7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium.  Yasmin Levy follows the trail of Sephardic Jews on their journey from medieval Spain to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire.  Joining her on this journey are Ishay Amir on darbuka (goblet drum) and Vardan Hovanissian on flute and clarinet.

For background information on the Jews in the Middle Ages, take a look at this essay from the Companion to the Medieval World in Blackwell Reference Online.

The concert will feature, among other instruments,  a darbuka.  Learn more about it from Oxford Music Online or listen to it being played using Smithsonian Global Sound.

For those unfamiliar with  Sephardim, the Encyclopedia Judaica offers a nice essay.

More about the Sacred Arts Festival.

Novelist Ron Hansen will read from his works on Thursday, October 22 at 7:30 pm in Room 126 (auditorium) at the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts, as part of the UST Sacred Arts Festival.

Ron Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. His novels frequently pair history with morality tales as well as Catholic themes of unconditional love, redemption and resurrection.

His novels include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (finalist for the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award), Mariette in Ecstasy (adapted for film and stage), and Exiles. Hanson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation as well as the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 2007 Hansen was ordained a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church, and in May he was inducted to the College of Fellows at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, Calif.