Lineup Nearly Set for April 2006 Festival of Faith & Writing

October 23, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

In April 2006, Calvin College will present one of the strongest lineups of keynote speakers in the history of its prestigious Festival of Faith & Writing.

The 2006 Festival, to be held April 20-22, will bring together more than 50 writers and some 2,000 conference participants from around the continent who gather for three days to soak in the Festival's wealth of keynote addresses, seminars, workshops and more.

Keynoters confirmed are Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie and Walter Wangerin Jr. (they join a long list of past notable keynoters at the Festival, including John Updike, Maya Angelou, Chaim Potok and Joyce Carol Oates).

Robinson wrote in 1981 the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Housekeeping, now regarded by many critics as an American classic. Almost a quarter of a century later she wrote her second novel, Gilead, which did win a Pulitzer Prize (the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). Gilead is set in 1956 and is written as a letter from an elderly minister to his young grandson.

Also an award-winning author, Rushdie, 58, is the first keynoter whose faith background is Islam. His name became a household word in the late 1980s when he published "The Satanic Verses," inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. He has just published his latest novel, "Shalimar the Clown," to good reviews. In a recent interview with Rushdie about the new book, TIME Magazine called him one of the world's greatest living writers.

Wangerin is the author of over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning Book of the Dun Cow (National Book Award), The Book of God, Preparing for Jesus and Saint Julian.

Rushdie became internationally known when in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for the death of Rushdie. Khomeini called The Satanic Verses "blasphemous against Islam" and condemned Rushdie for the crime of "apostasy" - attempting to abandon the Islamic faith. That sent Rushdie, a native of India, into years of hiding, but in 1998 the fatwa was lifted, and in the ensuing seven years Rushdie's life has returned to some sort of normalcy.

In fact in an August 2005 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Rushdie, who lived in Britain during much of his time in exile, addressed this summer's British suicide bombers and suggested where things were going wrong and where corrections needed to be made (Shalimar the Clown in part imagines what is inside the minds of jihadists).

"The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere," he wrote, "but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen. What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air."

For the op-ed piece see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501483.html

Shelly LeMahieu Dunn is the new director of the Festival of Faith & Writing (taking over for longtime director and professor of English Dale Brown). She says that Rushdie will add an interesting perspective to the Festival.

"In Salman Rushdie we will host a writer who grew up in a religious tradition different from ours," she says, "and yet his personal perspective on the dangers of and reasons behind extremism, not only in Islam but in other religions as well, is something that people of faith should hear."

She adds: "Rushdie reminds us that violence can be religiously motivated. This is certainly an issue that people of faith cannot and should not ignore."

For more details see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/festival.htm

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Received on Sun Oct 23 08:56:40 2005