Once a year, the Round Hill Community Church in Greenwich invites a prominent speaker to explore the interface between spiritual values and contemporary culture. This year's event, scheduled for November 3, was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy and has been rescheduled for Saturday, January 5, 2013. Dr. Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Fellowships, will be the guest speaker at the Church. She will speak about her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, published in March, 2012 and a New York Times Best Seller and Editors’ Choice. Previous Round Hill Lecturers have included Dr. Marcus J. Borg, Dr. Tony Campolo, Frederick Buechner, and Bruce Feiler.
Religion scholar and author Dr. Elaine Pagels is a preeminent figure in the theological community known for having forever changed the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Church as a unified movement. Dr. Pagels is best known for her book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which won a National Book Award and was named one of the 100 best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University where she has taught since 1982. As a young researcher at Barnard College, Pagels’s groundbreaking findings were published in her signature text, The Gnostic Gospels, which analyzed 52 early Christian manuscripts unearthed in Egypt. The New York Times called it “the first major and eminently readable book on Gnosticism benefiting from the discovery in 1945 of a collection of Gnostic Christian texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt."
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In 2012, Pagels received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities for, as one nominator wrote, "her ability to show readers that the ancient texts she studies are concerned with the great questions of human existence though they may discuss them in mythological or theological language very different from our own."
All are welcome at Dr. Pagels’s lecture, on Saturday, January 5, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 per person, $5 for students. There will be a reception and book signing following the lecture. The Round Hill Community Church is located at 395 Round Hill Road, Greenwich, CT. For reservations, call the Church at 203-869-1091, or visit www.roundhillcommunitychurch.org
