Meet the Author / Happy Hour
Mr. Smith's Club
Thursday, September 20th
6-9pm (happy hour 6-7pm, meet the author 7-8pm, mingle 8-9pm)
This is the first of several fundraisers for our 2008 Annual Dinner. This evening’s featured speaker will be Professor Jean Molesky-Poz, author of Contemporary Maya Spirituality. The author will be available after to sign her book. We suggest buying and reading the book before the event. She will bring a few books with her to sell but you may also buy a copy online:
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/molcon.html
About the author:
Jean Molesky-Poz ,Ph.D., a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, has researched extensively among the Maya in highland Guatemala from 1985-2001. a time coinciding with the public emergence of Maya spirituality. She understands Maya spirituality not as a conservative, static survival of the past, nor as a syncretic development, but as a distinct spirituality, with transformed continuities. Maya spirituality is unique in is tie to sacred geography, to the Mesoamerican calendar, and to ritual practice. Her work illuminates how the 260-day Maya calendar continues to be the "heart of the wisdom of the Maya people," and the underlying order which form Maya psychology and discernment. Her position as an ethnographer is unique to this work as through friendship, marriage and family ties, she has been brought into the Maya community.
Professor Jean Molesky-Poz was formerly a lecturer in Ethnic and Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley until 2001 and currently is on the faculty of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. She holds at Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She is recipient of the Fulbright-Hayes Award, John Templeton Religion and Science Awards, and numerous research grants.
