Hopson Symposium, April 17-18, features Mel Bringle

For Austin Seminary’s third Hopson Symposium, April 17-18, 2023, hymnologist Mary Louise Bringle will deliver a lecture and participate in a recital featuring Professor Eric Wall playing “Les Corps Glorieux/The Glorified Bodies,” by Oliver Messiaen.

The concert of organ music and readings for Easter, “Imagining Heaven,” will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 17, at University Presbyterian Church, 2203 San Antonio Street. Professor Eric Wall, The Gene Alice Sherman Associate Professor of Sacred Music, will play Olivier Messiaen’s “Les Corps Glorieux/The Glorified Bodies,” a benchmark twentieth-century organ work; Dr. Bringle will give readings from works by C.S. Lewis.

The following day, at noon on Tuesday, April 18, Dr. Bringle will deliver a lecture, “Imagination at Work: Metric Verse as a Vehicle for Theology” on the Seminary campus, 100 East 27th Street. Lunch will be provided. In her lecture, Bringle plans to explore the process of creating the poetry of hymn texts and that limitations and structures become possibilities for the imagination, drawing on C. S. Lewis’s essay, “Is Theology Poetry?” McMillan 210.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Dr. Bringle, professor of philosophy and religious studies and coordinator of Integrated Studies Major at Brevard College, is an award-winning hymn writer whose original texts and translations appear in hymnals around the world. She was named a Fellow by The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada (THS) in 2020. Chair of the committee that produced the PC(USA) hymnal, Glory to God, her other books include Joy and Wonder, Love and Longing; In Wind and Wonder, Despair: Sickness or Sin?, The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters, and Envy: Exposing a Secret Sin. 

The Hal H. and Martha S. Hopson Endowed Symposium Fund was endowed in 2016 by the Hopson children to honor their parents gifts and contributions to church music.The purpose of the fund is to promote the life of music and worship in the church and to enhance the work of the faculty holder of The Gene Alice Sherman Chair of Sacred Music. The symposium fund makes possible a variety of opportunities such as conferences, guest speakers and musicians, residencies, hymn song festivals, commissioning of hymns and songs, partnering opportunities with other organizations, music and worship related forums, workshops, special assemblies and much more.