Guest Scholar:

Bruce Herman

Does beauty matter today? At one time beauty, truth, and goodness stood as the highest universal ideals. But with the scientific and technological turns in culture, beauty has been reduced to benign prettiness. The collapse of the humanities has taken truth and goodness down with it. What if beauty had enduring and urgently needed relevance today? If it could reflect something good and essential in the worlds of science, politics, medicine, education, and mental health? What if beauty actuallyhas the power to help us recover truth and goodness in our struggle against the challenges of our age? Join us as internationally renowned painter and scholar, Bruce Herman, leads us to think about a timely return to beauty–in art and in life.

Interested in Attending

Bruce Herman; A distinguished painter, writer, and speaker. Former professor and founding chair of the Art Department at Gordon College.

Bruce Herman (American, b. 1953) is a painter, writer, and speaker.

Herman’s art has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions — nationally in many US cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston — and internationally in England, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His artwork is featured in many public and private art collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts print collection; The Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; DeCordova Museum in Boston; the Cape Ann Museum; and in many colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada.

Herman taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, and is the founding chair of the Art Department there. He held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts for more than fifteen years, and continues to curate exhibitions and manage the College art collection there.

Herman completed both BFA and MFA degrees at Boston University College of Fine Arts under American artists Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. He was named Boston University College of Fine Arts Distinguished Alumnus of the Year 2006.

Herman’s art may be found in dozens of journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and online art features. He and co-author Walter Hansen wrote the book Through Your Eyes, 2013, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, a thirty-year retrospective of Herman’s art as seen through the eyes of his most dedicated collector.

THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

This society seeks to gather Cornell faculty and graduate students to discuss major themes in biblical and theological studies. Discussion aims to satisfy what Simone Weil once described as the basic need of the soul to consider “every sort of opinion, without the least restriction or reserve.” To this end, we invite dialogue that explores and even challenges historic orthodox beliefs as well as those ideas that reign in the contemporary church, academy, and culture.

Our dialogue is collegial and cordial without shying away from the hard questions scholars face in their life and work. Members of the group seek to nurture discussion by listening attentively to one another, guarding the length of our responses, and avoiding diversions to pet issues unrelated to the subject at hand. In short, we seek to embody a uniquely Christian form of intellectual hospitality that we can pass on to future generations.