"Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions." (William Temple, Sr.)

A dialogue on flesh and beauty in Catholicism

With Eve TUSHNET, Author and blogger

Presented by Crossroads Cultural Center

It is a pleasure to have Ms. Eve Tushnet as our guest speaker. Many know of her from her work as a writer and commentator. Many of us have also been struck by her witness of faith. What is most striking about her story is the disarming honesty of her experience, and the purity of her desire to embrace the true, the good and the beautiful. It is not too hard to find intellectually gifted people who find in the richness of the Catholic tradition a playground for their intelligence and aesthetic sense. It is much more rare to find a highly intelligent person who is able to recognize that Christianity is in its core a carnal, human experience, not just a set of intellectual propositions or a list of ethical precepts. In fact, recognizing the concrete, visceral nature of Christianity demands from that type of person the greatest sacrifice: to accept that what is most worth loving will always exceed our ability to understand it. Eve Tushnet writes:

I definitely feel that [the Church] is the place where I need to be because of the Eucharist. That’s what initially made me sure I would need to become Catholic: Its vividness, its visceral quality, the fact that God would do this really emphasizes the importance of our bodies and the importance of the physical world. And also it’s very lurid and scandalous to people today, just as it first scandalized people when Jesus told them what he was going to do. And I think there’s something in that kind of shocking, fleshly, and even materially violent aspect of the Eucharist that responds to the world as we find it, which is shocking, and violent, and lurid. I feel like any religion that made it easier to understand or abstract away from that violence would be hard to believe.

The event is free and open to the public.

About this Event

Date: Thursday, March 23, 2017
Time: 7pm
Location: Crossroads Auditorium
125 Maiden Lane, 15th Floor, NY, NY
(ID required to enter the building)
map

About the Speaker

Eve Tushnet
Blogger at Patheos, and Author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith

Invitation

Download here

Video

Part I
Part II
Part III

Photos - click on image below