Online Zoom Forum: Thomas Stearns Eliot: The Spiritual, Ethical, and Social Vision in His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 17 December 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Simon Barrow:
Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, poet, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. Before that he worked in media and adult theological education. From 2000-2005 he was assistant general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, April 2026). He also writes for the Edinburgh Music Review.
Speakers:
Prof Jamie Callison:
Title: Modernism and Religion: The Unconscious Christianity of Four Quartets.
Description: T. S. Eliot often returned to the idea of unconsciously Christian literature and this talk explores what Eliot meant by that phrase, contrasting the poet’s usage with that of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who also expressed a similar interest. The talk explores how unconscious Christianity found expression in Four Quartets, noting what this reveals about the relationship between religion and literature and the role of poetry as a response to and/ or an element of spiritual life.
Bio: Jamie Callison is a Professor of English literature at the University of Agder. He has written widely on the connection between twentieth-century literature and religious culture and has published a monograph on the topic with Edinburgh University Press entitled Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy. More information about the monograph is available here: https://www.modernismandreligion.com
Dr Elysia Balavage:
Title: Human Flesh, Consumption and Transformation: Cannibalism in the Work of T. S. Eliot.
Description: In Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot uses the example of cannibalism to highlight the irrevocable loss of “self” via assimilation. He argues, “The man who, in order to understand the inner world of a cannibal tribe, has partaken in the practice of cannibalism has probably gone too far: he can never quite be one of his own folk again.” Here, the implication is that the act of consuming another human’s flesh is so profound that it completely changes the consumer. While Eliot’s rhetorical use of cannibalism is multifaceted, vacillating from veiled and allusive in The Waste Land; overt and sexual in “Fragment of an Agon”; and finally, to a discourse of otherness in The Cocktail Party, I show that these references generally reach the same conclusion: this particularly forbidden act of consumption utterly transforms the subject, whether an individual human or collective culture. Drawing upon contrasting visceral, cannibalistic imagery—explicit in “Agon” and shrouded in The Waste Land—I conclude that Eliot’s references imply a rejection of debased consumption that results in spiritual transformation.
Bio: Dr Elysia Balavage is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Slippery Rock University (Slippery Rock, PA, USA). Her research interests include transnational modernist readings of nihilistic ideas as well as the relationship between food and working-class spaces in modern British literature. Her chapter on “Orwell and Food” is forthcoming in George Orwell in Context (2026, Cambridge UP) and her work appears in English Studies, the Review of English Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and others. Her book project, “Modernism and Optimistic Nihilism: Hope and Nothing,” looks at the ways modernist authors draw upon nihilism to consider images of “nothing” as provisional and fruitful.
Dr Christina J. Lambert:
Title: Christmas Cards and Broadway Plays: T. S. Eliot and his Audiences.
Description: While T. S. Eliot is best known for the high modernism of The Waste Land, its fragmented lines alone do not paint a full picture of the poet and public figure who longed to “bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives.” Eliot’s “Ariel Poems” and his verse drama, specifically The Cocktail Party, demonstrate his concern for audiences and his imagination for the “social function” of poetry, particularly as expressed in his religious verse.
Bio: Dr Christina J. Lambert (Ph.D., Baylor University) is an Assistant Professor of English at Hillsdale College, where she teaches American literature. Her work has been published by Christianity & Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. Her scholarship on Eliot’s dramatic works will appear in the forthcoming collection T. S. Eliot’s Drama: Critical Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press), and her current book project explores the intersection of food imagery and religious ritual in the poetry and drama of T. S. Eliot and Denise Levertov.
Prof Jayme Stayer:
Title: What Eliot Learned about Suffering from Dante.
Description: A poet of suffering, Eliot’s most famous works—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men”—explore psychological and spiritual anguish, civilizational collapse, and the absence of meaning in the modern world. Raised in a 19th-century Unitarianism that was pragmatic and ethical in scope, Eliot was first dumbfounded, then fascinated by the metaphysics of medieval Catholicism, which he first absorbed through reading Dante. The suffering in Dante’s Divine Comedy—particularly in Purgatory, a place of happy, intentional suffering—changed how Eliot thought about his own suffering and was one factor in his conversion to the Church of England.
Bio: Jayme Stayer holds a double degree in music and literature from the University of Notre Dame, an MA and a PhD in English literature from the University of Toledo, and an MDiv from Boston College. He has held faculty posts at Texas A&M University-Commerce, Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador, and John Carroll University. Currently Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, he has published work in the fields of rhetoric, music, and modernism. His most recent books are Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in “Inventions of the March Hare” (Johns Hopkins 2021); The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. V: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939, co-edited with Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi (Johns Hopkins, 2017), winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition; Think About It: Critical Skills for Academic Writing (2014), co-authored with John Mauk and Karen Mauk; and T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe (editor, 2015). He is a past president of the International T. S. Eliot Society. He joined the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 2003 and was ordained a priest in 2013.
Prof Douglas Hedley:
Bio: Douglas Hedley is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He is Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism and the author of various monographs concerning and defending Christian Platonism.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
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