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.

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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.

Archive

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