Jesuits in Space: Science Fiction and the Jesuit Imagination
Thursday, February 28, 2019
4:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Ahmanson Auditorium, University Hall 1000
Loyola Marymount University1 LMU DriveLos Angeles, CA 90045
About the event:
The Academy of Catholic Thought and Imagination welcomes you for a discussion of Jesuits in science fiction and popular imagination.
“Jesuits in Popular Culture and Science Fiction”
Susan Scheibler, Associate Professor of Film, Television and Media Studies
“Jesuit Rhetoric and The Sparrow”
Steven Mailloux, President’s Professor of Rhetoric
“Adaptation and the Jesuit Imagination”
A Conversation with Br. Michael Breault, LMU Jesuit Visiting Scholar
About the speakers:
MICHAEL E. BREAULT, a brother of the Society of Jesus and a member of the Jesuits West Province, is Loyola Marymount University’s first Jesuit Visiting Scholar. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Professional Theater Training Program, he is a writer, director and producer for stage and screen. Br. Breault is a winner of the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, which honors the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in television, radio, and online media. He was producer and writer of the controversial ABC/20th Century Fox series NOTHING SACRED, hailed by critics as “the best television series ever produced about the rich and often complicated lives of American Catholics.” (Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News.). Mr. Breault recently served as Director of Vocation Promotion for the Society of Jesus in the United States and Canada. His remit was to design a dual-platform website with associated social media and to produce innovative video content. Results can be viewed at BeAJesuit.org (desktop and mobile versions available), BeAJesuit/Instagram and BeAJesuit/Twitter.
STEVEN MAILLOUX is President’s Professor of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University. Previously, he taught rhetoric, critical theory, and U.S. cultural studies as Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chancellor’s Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. He is the editor and author of several books, including most recently Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics, and articles such as “Wars of Words: Catholic and Protestant Jesuitism in Nineteenth-Century America” and the forthcoming “Political Theologies of Sacred Rhetoric.” He is continuing to work on a book project with the tentative title, “Theo-Rhetoric: Kenneth Burke, Critical Theory, and Jesuit Thinking.”
SUE SCHEIBLER is Associate Professor of Film, Television and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She has graduate degrees in New Testament Studies and Philosophy of Religion and a PhD in Critical Studies (Film and Television) from the University of Southern California. She has published in Theorizing Documentary, Alternative Media Handbook, War: Interdisciplinary Investigations, Signs and assorted journals. Her research and teaching interests include film theory, television studies, documentary, Asian film, science fiction, technologies of war, memory, video games and Asian philosophy. Scheibler has spoken at such engagements as the War, Virtual War and Human Security Conference where she presented on the topic of “Experiencing War the Video Game Way: Call of Duty 2” and the American Cultural Studies Association where she spoke about avatars, war and the documentary image. She is currently working on two projects: Windows, Frames, Screens: Understanding Media and The Meditative Gaze: Media and Eastern Philosophy.
For more information, please contact Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier at Tracy.Tiemeier@lmu.edu or (310) 568-6234.