Spiritual poetry can be a source of consolation, a form of edification and gateway to God through beauty — but in ministerial settings, it can be difficult to figure out how to make poetry accessible and interesting. This 90-minute webinar invites participants, whether poetry afficionados or curious novices, to learn how to use poetry in ministry, emphasizing how discussing, sharing, and praying with literature can bear spiritual fruit this Advent.
Join Ryan Carroll, a writer, instructor and PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for this virtual discussion of and reflection on poetry in Advent ministry — including an introduction to poetry that may be unfamiliar to you.
Topics covered:
- Discussion of four poets not commonly discussed in the Ignatian world, including Francisco X. Alarcón, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephen Crane, Pauli Murray, and more
- Consideration of how poetry can inform ministry on Advent themes like Incarnation, relationship, and pain
- Practical tools for using poetry in ministry settings, from large groups to one-on-one conversations
About the Instructor
Ryan Carroll is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He researches information theory and narrative in 19th-century British, American, and literature. He studies how narrative texts, including sensation fictions, American Romanticist novels, epic poems, slave narratives, and investigative journalism experiment with ways of synthesizing bare facts into narratives, and thus theorize how to navigate an information overloaded world.
He is a longtime enthusiast of Ignatian spirituality, having first become involved through the Ignatian Spirituality Ministry at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. In his academic and creative work, he is interested in uniting “secular” fields of literary studies with sacramental and liberation theology, especially that of figures like Ignacio Ellacuria, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Karl Rahner. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina, where he mostly works on finding God in all