The third annual Cushing Distinguished Lecture in Religious Studies will be presented by Professor Ann Grace ("A.G.") Mojtabai of the University of Tulsa on Wednesday, April 14, 2010. The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Maureen A. Fay Center in the Health Professions Facility on the McNichols Campus. Mojtabai is the author of eight novels, two short-story collections, and a non-fiction work, Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, based on interviews with workers at the Pantex nuclear assembly plant. She has taught at Hunter College, New York University, Harvard, and the University of Tulsa. She has received two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the American South. 

Jewish by background, several of her novels concern Catholic priests, and she shows some familiarity with the contents, frequently moldy, of rectory refrigerators. One book, Called Out, involves a priest who is among the first on the scene of a jetliner crash in west Texas. Her first short story collection, Soon, is based on her work as a volunteer in a Hospice in Amarillo, and her second concerns people who travel (as she often does) by cross-country Greyhound bus.

Her fiction is offbeat, unromantic, and sparce, unblinking in its rendering of ordinary people with their quirks, illusions, and often unrealized hopes. "I have always written about people who live (spiritually and emotionally, if not physically) on the margins and in the gaps," she says. Mojtabai is unsparing and yet compassionate towards the characters she describes, a realist who adheres to E. M. Forster's dictum, "Only Connect." She has thought deeply and written about the intersection of religion and literature, and it is no accident that figures with strong religious backgrounds populate her works, from Christian fundamentalists to Muslims in the Middle East, where she has also lived.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Justin Kelly, S.J., in whose honor this year's Cushing lecture is being offered, has known Mojtabai for almost 20 years, and calls her "an exciting writer and an extraordinary person. She is a worthy successor to the first two Cushing lecturers, social ethicist Gary Dorrien and feminist biblical scholar Elizabeth Shussler Fiorenza. We are deeply grateful to Doctors Ralph '99 and Barbara '02 Cushing for endowing this lecture series, making it possible for us to bring these distinguished people to UDM."