Descriptions Q1

Homer, Iliad (12 sessions, continues in 2026)

Mondays, January 5 to March 23/30,  8:00-9:30 pm ET

Homer’s Iliad has many excellent successors, but nothing can take its place. The Iliad is not only the fountainhead of poetry; it is probably its greatest summit. It is not only like a great mountain river rushing on with irresistible strength and unbearable beauty, staying in the mountains for a long time before making its spectacular descent through a world almost too rugged to be lived in, yet impossible not to dwell with once visited, its water bearing all before it through the shining plain; it is also like the mountain itself and the sea toward which its waters tend.

The poem is thus a world, about a world. Is this world simply the world as such: elemental, profound, brutal, fecund, brilliant, terrible, filled with women and men, love and hate, gods, animals, plants, earth, sun, air, sky, sea? What else is there, really? One thing, perhaps: pteroenta, winged things--words. A reader keeping their ear to the poem’s ground may hear the words alighting within the range of their hearing. There is nothing else like it under the sun--this sun to the sea of song that has followed it. We will read the Iliad slowly: a book a week, an hour and a half at a time, for 24 meetings -- and then we will meet one final time to wonder at what we just did.

Recent generations of English-language Iliad readers have been well served by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, and more recently Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo. Renderings by Herbert Jordan, Rodney Merrill, Michael Reck, Joe Sachs, Caroline Alexander, and Peter Green also all have their benefits. I will be reading Emily Wilson's 2023 translation, and I recommend it highly. Overall, our discussions will be more convenient if everyone in a group has the same translation; at the same time, it's illuminating when we can compare different renderings. Ultimately, the choice of translation is yours, so long as it is in verse and provides line numbers.

Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (new 6 sessions)

Mondays, January 26-March 9, 8:30-9:50 pm ET

Friedrich Nietzsche's five lectures on higher education, delivered in early 1872 in Basel, was one of his first public efforts. Through an imaginative setting and dialogue among students, philosophers, and a dog, "the lectures move from a consideration of German educational institutions to a consideration of what is needed for true, or classical, education." (from a translator's introduction.) Nietzsche writes: “Every so-called classical education has only one healthy and natural starting point, the artistic, serious, and rigorous habituation in the use of the mother tongue. . . . [Here] the wing... carries to the right and sole home of education, to Greek antiquity. Of course we would not come very far with the help of that wing all alone in the attempt to bring ourselves close to that castle of the Hellenic, infinitely distant and enclosed within diamond ramparts: rather anew we need the same leaders, the same teachers, our German classics, in order ourselves to become swept away under the wingbeat of their ancient endeavors – to the land of longing, to Greece.” What it would mean to put education, culture, above all else, above religion, above economics, even above the state? Such educational reforms suggests that the state must not be “a border guard, regulator, or overseer for his culture; rather the robust, muscular comrade, ready for battle, and companion on the way, who gives the admired, nobler, and, as it were, unearthly friend safe conduct through the harsh realities and for that earns his thankfulness.”  Underlying the lectures is the question of whether mass education is possible or desirable.  We will read and discuss the introduction and preface (week 1) and one lecture per week (for the next five weeks).  A PDF will be provided.  There are two recent translations: one from an SJC tutor, Michael Grenke, published by St. Augustine Press (Grenke translation), and another from NYRB Classics, called "Anti-Education..." (Searls translation) -- the second is a little easier to get, but either one will suffice.

Borges, Short Stories

Tuesdays, January 6-March 24/31 3:00-4:30 pm ET

We plan to spend three quarters on the works of Borges, one quarter on some of his lectures and essays, a second quarter on some of his short stories, and a third quarter on some of his poems.  Participants are more than welcome to join any one quarter or two or all quarters.

Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986) | Selected Lectures and Essays (1922-1986)

