UPbeat

News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.

Rev. Charlie Gordon

Bringing Eyes of Faith to Film: “DamNation,” Oct. 14

Wild summer steelhead swarm back to an undammed tributary of the North Fork Umpqua River in Oregon.
Wild summer steelhead swarm back to an undammed tributary of the North Fork Umpqua River in Oregon.

The Bringing Eyes of Faith to Film series will feature a free screening of “DamNation,” a SXSW prize winning eco-issue documentary sponsored by clothing company Patagonia. Fr. Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., and Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, will lead a discussion of Pope Francis’s compelling encyclical Laudato Si on humans’ responsibility to the environment prior to the screening on Wednesday, October 14, at 7:15 p.m., in Franz Hall room 120. The even is free and open to faculty, staff, students, and the public, and movie snacks will be provided.

For more information contact the Garaventa Center at 7702 or garaventa@up.edu.

Diving Into “Mink River”

Mink River Brian Doyle and Rev. Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., will again join forces as they explore the braided spiritual journeys of defiant hope and faith in Doyle’s novel Mink River, and in the works of other spiritual writers including Annie Dillard, David James Duncan, Marilynne Robinson, and Ron Hansen. Please join them on Wednesday, February 20, at 7 p.m., in the Pilot House bookstore. Their spirited talk is free and open to the public.

Doyle’s Mink River, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and winner of the Foreword Reviews’ Novel of the Year in 2011, is the story of a small town on the Oregon coast and its “fitfully graceful” denizens, among them a priest, a nun, and a remarkably wise and articulate crow. The book is now on the reading lists of students in high schools and colleges around America, and Fr. Gordon teaches it in his class on modern Catholic literature. Doyle, editor of the University of Portland’s Portland Magazine, is the author of many other books, among them the spiritual essay collections Grace Notes and Leaping. A new collection of his spiritual essays, The Thorny Grace of It, will be published in September by Loyola Press in Chicago.

For more on the Garaventa Center’s busy slate of events, all of them free and open to the public, see http://www.up.edu/garaventa/. For more information on this event contact Jamie Powell, Garaventa Center, at 7702 or powell@up.edu.