The Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture was founded in 2016 in honour of the Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse, BA’51, DD’07, of blessed memory, scholar, priest, and organist, whose dies natalis is January 15, 2011.
Each year, a lecturer is invited to give a public lecture in the King’s Chapel.
Just a few months after his birth in Winthrop Massachusetts, 1930, Robert Crouse’s family moved to Lunenburg County’s Crousetown, where he lived until his death in 2011. Robert Crouse’s schooling began in the one room school in Crousetown, which still stands next to St. Mary’s Church. After graduating from King’s in 1951, he earned an S.T.B. (cum lauda) from Harvard Divinity School, Master of Theology (1st class honours) from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970. He joined the Classics Department of Dalhousie in 1963 and later joined the faculty of King’s College, Halifax, where he taught in the Foundation Year Program.
For King’s students and faculty alike he became a voice of wisdom, knowledge and inspiration through his academic teaching and his sermons at Thursday Chapel. An international scholar and lecturer, he published over seventy articles, reviews, and translations. His treatment of Dante became a formative element of the Foundation Year Program, also enhanced by the lectures on his beloved Palestrina and Bach. For several years Dr Crouse was “Visiting Professor of Patrology, Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, Pontifical Lateran University Rome,” the first non-Roman Catholic to be so appointed.
This lecture explores the essential role played by the University of Paris (founded in 1150) in Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy. More widely, there is a survey of the significance of the Universities of Bologna (1088) · Heidelberg 1386 · Leipzig 1409 · Wittenberg 1502 · Berlin 1810 — to explore what of this medieval legacy has been retained and what has been lost.
David Adams Richards is heralded as one of Canada’s greatest literary figures. He has won numerous awards for his fiction and non-fiction, including twice winning the Governor General’s prize for literature in both the fiction category for Nights Below Station Street (1988) and the non-fiction category for Lines on the Water (1998), as well as the Giller Prize for Mercy Among the Children (2000). Several of Richards’s novels have been turned into screenplays and he won the New York Film Festival Award for Best Script for Small Gifts (1996).
Richards argues that his books speak to our common humanity. The plots of his novels revolve around the internal moral struggles of his characters. In a world in which the external constraints are inevitable and seemingly dominant, the real stories of Richards’s books are about the interiority of his characters who seek to find ways to live free and fulfilling lives in the face of the seeming desolation of living in an ever changing finite order.
A common complaint about traditional Anglican worship is that it is based on the false assumption that the purpose of worship is to read as much scripture as possible, a position described by today’s scholars as the ‘Reformation Fallacy.’ But this criticism ignores the profound connection between Anglican tradition and medieval spirituality, which found in the recited words of scripture a path to personal communion with God. This spirituality found special expression in the music of the liturgy. A recovery of medieval insights can bring fresh life to Anglican worship in our own time.