Honors Program Speaker Series

This talk tells the story of virtual unwrapping, conceived during the rise of digital libraries and large-scale computing, and now realized on some of the most difficult and iconic material in the world – the Herculaneum Scrolls – as a result of the recent phenomena of big data and machine learning. Virtual unwrapping is a restoration pathway for damaged written material, allowing texts to be read from objects that are too damaged even to be opened. To understand how the scrolls from Herculaneum can possibly be read despite their profound damage, I will describe the non-invasive, technical steps that we invented, and I will discuss the human steps necessary to race toward digital restorations that will have impact for the scholarly world.

Dr. W. Brent Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held research positions at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, UNC Chapel Hill, Google (Paris), and the Getty Conservation Institute.

The Heritage Science research lab (EduceLab) founded by Seales at the University of Kentucky applies techniques in machine learning and data science to the digital restoration of damaged materials. The research program is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Google.

Seales is a co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, an international contest formed around the goal of the virtual unwrapping of Herculaneum scrolls. He continues to work with challenging, damaged material (Herculaneum Scrolls, Dead Sea Scrolls), with notable successes in the scroll from En-Gedi (Leviticus), the Morgan MS M.910 (The Acts of the Apostles), and PHerc.Paris.3 and 4 (Philodemus / Epicureanism). The recovery of readable text from still-unopened material has been hailed worldwide as an astonishing achievement fueled by open scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, and extraordinary leadership generosity.

How do contemporary theories of gender compare to a Christian understanding of gender? This talk will give an overview of the two major understandings of gender in today’s culture and bring those frameworks into conversation with Christian scripture and theology, highlighting the points of consonance and dissonance between them.

Dr. Abigail Favale is a writer and professor whose work lies at the intersection of Catholic theology, literature, and women’s studies. Her abiding interest as a writer and scholar is the meaning and dignity of woman, and her work explores sexual difference and embodiment in the Catholic imagination.

Abigail supports MICL programming by writing and teaching on women, feminism, and gender from a Catholic perspective. She holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of Theology, where she teaches on topics like Edith Stein’s Theology of Woman and Religion & Literature.

Abigail’s most recent book, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, was published in 2022 by Ignatius Press and has already been translated into multiple languages. Her numerous essays have appeared in MICL’s Church Life Journal, The Atlantic, First Things, Public Discourse, Comment, and elsewhere. Abigail is also a fiction writer and was awarded the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction in 2017.

This multimedia examination of how Michelangelo’s David came to be, highlights our hunger for glory, and how our desire for perfection is actually a longing for another world.

Russ Ramsey, author and pastor, grew up in the wheatfields of Indiana. He studied at Taylor University and Covenant Theological Seminary (MDiv, ThM) before becoming a pastor. He and his family live in Franklin, Tennessee. Russ is the author of Van Gogh has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive (Zondervan 2024) and Rembrandt is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith.

Christians today often assume that the earliest Christians were better than us, that they were zealous converts more counterculturally devoted to their faith than typical churchgoers today. Furthermore, too often today we think of cultural Christianity as a modern concept, and one most likely to occur in areas where Christianity is the majority culture, such as the “Bible Belt.” But what if we are much more similar to earlier Christians than we realize? This is both good and bad news but most of all, this is a call to pursue sanctification.

Dr. Nadya Williams received her PhD in Classics from Princeton University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Early Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024). She is currently completing a guide for Christians on reading the pagan classics for spiritual and moral formation, Christians Reading Pagans (under contract, Zondervan Academic). She is Book Review Editor at Current, and a contributing editor at Providence and Front Porch Republic.

Previous Speakers

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(The password 4kh3k4m3a3MC is required to access the video below)

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