MONMOUTH, Ill. — Anne Browning Nelson, a faculty
member at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., will deliver the 19th
annual Bernice L. Fox Classics Lecture at Monmouth College on March 1.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public,
will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in the Whiteman-McMillan Highlander Room of
the college’s Stockdale Center.
Entitled “Education in Fourth-Century Alexandria:
Didymus the Blind’s Commentaries on the Psalms,” Nelson’s lecture is based
on papyri found in Tura, Egypt, in 1945 that provide a first-hand example
of the way that a Christian teacher and church father named Didymus the
Blind interacted with his students.
Didymus was appointed head of the catechetical
school in Alexandria, Egypt, at a time when Alexandria was a magnet for
scholars from all over the Mediterranean. Didymus accepted and taught the
idea of the pre-existence of the soul before it entered the body, a belief
that was later declared heretical by a church council in 553.
Nelson, who has a Ph.D. from the University of
Michigan, was a visiting assistant professor at Monmouth College for two
semesters in 2001. She is also a member of Monmouth College’s Gamma
Omicron Chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, the National Classics Honorary Society.
Established in 1985, the lecture honors the late
Bernice L. Fox, who taught Classics at Monmouth from 1947 until 1981. The
goal of this series is to illustrate the continuing importance of
Classical studies in the modern world and the intersection of the Classics
with other disciplines in the liberal arts
