Magnifica: Pope Leo & The Church in the 21st Century

Jack Hanson is a writer, editor, and scholar of religion. His work has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, Commonweal, The Nation, The Drift, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University and is now a lecturer at Columbia University.

Matthew Clemente is the Director of Academics & Operations at Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics and an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Department of Formative Education at Boston College.

Composer and performer John Zorn has been a central figure in New York’s Downtown music scene for more than fifty years, creating an extraordinarily diverse body of work inspired by art, literature, film, theater, philosophy, alchemy, mysticism, and music. For Magnifica, three of Zorn’s longtime collaborators, pianist Brian Marsella, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer and percussionist Ches Smith, will perform a short set of Zorn’s compositions inspired by Christian mysticism, bringing a musical dimension to the evening’s exploration of faith, culture, and the moral imagination.

Marsella has been a central figure in Zorn’s musical world for the past fifteen years; Morgan, one of the most respected bassists in contemporary jazz, has collaborated with Zorn for a decade; and Smith is among Zorn’s most frequent collaborators, as well as a longtime student and practitioner of Haitian Vodou drumming. Their performance will precede and complement the conversation between Jack Hanson and Matthew Clemente, joining music and journalism as two different approaches to the spiritual and cultural questions at the heart of the evening.