James Carroll to Deliver Lowell Lecture

On Tuesday, April 28, at 8 pm in Science Center A, author and columnist James Carroll will deliver the Lowell Lecture on "Sacred Hatred: Religious and Political Lessons of the Holocaust." The annual Lowell Lecture, sponsored jointly by the Harvard University Extension School and the Lowell Institute of Boston, is a public service event devoted to major issues of the 1990s.

In his remarkable career, Carroll attended the Priory School in Washington, DC, where his father, an Air Force general, served as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. After attending Georgetown University, he entered St. Paul's College, the Paulist Fathers' seminary in Washington, to train for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He earned his BA and MA degrees there and was ordained to the priesthood in 1969.

From 1969 to 1974 he served as Catholic Chaplain at Boston University. He published books on religious subjects and wrote a weekly column on religion and politics in the National Catholic Reporter. He was an anti-war activist from his student days in Washington until the Vietnam War ended.

Carroll left the priesthood to pursue a career as a writer. In 1974 he was Playwright-in-Residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He published his first novel, Madonna Red, in 1976, and since then he has written eight more, notably Mortal Friends (1978), Prince of Peace (1984), and The City Below (1994). His personal memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, won the prestigious National Book Award in nonfiction for 1996. He is a frequent writer for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Atlantic Monthly. His weekly op-ed column on politics and religion and culture appears in the Boston Globe. He currently serves on the Executive Board of PEN-New England.

In recent years Carroll has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a Robert Frost Fellow at Amherst College. This year he is a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, where he is researching issues related to his Lowell Lecture topic.