lawyerland, a book of prose.

Valerie Sayers, author of five novels, Who Do You Love and Brain Fever–both named “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review—Due East, How I Got Him Back and The Distance Between Us.  She has received a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Notre Dame.