Join Oregon Humanities for a conversation about trust, faith, and beauty with Christian Wiman. In his poems and essays, Wiman explores religious and secular belief, hope and despair, sickness and memory. In all that he writes and does, Wiman asks what we can count on or believe in as we aim to live lives full of meaning and connection.
Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, including Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, and Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. Currently a professor at Yale Divinity School, Wiman has taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Lynchburg College. From 2003 until 2013 he was the editor of Poetry magazine, the premiere magazine for poetry in the English-speaking world. For the magazine’s centennial year, Wiman edited, with Don Share, The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, and numerous other publications. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and holds two honorary doctorates. His particular interests include modern poetry, the language of faith, “accidental” theology (that is, theology conducted by unexpected means), and what it means to be a Christian intellectual in a secular culture. Raised in West Texas, he now lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
