Events Calendar

On Wednesday, Feb 7, poet Martha Serpas will deliver a poetry reading from 6:00-7:15 in TDC 407. This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Forum and Slattery Center, The Ellacuría Initiative, The Jesuit Center, and the Department of English & Theatre’s University Reading Series.

"Ecotheological Longing and Its Double Effect"

In her above titled address, Martha Serpas laments a homeland already destroyed by climate change while supplicating for its rescue. That paradox, for Serpas, follows Paul Tillich’s definition of Providence: There is less a divine plan than “a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation” which cannot be destroyed" not by human disregard, violence, despair, or abandonment.

Double Effect, her fourth volume of poetry, contains meditations on ecological destruction, maternal attachment, and the restless and obsessive longing for God. “Everything I experience of God, I know through the marsh,” she writes.

Through an expansive and sometimes converse reading of Aquinas’s Doctrine of Double Effect, Serpas will invite a conversation about an elegiac ecotheology without sacredness or profanity, discrete creation or destruction. “Not every evil comes to harm.”

“Double Effect’s intimacy and universality combine with elements of local color to convey a spiritual witness and conciliation concerned as much with individual identity as it [is] with exploring spiritual quandaries and the workings of logic and language.” Michelle Antoinette Nicholson, New Orleans Review

MARTHA SERPAS has written four volumes of poetry, including The Dirty Side of the Storm and most recently Double Effect. She earned a PhD from the University of Houston in Literature and Creative Writing, and an MDIV from Yale Divinity School. She co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about Louisiana’s coastal land loss. She teaches at the University of Houston and co-directs the narrative and lyric health program Scripts at UH’s Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. She is a hospital and psychedelic chaplain.