In the Spanish-speaking world Borges is most highly regarded as an essayist.  His essays explore themes also present in his short stories and poems.  An advantage for us is that English was among Borges’ first, native languages (he had an English grandmother who read the Authorized Version to him, an English library at home, and he began reading Shakespeare at 12).  From 1914 to 1921 he lived with his family in Europe, and from 1914-1918 he studied at the famous Collège de Genève, presently the Collège Calvin after its founder Jean Calvin.  There he also attained fluency in French and German, and later Italian, Old English and Old Norse.  After his graduation in 1918 the family moved to Lugano, and after the end of the War lived in Barcelona, Palma Mallorca, Seville, and Madrid.  He was a noted translator beginning with Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince at age 10, going on to translate into Spanish works by Snorri Sturluson, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Virginia Wolf.  By the age of 55 he was completely blind.  This gave him mental registers with a range akin to a great organ.  In 1961 he was appointed to the Tinker Chair in the University of Texas at Austin, and embarked on a US lecture tour that year.  In 1967-8 he held the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry in Harvard University, and also spent time at the University of Virginia.  He also travelled widely in Europe, including Athens and Crete.  He died and was buried in Geneva. He lived in Buenos Aires, a port city, and a cosmopolitan city that was the intellectual center of the South American continent. He taught first as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture, and from 1956 to 1970 as professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires.  He advised the important publishing house Emecé Editores.  He was the director of the National Library from 1955 to 1973, resigning when Peron was elected a second time.  His close, longtime interlocutors and collaborators included his sister Norah, a noted painter and art critic; Macedonio Fernandez, erstwhile lawyer, writer, humorist, philosopher, family friend, and Socratic mentor; Maurice Abramowicz, Polish poet and lawyer; Simon Jichlinki; David Ben Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel; Victoria Ocampo, the founder of Argentina’s most important literary journal, Sur; the great Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares; the Italian-American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni; Silvina Ocampo, short story writer, poet, painter, and younger sister of Victoria; Margarita Guerrero, dancer, writer, and dabbler in the occult; Estela Canto, a communist and his longtime lover and lifetime friend; Astor Piazzolla, the tango composer; Maria Kodama, an Argentine of Japanese and German of background, his longtime assistant, then lover, wife, widow and heiress.  Authors who greatly influenced Borges include Spinoza, Berkeley, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Meyrink, George Bernard Shaw, Alfonso Reyes, Franz Mauthner.  He distilled as it were this cosmopolitanism.  And in turn Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut are two American writers greatly and directly influenced by Borges.     

All the lectures and essays are selected from Borges, Jorge Luis, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, City of Westminster, London: Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 1999, Trade paperback ISBN 978-0-14-029011-0.  All readings are short but dense and provocative, e.g. 10 pp. 

Herodotus, Histories (continue from 2025)

Tuesdays, January 6-March 24/31  8:00-9:30 pm ET

The first historian was the greatest, because he was the greatest inquirer called by that name, which in fact means inquirer.  Well, there was that second fellow, whom many, with strong reason, regard as the greatest, but he said he wasn’t interested in prizes, so maybe he won’t mind not bearing the palm.  What is a history?  How is it different from an epic poem or from a scientific inquiry?  What would it mean to perform it?  To read it in public is to make a written thing – in some sense, a speech – into a deed.  But the written thing itself tells of deeds, and the deeds themselves are often speeches.  And all people everywhere speak and do, and their doings speak and their speakings do things.  Our historian gives us a universe of conflict, on the grandest of scales – barbarian and Greek, free and slave, kings and commoners, old and new, giants and underdogs, women and men, stupid and clever, people and gods, animals and people – in which human beings war with each other over things they’ve said and things they’ve done.  Is it any wonder that a work so bursting with richness of character and action enchanted so great a novelist as George Eliot?  His story is so filled with plot and incident, with love of the great human theater that is the world and with wonder at human beings and how they do and what they speak, that memory can’t keep up with all the memorable things he sets down so that “time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being.”

Text: either David Grene’s translation (U. Chicago Press; ISBN: 9780226327723), or Andrea Purvis’s, The Landmark Herodotus (Anchor Books; ISBN: 9781400031146), or -- better yet! -- both 

Newman, The Idea of the University, Part II, University Subjects

Tuesdays, January 6-March 24/31  9:00-10:30 pm ET

Do you wish to investigate deeply or further investigate what are freedom, autonomy, self-possession, liberal learning, education, classical education, liberal education, knowledge, sciences, ends and means, liberal arts, wisdom, religion, theology, and their interrelations, relations with the person, and with a community of persons? Do you wish to read and discuss seriously with others one of the very greatest writers in the English language? Are you merely curious and wish to see what the fuss is about, perhaps read the text itself rather than just citations of fragments? If so, we invite you to join us as we are masterfully guided in our inquiries by one of the greatest classics, The Idea of a University leisurely over the course of 23 weeks.

