Wednesday, October 25, at 8 PM , Utah Museum of Fine Arts Dumke Auditorium. Carlos N.M. Eire will present the 2006 Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture in conjunction with the Great Salt Lake Book Festival.

“Spiritual Apartheid: Protestantism and the Reformation of the Hereafter”

Eire will discuss one of the most profound changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation: the redefinition of the relationship between the living and the dead. First, by abolishing purgatory as an intermediary state in the hereafter, where the suffrages of the living could have an effect on their dead, Protestants not only redefined the afterlife, but also denied that the living could do anything for their dead. Second, by denying that the saints in heaven could intercede for the living on earth, Protestants also denied that the dead could do anything for the living. Though this change in belief had numerous practical consequences, many of which are often seen as markers of "modernity," the subject as a whole tends to be ignored by historians. The lecture will examine the significance of this major paradigm shift in Western religion, and raise questions about the relation between belief and behavior, and religion and culture.

Carlos N.M. Eire is Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies in the Department of History at Yale University. Professor Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of death. He has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), which won the national Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003.  Eire is the author of three other books, including From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain ( Cambridge , 1995).

This year's McMurrin Lecture is the crowning event of a conference on "Hell and Its Afterlife: Comparative and Historical Perspectives," October 23-25. Both the conference and the McMurrin Lecture are presented by the Tanner Humanities Center in the College of Humanities at the University of Utah. Both the Hell Conference and the McMurrin Lecture are free and open to the public. The Hell Conference is sponsored by a generous grant from the Utah Humanities Council.

The Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture was founded in 1992 by close friends and colleagues of Dr. McMurrin, a beloved professor of history and philosophy at the University of Utah until his death in 1996. Dr. McMurrin presented the first six lectures in his namesake series, and the lectures are available in a hardbound volume through the Tanner Center. In 1992, at the inauguration of the McMurrin Lectures, Dr. McMurrin made a statement about the importance of studying religion in the humanities and in American life. This statement has become the talisman of the lecture series:

"Religion is at the heart of every culture-primitive or sophisticated, humanistic or theist, oriental or occidental. As Professor Paul Tillich defined it, religion is our ‘ultimate concern.’ It is the ground of our consciousness of being, and the source of our purpose as individuals and of the meaning of history. Its relation to morality is obvious; its historical connections with the arts and sciences are equally apparent.  And now, its involvement with politics and the economy is headline news.

Considering the importance of religion for the life of the individual and the quality of culture, it is nothing less than a national scandal that it has been so severely neglected by our educational institutions. It is time for us to give the study of religion the attention it needs-serious, reasonable, knowledgeable study-unless we are resigned to becoming victims of the irrationality and emotionalism in religion that are already so much in evidence."  Sterling M. McMurrin, 1992

The Tanner Humanities Center believes that this statement is more compelling in 2006 than ever. For more information on the Hell Conference program schedule, background information, and biographies of presenters, please visit the Tanner Humanities Center website at http://www.hum.utah.edu/humcntr/ , which will be updated periodically.

Carlos Eire will appear on Wednesday, Oct. 25, 8 pm, in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Dumke Auditorium.