The Wabash College Lecture Committee invite you to hear speaker, Dr. Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes, at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 1, in Lovell Lecture Room (room 101) in Baxter Hall. She will talk on “Art, The Erotic, and Chastity: Recovering a Christian Appreciation of the Sexual.”
Delkeskamp-Hayes explains “My talk on the erotic in art, chastity and a Christian appreciation of the sexual is about philosophy, a philosophical reflection on the experience of those who ‘consume’ art and on those who ‘produce’ art, that is, on from where to draw criteria concerning what kinds of experiences one should expose oneself (and one’s children) to given the fact that ‘art’ and ‘higher culture’ always seem to suggest something worthy of attention and dedication. Ever since art has become ‘for its own sake’ (and for the market), defining such criteria has become very difficult. I claim that the erotic dimension of art (in both its formal and material senses) is one area where this problem can be assessed (there are others, of course). My thesis is, that in order to draw a limit in this regard, the concept of chastity is helpful, even though it has been almost lost in an age of increasing secularization. If art is about experience, and (at least in some areas) about ever more invasive and shocking experience, a category like chastity permits us to decide where to draw a limit. But in order to make sense of chastity you must have a very robustly Christian understanding about what sexuality is about. So my second leg is this Christianity.”
Delkeskamp-Hayes has served as director of European Programs for International Studies in philosophy and medicine since 1977. She has published numerous articles on moral philosophy and medical ethics for both American and European journals, and she serves as associate editor of Christian Bioethics: A Non-Ecumenical Journal in Medical Morality .
Her lecture is free and open to the public.