James Carroll on "Jerusalem, Jerusalem"

James Carroll delivered the 7th Annual Bullock Memorial Lecture on September 14th in the Rogers Center for the Arts at Merrimack College.   He spoke on his latest book, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World."  If you missed the program, you can now watch it here on YouTube.  Click here.

About the program:
Wednesday, September 14, 2011CE
7:30-9:00 p.m.
Rogers Center for the Arts at Merrimack College

In Carroll’s reading of the deep past the Bible’s brutality was a response to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start.  Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian and Muslim history, Carroll illuminates the mounting European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem as spark of both antisemitism and racist colonial contempt.  The holy wars of the Knights Templar burned apocalyptic mayhem into the Western mind.  Carroll’s brilliant and original leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his own Jerusalem-centric world view to the West, America too was powerfully shaped by the dream of the City on the Hill -- from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan.  The nuclear brinksmanship of the 1973 Yom Kippur War helps prove Carroll’s point: religion and violence fuel each other to this day, with Jerusalem the ground zero of the heat.

James Carroll is a renowned novelist, author of nine works of fiction - many bestsellers and award winners - and of many powerful and incisive commentaries on, among other issues, peace and war, religion, violence and religious reform.  He won the National Book Award in 1996 for his memoir American Requiem:  God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us, the first PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for the masterful House of War:  The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, among many other awards for his writing.  His Constantine's Sword:  The Church and the Jews was a 1991 New York Times bestseller and the documentary film based on the book was also very well received.  Carroll is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Suffolk University and a Member of the Executive Board of Directors of Merrimack College’s Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations.  He was the 2008 Bullock Memorial Lecturer as well; at that time his lecture inaugurated the expanded mission of the Center to embrace Islam and Muslim people.