The Idea of a University is a composition of two parts, University Teaching, a series of nine public lectures given in Dublin in 1852 to select prospective donors, and a preface to them published in that same year as the first edition of Idea, and University Subjects, a collection of ten university lectures given also in Dublin between 1854 and 1858 to students and faculty and first published in 1859 as Lectures and Essays on University Subjects. The second 1872 edition of Idea incorporated the latter. Newman continued to revise the text, and the definitive edition is the 1899 publication by Longmans, Green, and Company. The University of Notre Dame Press inaugurated its Notre Dame Series in the Great Books with that complete and definitive, expertly annotated in 1982 and kept in print since as an accessible trade paperback. Of the many contemporary editions that are available, it is unique in that it is a complete reproduction of the definitive 1899 edition.

We will be reading this together, trying to read as closely as it deserves, one chapter as it were at a time, weekly. From the author’s preface to Part I through the editor’s end notes are 435 pages followed by a very brief and handy index. On average then we will read 20-25 pages per week. The prose is gorgeous 19 th C. English, and the concepts conveyed are dense and very rich. We will seek to penetrate the surface, and really join Newman, face his words, engage, let him lead us by the hand to see where we get. We strongly suggest that you please NOT read the editor’s introduction but save it for once we have completed reading the work itself.  The ISBN is 0-268-01150-8.

Crosscurrents: Medieval Islamic Art & Poetry 

Tuesdays, TBA 8:00-9:30 pm ET

- This pathway meets every TUESDAY night for 90 minutes : 8pm EST / 7pm CST / 6pm MST / 5pm PST.

- We'll begin 2025/09/30, and meet for 10 weeks, from October into December.

- You do not need to purchase books for this pathway; material will be provided.

When art and words come together across the discussion table, the past is illuminated in new ways. The first few centuries of the Islamic era brought a flowering of great visual art, architecture, and poetry. In this new entry in our Crosscurrents series, we'll be tracing classical Arabic poetry from its pre-Islamic roots in the Mu'allaqat to its flowering during the Abbasid caliphate - and along the way, we'll explore the great art and architecture of these centuries, from the Kaʽba itself to the Dome of the Rock and much more. We're excited to share the rich, often surprising tapestry that is the art and poetry of the classical Islamic period.

Listener's Studio: Bach

Tuesdays, TBA 12:00-1:15 pm ET

- This pathway meets every TUESDAY midday for 75 minutes : 12pm EST / 11am CST / 10am MST / 09am PST

Bach's Matthew Passion is routinely heralded as one of the greatest musical works of history. A mixture of free-sung recitatives, choruses based on hymns, delicate arias, and complex chorales, this stunning combination of storytelling and music is rightly seen as the crown jewel in the great canon of JS Bach's works. We have a wealth of great historical recordings we'll be listening to - and we'll take a good look at the score as we go. If you've never read music before, don't worry! - we'll explain how written works, and we'll visually scroll along the written music together as we listen. Together we'll be opening up Bach's great masterwork and trying to see what it has to say to us today.

You do not need to purchase any scores or music for this pathway; recorded music and a PDF score will be provided.

Plato, Republic (continued from 2025)

Wednesdays, January 7-March 25, 8:00-9:30 pm ET

When Socrates went down to the Piraeus he went down into the human soul.  But where is that?  The soul is no place; it has no geography.  And since it doesn’t, how can there be a city in it?  And yet there seems to be a world there, and he says a city is to be found in that world -- somehow.  The pattern of a city is laid up – laid down – therein.  It is both hard and easy to speak generally of Plato’s dialogue, because it is hard to say what there is in the world that might concern a human being that the book does not, in some way, have in it, and it is also therefore easy to assert that there must be nothing of such a kind.  The dialogue, an all-nighter (which would probably take ten to fifteen hours to read aloud without stopping), revolves around the single question what justice is, but that question turns out to involve everything human.  One risks being tedious by even calling the dialogue (or its unforgettable narrator and main character) inexhaustible, so glaring is the fact.  Does The Republic do – can any book do – that most elusive of things: show us how to live, how to be in the world?  If every great book helps us in this endeavor, and is therefore always relevant, always timely, probably few careful readers of such books affirm, except in rare instances, that this is true without qualification of any particular great book, for one cannot so affirm without putting oneself on tricky ground: how much must one be presuming on the book and on one’s own life by making such a claim?  And yet the question of choosing one’s own life is itself made part, rousingly, of the drama of this book.  It puts us constantly on just this tricky ground.  But in what sense, if at all, do we choose our lives, and what kind of city must lie within us if we are to do so? 

