Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series

The Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series on Religion and Conflict is an endowed lecture series that honors the life-long commitment of Maxine Besser Marshall ('76) and Jonathan Marshall to education, civil liberties, and world peace.

2024 Lecture

Is There God After Prince? Icons in an Age of Last Things

Peter Coviello
Professor and Head of English

University of Illinois Chicago

What can it mean to love the things we love (books, records, people) in a time of disaster, an era of ends? How do our icons speak to us—what news can they deliver—during planet-sized calamity? Taking a cue from the death of Prince, the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, this lecture considers the icon as a herald of possibilities lying just beyond the secular perimeter of the knowable and known. All manner of things find us through our icons. This talk wonders over the fate of our devotion to them in this time of crisis and collapse—an age of Last Things.

Details + Registration

Peter Coviello is the author of six books, including “Make Yourselves Gods,” a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize and “Long Players,” a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Best Books of 2018. His newest book, “Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things,” was selected for The Millions’ ‘Most Anticipated’ list for 2023.

Complete Archive

Date

Title

Speaker

Links

2024 Is There God After Prince? Icons in an Age of Last Things Peter Coviello

2023

Religious Liberty after Dobbs

Cathleen Kaveny

Video

2022

The Soul as the Seat of Aspiration: A Philosophical-Historical Approach

Melvin Rogers

Video

2020

A Crisis in American Christianity? How Scholar-Practitioners Can Engage the Current Moment

David Gushee

Video

2019

Prosperity, Politic, and Pentecostal Power in Nigeria

Anthea Butler

Video

2018

In Search of Our Better Angels: A Story of America’s Civil Religion

Philip Gorski

Video

2017

Religion and Conflict: A View From the State Department

Shaun Casey

2016

Religious Violence in the Age of Enlightenment

Benjamin Kaplan

2014

America and the Religion of No Religion: Or How We Got to "I am Spiritual but Not Religious"

Jeffrey Kripal

2013

Lifestyles of the (Not So) Rich and Religious: Theological Prosperity in an Age of Economic Inequality

Jonathan L. Walton

2012

Taking Women and Religion Seriously: Intersecting Paths

Katherine Marshall

2011

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam

Eliza Griswold

2010

Governing Religion: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Postsecular Age

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

2009

Private Faith/Public Faith: Religion and Government

Daisy Khan

2008

Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im

2007

Sacred and Secular Refigured: Identity, Piety and Politics in a Global Era

Jean Comaroff

2006

'If it Bleeds, it Leads': Does the Media Play a Role in Religious Violence?

Diane Winston

2005

Violence at the Threshold of the Sacred and the Secular

Rene Girard

2004

Democracy and the Limits of Pluralism

Raphael Cohen-Almagor