On Thursday evening, Erin Cline, former Homer resident and now professor in Interfaith Studies and Dialogue at Georgetown University in Washington DC, will give an author talk and book signing at the Homer public library for two books that she had published in 2026: The Analects: A Contemporary Translation and The Problem of God: The Challenges of Faith, Religion & Spirituality Today. These are Cline’s sixth and seventh book publications. Cline provided an overview of the books and what she plans to talk about at the library. The first book, The Analects, is a personal translation that Cline describes as “arguably the most influential text in human history if we measure influence by the number of people who have lived their lives according to a particular view.”
“…So this is my new translation, my translation of this ancient Chinese text, originally written in classical Chinese, which is a little bit like Latin. It's a dead language. It's the ancestral language of modern Chinese, which I'm also fluent in, but most of my work is in classical Chinese because I work on third and fourth century BCE texts a lot. So it was really fun for me to tackle my own translation. I've taught the text for more than 20 years,” Cline said.
The second book is The Problem of God, which is based on an introductory course at Georgetown that all students at Georgetown take and that Cline has been teaching for 17 years.
“I started teaching it as soon as I came, and one of the fun things has been I get to see students from all across the university because again all of our students take it. So it's whether students are business majors or are philosophy majors or in the School of Foreign Service or government. A lot of our students come for those programs. We get this broad cross section of all of our students. Another really fun thing is that I've gotten to see the change in our student body over the last 17 years, which interestingly tracks the change in America overall when it comes to religious belief and religious commitment…One of the things I love about teaching the class and being a part of my department is that we're the most interdisciplinary department on campus. We're also the most global department on campus, and so you can take courses on really. Religion all over the world. We have students who come from all over the country and all over the world. So that's really a fun set of things to engage in the course,” Cline said.
Cline described how she got started in this field of research after initially pursuing musical education:
“I was born and raised in Homer, graduated from Homer High School, absolutely expecting to pursue a career in music, as people who know me when I grew up here will remember. So I went to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, pursuing a career in the country music industry and in bluegrass. And Belmont was known for its programs in that area. was a great place for me. Music for me was always really a calling. I always had a sense of vocation about it, a sense that it was what I was supposed to be pursuing, and that I had certain gifts, and that I was using them. And at a certain point during college, as I was working my way through my music major, which I loved and had a wonderful experience with at Belmont, I just felt like my call had shifted, and my sense of vocation was shifting. So I was completely unmoored because I was like, "This is what I was always going to do. What I'm going to do now. So I just started working my way through the core requirements toward my degree. Took a course in philosophy simply to fulfill a requirement toward my degree as I was looking for a new major, and and I absolutely fell in love with with the study of different traditions, it was a comparative philosophy and religion course where we looked at China, Islam, and Japan, and the traditions that have shaped those places and those cultures. And I was really struck by how an understanding of the philosophical and religious underpinnings of those cultures kind of unlocked cross-cultural understanding in those parts of the world, in those places, and people,” Cline said.
Cline concluded her talk with KBBI on the role that Homer plays in the books that she’s written:
“I also include in the book a lot of stories that come from my own background, including with people that I knew growing up and people in Homer. And I'm so informed by this place, and it was such an amazing place to grow up, and so that that always I think comes through in my writing…” Cline said.
Her talk at Homer Public Library will take place on Thursday, June 23rd at 6 PM in the Fireside Reading Lounge and books will be available for purchase at the event through the Homer Bookstore.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
