Author, historian, and theologian James Carroll will be the featured speaker at Guilford College’s convocation on Oct.15. Carroll will address faculty, students, and staff at 4:30 p.m. on the topic of “Academics and Activism: Past and Future” and will give a public lecture on “Anti-Semitism and the Church: A Scandal for Christians, a Dilemma for Jews” at 8:00 p.m. Both events will be held in Dana Auditorium.Carroll, 58, is the author of seven novels, including The City Below and Mortal Friends. He has also written two memoirs, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, and Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, the scope and context of which could qualify them as history texts just as easily as personal writings.
Carroll is also a prolific poet and playwright, and has published articles in both The New Yorker and The Boston Globe, where he is a syndicated columnist.
His most recent book, the aforementioned Constantine’s Sword, is a history of the interaction between Christians and Jews, from the inception of Christianity to the Holocaust to the rifts developing between Catholics and Jews in their attempts to remember those who died at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
The book, laced with subtle irony and poignant questions about the nature and root of Christian attitudes toward Jews, takes its name from the conversion to Christianity of the Byzantine emperor Constantine in 312 AD, and his subsequent adoption of the cross as his royal symbol. This led, as one reviewer of the text so succinctly put it, to “the faith of a rebel [being] twisted into the ideology of the empire.”
James Carroll, the son of Joseph Carroll, head of Air Force intelligence during the Vietnam War, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1969 and remained one until the mid-70s, when he left the priesthood to become a writer full-time. He was heavily involved in the civil rights movement and in protesting the Vietnam War. His experience of the war is the basis for his book, An American Requiem.
Carroll’s speeches on the 15th promise, at the very least, to be thought-provoking, and if his tendencies carry over to speech from the written word, there may be a crowd of people leaving Dana on Wednesday night, having been forced to reexamine what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be a Jew, what it means to be a human in the third millennium.