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Intellect

Responses to KONY video, early Christianity topics for BYU lecture March 26, 29

The Brigham Young University David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies will present two free lectures next week in 238 Herald R. Clark building.

• Leslie Hadfield, an assistant professor of modern African history at BYU, and Peter Leman, an assistant professor of English at BYU, will present “Responses to KONY 2012” Monday, March 26, at 4 p.m.

The video launching a campaign to arrest the Joseph Kony, Ugandan leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has rapidly spread via the Internet. The video and the organization that produced it, Invisible Children, just as quickly came under international scrutiny. Join Leman and Hadfield, two Africanist scholars at BYU, in a discussion on the situation in Africa and various responses to the Kony 2012 campaign: How have Africans responded? What does this tell us about our perceptions of Africa? What can BYU students do?

• Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Michael’s College, will present “Models of Holiness in Syriac Hagiography” Thursday, March 29, at 11 a.m.

Saint-Laurent teaches classes in Syriac, early Christianity, saints and holiness and Eastern orthodoxy. Saint-Laurent received a bachelor's degree in religious studies and classics from Gonzaga University, a master's degree in early Christian studies from the University of Notre Dame (2002), and a doctorate in religious  studies from Brown University (2009).

This lecture is co-sponsored by BYU's Neal A. Maxwell Institute and Students of the Ancient Near East.

These lectures will be archived at kennedy.byu.edu/archive. For more information, contact Lee Simons at (801) 422-2652 or lee_simons@byu.edu.

Writer: Charles Krebs

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