Text: There are at least several good, but probably none unqualifiedly good, translations: those by Joe Sachs (this writer’s preferred), Raymond Larson, and Allan Bloom, are probably as good as any in English.  (It’s probably best to avoid Jowett.)   

Shakespeare, Sonnets "Read Aloud"

Wednesdays, January 7-March 25, 12:30-2:00 pm ET

Join Tim and Reynaldo as we read Shakespeare's poetry out loud!  This seminar invites participants to bear witness to Shakespeare’s sonnets, both as observers of the unfolding event and participants who enact and uncover the experience of the speaker.

Although not an acting class per se, we will familiarize ourselves with the rules of iambic pentameter and classical acting along with brief sojourns into 20th century acting theory.  Particular attention will be paid to the aesthetic of “fire and ice,” simultaneously inhabiting the poem with both emotional connection and detachment.  By thinking and feeling the line in performance, we turn our minds and hearts toward the universal preoccupations of the Bard and, ultimately, toward each other.

Tim has 25 years of experience as a classically trained stage actor in the classical English and Spanish repertory.  Reynaldo is a seasoned seminar leader, and, like many Anglophones, a lover of Shakespeare.  For more on Tim see his website here. 

Shakespeare, Henry V

Wednesdays, January 7-March 25,  2:00-3:30 pm ET

Aristotle, Politics, Books  V-VI 

Thursdays, January 8-March 26, 18 2:00-3:30 pm ET

If you are interested in a serious investigation into what is the political, how can politics work and not work, why so, that is to say the foundations of all politics, of politics as such, you are invited to join us, a happy few, a merry band of colleagues, in a close reading of Aristotle’s Politics and serious conversation thereof always guided by this master text.  The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once quipped, half-joking, that all Western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato.  We might say the same about this text and Western political thought.  It lays out virtually all the fundamentals, such that it remains a touchstone 2,500 years later and a continent and an ocean away for us.  If you are sick of what Symposium’s founder called “retail politics”, e.g. media, social media, polarized partisanship, this may be your welcome refuge.  What are the political realities faced by MAGA, Democratic Socialists of America, the Chinese Communist Party, Erdogan, King Charles II, the states and peoples of Afghanistan and Norway, alike?  Let us follow Aristotle under the trap door, and see the simple, most basic and underlying questions rather than rushing ahead of ourselves.  For instance, Aristotle begins by proposing that the reason we are political critters is that we alone among all the animals speak.  The other animals communicate by sounds and gestures, but they do not predicate or form sentences: many of the other animals are social, but they are not political.  In the shelf of great books on politics arranged chronologically, this is the second one after Plato’s Polity/Republic, like Herodotus and Thucydides on the history shelf.

Our common translation is by Joe Sachs, in the Focus Philosophical Library series published by Hackett Pub., 2012.  ISBN-10: ‎ 1585103764, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1585103768.  You are welcome to use any secondary translations privately, we recommend Carnes Lord, in the second edition, University of Chicago Press, 2013.  Both books have outlines and glossaries, and are easily available in trade paperback.  We will begin on Bk. D/4.  You are welcome to read the first three books on your own, and the group is happy to fill you in. 

Exodus (continued from 2025)

Thursdays, January 8-March 26  8:00-9:30 pm ET

Slavery, freedom, law, and worship: these widely recognized themes of Exodus invite us to reflect on “the moral meaning of communal life, the nature of political leadership, and the standards for judging a social order,” (Kass) as well as the possibility of a transcendent presence among human beings. As is our Symposium custom, we will strive to read this story of the formation of a particular people, the Jewish people, with a view to universal human concerns, and to make a good faith effort not to impose either a traditionally religious reading or an anti-religious reading on the book (even if we make occasional use of diverse philosophic and theological resources). We will simply start with the words on the page. This story of the founding of a nation deserves study on its own terms, even as the legacy of Greek political philosophy looms over us. While we resist the introduction of secondary sources in our weekly discussions, we encourage readers to have their own private dialogue with any resources they find useful. For example, Leon Kass’s Founding God’s Nation is an accessible introduction to Exodus and makes a nice conversational companion as one reads at home; but, of course, there are millions of other secondary sources.

We will use the Contemporary JPS translation of Exodus, found online at Sefaria.org, and invite participants to consult other translations, such as one by Robert Alter, and other versions published in Tanakhs or Bibles (JB, NIV, or KJV). We plan to read 15-20 chapters this quarter, and to continue with the rest of the book from January to March 2026.

