Bestselling Author Daniel Mendelsohn Giving 2019 Cardin Lecture

BALTIMORE – International bestselling author, award-winning critic and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn will deliver the 2019 Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 6 p.m., at Loyola University Maryland (McGuire Hall - Andrew White Student Center, 4501 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21210).

Free and open to the region’s academic and religious communities and the general public, the lecture is titled Latkes with the Priests in Lwów: Jews and Christians, Harmony and Horror in Prewar Poland. Delving into a rich store of family anecdote and legend, Mendelsohn will explore how relative harmony between diverse cultures and religions can devolve into tales of horror – and, sometimes, of heroism.

“We look forward to an engaging presentation by Daniel Mendelsohn – a respected academic and prominent public intellectual whose writing is fluent and accessible,” said Mark Osteen, director of Loyola University Maryland's Center for the Humanities, which annually hosts and sponsors the Cardin Lecture.

“Learning how people of different religions and cultures can come together and live in harmony is extremely relevant today when tribalism is surging in Europe, when many people in the United States are clinging to their narrow versions of their traditions, and when there is a world-wide refugee crisis,” Osteen added.

In addition to serving as editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books and the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, Mendelsohn teaches classics and literature at Bard College. He is the author of eight books, including The Elusive Embrace (a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year); An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus); and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, about Mendelsohn’s quest for infor­mation about six relatives who perished in the Holocaust.

A New York Times and international bestseller, The Lost won the National Books Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the Salon Book Award in the United States, as well as the Prix Médicis in France and many other honors in the United States and abroad. With more than half a million copies in print, it has been published in over 15 languages.

Mendelsohn’s third collection of essays, Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, will be published in October. These essays examine how we continue to look to the Greeks and Romans as models: some argue for the surprising modernity of canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK.

The Cardin Lecture will be followed by a book signing with Mendelsohn and kosher reception featuring desserts and beverages. Registration is required by visiting loyola.edu/cardinlecture. For more information, call 410-617-5273 or email advevents@loyola.edu.

About the Cardin Lecture
The Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture was established in 1986 by the Jerome S. Cardin family to foster exploration of topics in the humanities pertinent to the Jewish and Christian traditions, particularly in the area of Jewish-Christian relations. Notable speakers have included Chaim Potok, His Eminence William Cardinal Keeler, Cornel West, Taylor Branch, Adam Gopnik, Stephen Greenblatt, Susannah Heschel and Robert Alter.