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Religion lecture tackles the two lives of a saint
April 04, 2008
Brenda Ihssen will examine the two lives of St. John the Almsgiver at a Department of Religion Public Lecture Tuesday, April 8 at 7:30 p.m. in Xavier 201.
A visiting assistant professor of religion, Ihssen’s lecture is titled “‘Strip the rich right down to their shirts’: St. John the Almsgiver and the Transformation of the City.”
St. John the Almsgiver was a seventh-century Patriarch of Alexandria. Unlike the average life of a saint, his two biographies are alarmingly tame. The normal elements of such literature — wondrous miracles and divine visions — are conspicuously absent.
However, careful attention to the largely ignored lives of St. John reveal that through the defense of doctrine and care for the poor, he sought to transform the city of Alexandria and redeem it for an empire balanced on the threshold of political and religious chaos.
Ihssen teaches courses in the history of early Christianity and specific topics in historical theology and Orthodox Christianity. She is a member of the International Honors faculty at PLU.
Her research is focused primarily on the social ethics found in the writing of fourth century Greek Christian authors and in monastic and spiritual texts of Orthodox Christianity during the age of the Byzantine Empire. She holds a doctorate from the University of St. Michael’s in Toronto.
St. John the Almsgiver was a seventh-century Patriarch of Alexandria. Unlike the average life of a saint, his two biographies are alarmingly tame. The normal elements of such literature — wondrous miracles and divine visions — are conspicuously absent.
However, careful attention to the largely ignored lives of St. John reveal that through the defense of doctrine and care for the poor, he sought to transform the city of Alexandria and redeem it for an empire balanced on the threshold of political and religious chaos.
Ihssen teaches courses in the history of early Christianity and specific topics in historical theology and Orthodox Christianity. She is a member of the International Honors faculty at PLU.
Her research is focused primarily on the social ethics found in the writing of fourth century Greek Christian authors and in monastic and spiritual texts of Orthodox Christianity during the age of the Byzantine Empire. She holds a doctorate from the University of St. Michael’s in Toronto.