On a Thursday in September, Philip Klay, delivered his lecture at STM entitled “Violent Uncertainty: Finding Faith in War and Chaos.” Klay—author of Redeployment, winner of the 2014 National Book Award in fiction—is the 2018 recipient of the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters. The Hunt Prize, a joint venture between STM and America Media, seeks to recognize the finest literary work of Roman Catholic intelligence and imagination; and this year, was awarded to an outstanding work in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism.
Klay is a fellow at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Marine Logistics Unit (Forward) as a public affairs officer.
“In high school the Jesuits had taught me to be a man for others, the Marine Corps had promised me a way to do that—and so here I was [in Iraq]. And yet as a staff officer, especially as a staff officer with a job related to media, it was difficult to square my day-to-day activities with the life and death stakes all around me. I didn't even know if I was helping or hurting the cause, most of the outside journalists that I brought into Anbar Province tended to report only bad news. All I knew was that I had a safe job in a dangerous place, the sort of place where moral heroism was definitely needed, but where I didn't have the slightest clue as to what that moral heroism would even look like.
Faith for me has always been a place to register a sense of doubt, of powerlessness, of inadequacy and uncertainty about my place in the world and how I'm supposed to live. You kneel before a cross, before a broken, tortured and humiliated human body. You face human frailty and human cruelty. You call to mind your sins, all that you've done and all that you've failed to do, in a place where you know that—nevertheless—you are accepted and forgiven. Those early days in Iraq were so busy, it was easy to get lost in the constant flow of work, but my time at Mass, particularly my time in confession, [was where] time stopped and I tried to imagine ways of reordering myself in relation to this very disordered, broken world. Then I poured out my doubts, received reconciliation and went back to my confusing day job.”
Pictured above, L to R: Fr. Matt Malone, S.J., President and Editor-in-Chief of America Media; Phillip Klay and Sr. Jenn Schaff, Assistant Chaplain at STM.
View a video of Klay’s Hunt Prize Lecture at stm.yale.edu/media.
View an essay adapted from Klay’s lecture at America Magazine online at http://bit.ly/HuntPrize_Klay
