Princeton University Professor to Lecture at Princeton Seminary on Evil, Egotism, and the Sacred in Film

Princeton, NJ, August 7, 2007–Jeffrey Stout, professor of religion at Princeton University, will deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary in a series of five lectures and five film screenings beginning Monday, September 24. The series is titled “A Light That Shines in the Darkness: Evil, Egotism, and the Sacred in Film,” and will include screenings of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Lars von Trier, Yasujiro Ozu, Nathaniel Dorsky, Stan Brakhage, and two rarely seen films by the late avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos: his six-minute, 16mm 1968 film Bliss, and a thirty-minute preview excerpt from his 16mm eighty-hour masterwork Eniaios, scheduled to premiere in June 2008 in Greece.

The schedule for film screenings and lectures is as follows:

Week 1

Monday, September 24, First Screening: Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt (108 minutes, 16mm, 1943)

Tuesday, September 25, First Lecture: “In the Shadow of Darkness”

Week 2

Monday, October 1, Second Screening: Frank Capra, Meet John Doe (122 minutes,16mm, 1941)

Tuesday, October 2, Second Lecture: “Modern Horrors and Democratic Hope”

Week 3

Monday, October 8, Third Screening: Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves (159 minutes, 16mm, 1996, CinemaScope)

Tuesday, October 9, Third Lecture: “The Sacred Made Visible”

Week 4

Monday, October 15, Fourth Screening: Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story (35mm, 1953)

Tuesday, October 16, Fourth Lecture: “Now and Then”

Week 5

Monday, November 5, Fifth Screening: Gregory Markopoulos, Bliss (6 minutes, 16mm, 1967); a preview excerpt from Gregory Markopoulos’s upcoming film, Eniaios (approximately 30 minutes, 16mm, premiere scheduled for June 2008 in Greece); Nathaniel Dorsky, The Visitation (18 minutes, 16mm, 2002); and Stan Brakhage, untitled handpainted film known as For Marilyn (11 minutes, 16mm, 1992).

Tuesday, November 6, Fifth Lecture: “All Mean Egotism Vanishes”

The Monday film screenings will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Theater on the Princeton University campus, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton (enter from the parking lot side). The Tuesday lectures will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Cooper Conference Room at the Erdman Center, Center of Continuing Education, 20 Library Place, on the Princeton Seminary campus.

Stout earned his Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University and joined the faculty there in 1975. He is the author of Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2005), Ethics after Babel (Princeton University Press, 2001), and The Flight from Authority (Notre Dame, 1981). Ethics after Babel won the award for excellence from the American Academy of Religion in 1989. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Ethics, The Monist, New Literary History, Soundings, The Journal of Religion, Religious Studies, and The Journal of Religious Ethics. He is also president of the American Academy of Religion.

The Stone Lectures were created in 1871 by Levi P. Stone, Esquire, of Orange, New Jersey, a director and also a trustee of the Seminary. He created the foundation for the lectureship in 1883.

Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812, the first seminary established by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.  It is the largest Presbyterian Seminary in the country, with more than 700 students in seven graduate degree programs.

For more information about the lecture series, visit http://www.ptsem.edu/lectureships/index.php or call the Communications/Publications Office at 609.497.7760.