Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture for Meritorious Scholarship Est. 1975
The annual Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture for Meritorious Scholarship provides a public platform from which the claims of the liberal arts in the Christian university are espoused. Delivered each year by a SPU faculty member selected by the Faculty Affairs Committee, the Weter Lecture honors Winifred E. Weter, SPU professor emerita of classics. Her teaching career spanning 40 years (1935-75) exemplifies a life of Christian character and integrity. Her love for the study of classical languages and literature inspired a similar enthusiasm in thousands of her students, and this lecture continues that tradition of inspiration. .
To listen to past Weter Lectures visit our University iTunes.
The 2013 Winifred E. Weter Lecture
Youth, Faith, and the Christian University after Moral Therapeutic Deism: A Reassessment of the National Study of Youth and Religion Findings in Light of Walter Brueggemann's The Creative Word
Jeffrey Keuss, PhD
Professor of Christian Ministry, Theology, and Culture
Associate Dean of Seattle Pacific Seminary
Tuesday, April 9, 2013, 7:30 p.m.
Upper Gwinn Commons, SPU Campus
Lecture incorporates live music, dance, and painting by SPU students and local artists.
Refreshments following.
Jeffrey Keuss, holds a BA in English and psychology from SPU, an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary and a PhD in English literature, theology, and cultural study from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has published articles, chapters and reviews on the interdisciplinary engagement of theology, literature, and contemporary culture and is the North American general editor for the journal Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press) as well as on the advisory board for The Other Journal. He is the author of A Poetics of Jesus: The search for Christ through writing in the nineteenth century, The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Issues in Hermeneutics, Freedom of the Self: Kenosis, Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads, and Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What popular music can teach us about faith, hope and love (Cascade, 2011). He also has two chapters in Cinema Divinite addressing the role of film studies in theological reflection in the work of director Stanley Kubrick. Dr. Keuss is active in the local arts community and a regular panelist on The Kindlings Muse, a monthly live podcast addressing topics of pop culture, creativity, and the arts in relation to faith.
In the 2013 Winifred E. Weter Lecture, Dr. Keuss will reflect on the 10-year anniversary of one of the most influential ongoing research projects in recent memory to assess the nature of faith formation of young people. The effects upon faith communities as a result of the data collected by the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), first begun in 2002 and later published by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton in 2005 as Soul Searching, have been profound. This lecture will review the outcomes drawn from the NSYR data in light of a more sustained biblical and theological reflection on what faith formation in young people should and could be. To this end, the lecture will present what practical theologian Stephen Pattison calls a "critical conversation" with these outcomes in relation to the proposed canonical model of faith formation offered by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann throughout his oeuvre, but with particular attention given to his educational mandates found in The Creative Word: Canon As A Model for Biblical Education.
PDF versions of past Weter Lectures
04-17-12— Resurrection of the Body?: Physicalism and the Possibility of Life After Death
02-02-10— The Chemical Constraints on Creation: Natural Theology and Narrative Resonance