This offering is part of an ongoing series that explores Jewish and Christian texts. Anyone who is interested in a pluralistic, serious (with some playfulness), conversational approach to religious texts, read for the purpose of personal understanding is invited to join each quarter. We like to think we are contributing to interfaith dialogue by not adopting “a theory of interfaith dialogue,” but by just doing it.

Rumi, More Selected Poems (6 sessions)

Thursdays, TBA 7:00-8:30 pm ET

You have probably encountered Rumi via quotes on coffee mugs, in Instagram posts, or during wedding (or funeral) readings. But Rumi’s poetry is so much more than good one-liners. Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, theologian, and Sufi mystic, started life as a jurist and preacher before meeting a wandering dervish (Shams of Tabriz). Their friendship transformed Rumi’s life, igniting a torrent of poetry and ecstatic teaching. 

The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks, invites us to get to know Rumi as a poet, mystic, and teacher who wrestles with love, loss, friendship, and the divine.

This six-week seminar is meant to be an introduction. As such, we’ll focus on six themes and read several sections to inform our conversation (i.e., we will not read the entire collection together). Our approach will be less about decoding than dwelling: sitting with images, asking questions, and tracing the currents of longing, joy, and transformation that run through Rumi’s poetry. The goal is not to “master” the text, but to try to inhabit his world of longing, joy, and transformation together.

Famous Poems Revisited

Friday afternoons, February 6 to March 13, 4:30-6:00 PM ET  

Famous Poems Revisited continues a series of shorter seminars that invites readers to "sit with" poetic treasures. This seminar will approach the poems of Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Yeats, Poe, and Longfellow, with an eye to the words on the page, the similes and sound of the language, and the simple pleasure of reading a good poem. The plan is to revisit famous poems with fresh eyes. In each case, we’ll help each other obtain small rewards for the efforts of looking carefully and talking through the details together.

Free Lecture on Robert Burns's The Jolly Beggars: Love and Liberty - A Cantata, January 23, 4:30-6:00 pm

Jason Happel, noted authority, will deliver a new version of his risqué vanity lecture, On Love and Liberty (30 minutes on a good night), which has been heard at more than one of his family's Burn's Suppers over the past 20 years.  Join us for a celebration of the themes of Burns's poetry: love, liberty, and humane sympathy. The poem has been called "Shakespearean" and one of Burns's greatest compositions -- whether the poem is ultimately sympathetic with the down-trodden characters is debatable, but it does appear to celebrate love and liberty, even in their less than noble forms. The talk will be followed by a discussion period; raucous, if the Scotch is pouring, subdued, if not.  Join us, but don't judge us by this indiscretion.

Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed

Sundays, 10:30-12:00 am/pm ET

Maimonides did not write the Guide of the Perplexed for readers in a hurry. This seminar gives us the chance to slow down—free from exams and term papers—and read a book that still surprises and challenges people more than eight centuries after it was written.  

Each week we’ll focus on just a few pages—four to eight at most—so we can pause over Maimonides’ words, discuss difficult passages, and let the ideas unfold. We’ll begin with the Introduction, where Maimonides shows us how to approach the Guide—a work that also opens up new ways of reading the Bible. From there we’ll turn to his striking interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. In the following weeks, depending on our pace, we’ll explore his teachings on prophecy, providence, and his reasons for the many commandments in the Hebrew Bible.

As Leo Strauss once wrote, The Guide is like an “enchanting forest”: the deeper you go, the more it comes alive.  No prior knowledge of Judaism, the Bible or Hebrew is required. We will use the Pines translation of the Guide, now available in one volume from the University of Chicago Press.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

Sundays, January 4 to March 22, 11:00-12:30 am ET / 8:00 am PT

"Thucydides of Athens wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, how they waged it against each other." We'll look carefully at the year-by-year account of the war as an example of inquiry and an education in politics. By comparing and contrasting the pretexts and causes of the war, words and deeds, Thucydides walks us through the issues of politics and the questions we should be asking, regardless of which side we're on. (Go Spartans!) He calls his work "a possession for all time" which suggests that it more than a mere historical report of a ancient war.  To begin, we'll set aside the labels of "political realist" and "historian," and follow Thucydides's lead for an education in understanding war, peace, and political life.

Preferred edition:  Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), Jermy Mynott, trans., ed.  Cambridge University Press  2013  ISBN 0521612586 / 978-0521612586