In his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis proposes that “an innate tension exists between globalization and localization.” In his great short story "The Dead" (1914), James Joyce undertakes an exploration of that tension as it presents itself in Ireland of the early twentieth century. During this webinar Georgetown University Professor Emeritus Michael Collins explored how Gabriel Conway, the central figure of the story, experiences three cultural encounters with other persons that illustrate both the obstacles to genuine encounter among people and the disfiguring separation of the global and the local that creates, in the words of Pope Francis, “a dangerous polarization.”
This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the year-long series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user William Murphy
