Hughie O'Donoghue + Jonathan Haidt

Hughie O’Donoghue is a British artist whose work explores memory, myth, and the sacred. Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist.
This event is part of The Road That Teaches series that complements the exhibition Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity and Islam(July 1, 2011 – October 24, 2011). The Road That Teaches is a Wednesday evening conversation series, exploring the nature of faith and pilgrimage, between two people from different walks of life or differing spiritual experiences. To view more conversations in this series, click here.

Hughie O’Donoghue is an acclaimed Ireland-based contemporary painter of religious subjects. His powerful figurative paintings and drawings often draw from the old Masters and have been compared to School of London painters such as Francis Bacon. While O’Donoghue claims his 17-year cycle of large-scale Passion works arose not from any religious intent, but from his interest in this format in painting history, “the subject matter of the Passion–seen as journey, metamorphosis, sacrifice–well suited this painter’s language: the gradual building up in rich pigment layers toward delineation of form, and the tension in reconciling the abstract values of his very sensual large color fields (he studied Rothko and Newman) with his interest in the conceptual potential inherent in the human image.” (Pamela Hardesty, Art and Christianity Journal).

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He studies the emotional basis of morality and political ideology, and is on a crusade to get people to understand the moral motivations of their enemies. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001, and the Virginia “Outstanding Faculty Award” in 2004. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006). He is currently writing The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).