By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell,  Fordham University

I am still awestruck.

As I page through the copious notes I took during The Power of the Word Conference 7 in Rome this past September 2024, “The Dramatized Word: Theology, Philosophy, and Literature in Conversation,” I am amazed by the many gifted authors and academics we met and the wide range of fascinating topics brought to our attention by the presenters, the depth of their analysis, the nuance of their commentary, their passion for their subjects, and the sheer amount of expertise and knowledge we were given access to in the space of a few short days.

Indeed, some four weeks after the conclusion of the conference, having returned to my busy life as a professor and administrator, I am still processing the richness of the experience, remembering revelatory moments, entertaining new questions, and looking forward to following up on the many new ideas, new writers, new texts, and new works of art that have been brought to my attention by my ingenious and generous colleagues.

The Power of the Word is unique among conferences I have attended. The sense of connection and fellow feeling among the participants, despite the fact that they hail from different countries and continents, speak a variety of mother tongues, and work in diverse disciplines was immediately palpable to me. In addition to their passion for intellectual inquiry, they seemed to be united by an interest in the connection between human creativity and divinity, a sense of the sacredness that lies at the heart of art and of their own chosen vocations. Here at the Universitá Sapienza, virtually within sight of the Vatican and in the heart of the Eternal City, a group of some 60 scholars and writers gathered who had been invited to consider some of the eternal questions:

• What is the relationship between the word and The Word?
• In what ways does the enacted and embodied word bring us to a fuller understanding of our humanity and our inherent divinity?
• How are we to understand the mystery and miracle of human life played out across the centuries, incarnate amid a kaleidoscope of cultures, and expressed by writers, thinkers, and artists as disparate as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dante and Dostoyevsky, Blake and Barth and Bach?

Many of the responses to these questions stick with me indelibly.

“When we are born, our world is born with us. When we die, we take our world with us.” – Daniel Gustaffson

“Imagine Beethoven listening to a lecture on Beethoven: ‘It’s neither me nor not-me, but a third thing.’”—Thomas Stern

“The object of drama is the triune God who performs in the theatre of the world.”—Michael P. Murphy, quoting Hans Urs Von Balthasar

“Conversion is like stepping out of a looking-glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made.”—Emma Mason, quoting Evelyn Waugh

“The mystery of human existence lies in not just living but finding something to live for.”—Haddy Bello, quoting Dostoyevsky

“The good shepherd is a pyromaniac burning dry branches, the savior an arsonist. The Gospel without fire is quenched.” –Antonio Spadaro SJ, as translated by Francesca Bugliani Knox

The assortment of statements recorded here are just a few of many brilliant and provocative observations we heard delivered in the course of five days of presentations and conversations, and I am still thinking about them. They might serve as starting points for meditation, prompts for homilies and poems, echolocations that help us navigate our way through the thicket of experience, living, as we must, according to Flannery O’Connor, “hotly in pursuit of the real.”

In addition to hearing words that express timeless truths—in sometimes surprising, often arresting ways—we had the opportunity to see those words enacted. Compagnia di Colombari’s powerful performance of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” brought her provocative parable about race relations in America from the page to the stage, allowing us to hear O’Connor’s quick-silver dialogue, to savor the unique idiom of ordinary Southern American speech in which grand truths can be spoken, and to witness the transformative conversion that lies at the heart of the story. Karin Coonrod’s play effectively translates the written word into a sensual experience for both the players and the viewers/hearers, appealing to multiple senses, pulling us physically into the imaginative world of the writer, and bringing us all into community where we serve as a cloud of witnesses. Watching the play in the context of the conference ushered us beyond the realm of ideas and abstraction about the power of the word into the realm of the concrete and the real, bringing us back to the ground of our being, reminding us (as art and artists do) of our primary identity as incarnate creatures alive in the world in which our actions, as well as our words, have motives and consequences.

I’ll mention one final favorite moment that I still savor, one which took place on the last day of the conference after the final session concluded. A group of participants met at Campo di Fiori before being led on a guided tour of The English College, where we were able to see some of the precious manuscripts housed there amid the spectacular holdings of the library and to attend solemn Mass. As we gathered beneath the brooding statue of Giordano Bruno, one of our keynote speakers and one of the advisory board members of The Power of the Word Project, Michael Kirwin, SJ, recited Czslaw Milosz’s “Campo di Fiori,” a poem that bears witness to Bruno’s burning amid the carnival atmosphere of the marketplace of 1400, even as the same carnival atmosphere went on around us in 2024, despite the 600-years that have elapsed. Milosz wrote the poem in 1943 as a way of bearing witness to the martyrdoms of his own time and his own country, as well as the ones taking place now, in this moment, all over the world, amid the clatter and chatter of the noisy marketplace.

Milosz concludes the poem with a prophetic wish:

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo dei Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet's word.

I could not imagine a more powerful conclusion to our week-long conference devoted to the Power of the Word.

Thanks to the organizers of the conference, especially Francesca Bugliani Knox, to The Power of the Word advisory board members, to Giordano Bruno and Flannery O’Connor and all the writers in between, and to my 60 colleagues and co-presenters who offered a feast for the famished soul—I am still awestruck.

Note: My video recording of Michael J. Kirwin’s reading of “Campo di Fiori” can be found here.