On October 16, 2025, we will host Carlos Eire, PhD, to give the Annual Lecture in Carmelite Studies. His topic is “Saint Teresa’s Troublesome Ecstasies.” Dr. Eire is a historian of late medieval and early modern European religion at Yale university, where he has served as chair of the Religious Studies Department and the Renaissance Studies Program, and was recently awarded Yale College’s 2024 Byrnes -Sewall Teaching Prize. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019), and of several prize winning books, including Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016), and his most recent, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). His childhood memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, won the U.S. National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2003. All of his books are banned in his native Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.
His lecture will explore Saint Teresa of Avila’s frequent mystical ecstasies, which often resembled cataleptic seizures and sometimes made her float in mid-air, placing her in a potentially perilous position, for in her day and age such phenomena could be ascribed to the devil. In fact, some of her confessors repeatedly interpreted her visions of Christ as demonic in origin. Closely scrutinized by her male Carmelite superiors and denounced to the Spanish Inquisition several times by Dominican theologians, Saint Teresa lived on a razor’s edge for many years, while at the same time reforming her Carmelite order, founding new convents throughout Spain, and writing some of the most sublime texts in the Christian mystical tradition. This lecture will focus on how Saint Teresa coped with all the suspicions that surrounded her astounding spiritual life and how she ultimately prevailed over all critics and ended up being declared a Doctor of the Church.
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 5:00pm
Location: The Catholic University of America, Hannan Hall Auditorium
REGISTER HERE to attend. This event is free and open to the public