NAAL Newsletter
Summer 2002
Letter from the President
I hope that you are planning to attend our academy meeting, January 2-5, 2003, to be held at the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The hotel is wonderfully situated downtown in National City Center, across from the State Capitol, and is linked by enclosed skywalk to the Convention Center/RCA Dome and the Circle Centre Mall. Nearby are Pan Am Plaza, Eiteljorg Museum, Conseco Field House, Hilbert Theatre (symphony) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (15 minutes away) for you racecar enthusiasts. Within and around the hotel there are many quality restaurants featuring world-class cuisine.
I am also pleased to announce that Frank Burch Brown will be our plenary speaker for this year's convention. He is the Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the Arts at Christian Theological Seminary (CTS) in Indianapolis.
Dr. Brown is author of four books, including Religious Aesthetics (Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) and Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), which has been nominated for the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion and which was chosen by the Association of American Publishers as one of the three “most outstanding” academic books in religion and philosophy for the year 2000. For five years he was Area Editor in arts, media, culture, and religion for a new edition of the multi-volume Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Religion Past and Present), currently being published in German and later in English.
A composer with twenty commissioned works to his credit, Brown is former Director of the Master of Arts in Church Music program at CTS. He was appointed a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 1996-97, in the area of Theology and the Arts, and was Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University for the fall term of 2000.
He has lectured widely, having made multi-media presentations at academic institutions such as Cambridge, Yale, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Union Theological Seminary (NYC), and many more. In 1994 Brown gave the Walter Hussey Lecture in the Church and the Arts at Oxford University. He is also a consultant to churches and arts organizations.
I am looking forward to what he has to say to us and am certain that he will be a most captivating speaker. So mark your calendars and plan to come to the capitol of Indiana in January 2003!
Michael S. Driscoll
NAAL President
University of Notre Dame