Indiana Wesleyan University’s John Wesley Honors College is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Aldersgate Prize: Dr. Vittorio Montemaggi, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Motivated by the ethos of its Christian liberal learning community, the John Wesley Honors College awards the Aldersgate Prize annually to celebrate the outstanding achievement of an author whose scholarship challenges reductionistic trends in academia by yielding a broadly integrative analysis of life’s complexities and by shedding fresh light on ultimate questions that can enrich Christian conceptions of human flourishing.
Selected from nearly seventy nominations for this year’s prize, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology exemplifies this kind of scholarship through a path-breaking literary analysis whose methodology offers a creative, new way of conceiving of the relationship between academic study and spiritual formation.
In the midst of making a compelling case for interpreting Dante’s own spiritual transformation as the centerpiece of the Divine Comedy’s drama, Montemaggi simultaneously explores and practices the text’s theological insights, ultimately recasting scholarly interpretation as an enterprise of love. Accordingly, in the midst of his richly argued literary analysis, he presents a personal, autobiographical interpretation of the Comedy that humbly offers his particular encounter with Dante’s poem and the journey that got him there, especially the conversations, encounters and relationships that helped to nurture his interpretations of Dante.
The Aldersgate Prize selection committee is convinced Montemaggi’s daring new methodology will prompt new conversations about distinctively Christian ways of engaging in scholarship. By asserting that “scholarship ultimately has no proper context other than love, and no proper meaning other than that of helping us love better,” Montemaggi challenges scholars to pursue their intellectual endeavors as deeply interpersonal encounters with divine charity that yield intimacy with a reality in which knowledge is always bound up with matters of moral and spiritual transformation.
Montemaggi is a lecturer in Religion and the Arts at King’s College London, where he also supports the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s and the Visual Commentary on Scripture project. He previously taught at the University of Notre Dame as an associate professor of Religion and Literature. Montemaggi, a native of Italy, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He will accept the Aldersgate Prize and its monetary award of $3,500 at the 2018 Celebration of Scholarship Luncheon on April 19, 2018 at IWU’s residential campus, where he will offer the keynote address.
The selection committee for the 2017 Aldersgate Prize included the faculty of the John Wesley Honors College as well as Stacy Hammons (Provost, IWU), Don Sprowl (Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, IWU), Karen Hoffman (Associate Vice President, School of Nursing, IWU), Rebecca Findley (Assistant Professor of Music Therapy, IWU), Willem Van De Merwe (Blanchard Chair in Physics, IWU, Emeritus), John Wilson (editor, Books and Culture), Scott Huelin (Honors Director, Union University), Catherine Brekus (Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, Harvard University), Christina Bieber Lake, (Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College) and Makoto Fujimura (Renowned Artist and Director of the Brehm Center, Fuller Theological Seminary).
Nominations are open for the 2018 Aldersgate Prize here: http://www.indwes.edu/Academics/JWHC/Aldersgate-Prize/.