Check back for notices about changes or cancellations prior to the starting date. All Times Eastern Daylight
Enlightenment Thinkers (12 sessions)
Sundays, 11:00a-12:30p ET | July
Leader: John Samples
This seminar offers an introduction to the themes and thinkers of the Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th century movement of ideas that continues to influence contemporary life. Natural science - above all the brilliant discoveries of Newton - fostered a faith that nature and humanity could be understood, and the world shaped to serve human purposes. Enlightenment thinkers were skeptical about many things not least traditional religious dogma and its implications for governments and societies. But they were not just critics. The Enlightenment thinkers argued for knowledge through scientific inquiry, government through consent, and prosperity through economic liberty. We shall examine their criticisms and affirmations, not forgetting their oversights and errors. Unlike other seminars we shall focus on shorter writings from a broad array of writers. Later seminars in this series will engage individual works by the leading authors
of the Enlightenment.
Book: The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, Penguin Books.
Weekly reading load: 20-25 pp.
Beginning Ancient Greek (cont.)
Sundays, 7:30-9:30p ET | July
Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga
This session is continuing from the previous quarter.
Math Focus: Plato, Timaeus (12 sessions, Mon & Thurs)
Mondays, 2:30-4p ET | July
Leaders: Eric Stull & Esa Palosaari
In the famous fresco by Raphael, Plato is depicted holding Timaeus: a dialogue about mathematics, harmony, cosmology, astronomy, and the structure of the universe. Detail of The School of Athens, 1509-1511 by Raphael.
Why did Raphael choose this book? Why did later generations regard Timaeus as one of the key texts of philosophy, cosmology, and the mathematical sciences? And how did a dialogue written in ancient Greece come to influence the intellectual world of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton?
This seminar explores Plato’s Timaeus as one of the foundational texts of the ancient mathematical worldview.
The dialogue presents a cosmos ordered through number, geometry, harmony, and astronomical motion. It can be read as a remarkable introduction to what later became known as the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, the four mathematical arts that shaped ancient and medieval education and profoundly influenced the development of science.
For modern readers, one of the most surprising aspects of Timaeus is its treatment of music. Harmonic ratios and musical intervals are presented not merely as artistic phenomena, but as mathematical structures woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. The dialogue asks whether the same principles governing musical harmony might also govern the soul, the heavens, and the structure of nature.
Timaeus would remain enormously influential throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Historians of science have often connected the Platonic tradition represented by the dialogue with the rise of mathematical astronomy and physics in figures such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Johannes Kepler in particular explicitly drew upon Platonic and Pythagorean ideas of cosmic harmony and geometrical order in his attempts to understand the structure of the heavens. The Platonic dialogue form itself would remain influential well into the scientific revolution: Galileo presented his most famous cosmological work as a dramatic dialogue between competing worldviews.
At the same time, Timaeus constantly reminds us that cosmology may be only a “likely story” about the world of becoming. Is Plato presenting a mathematical science of nature or a self-conscious reflection on the power and limits of cosmological images? Why does Socrates largely fall silent while Timaeus speaks? Is the dialogue constructing a vision of the cosmos, questioning such visions, or somehow both at once?
Over six weeks, we will meet twice per week and work carefully through the dialogue, paying special attention to:
harmonic ratios and the musical scale,
the world soul and cosmic order,
the astronomical structure of the heavens,
the Platonic solids,
and the relation between mathematics, cosmology, and philosophy.
The seminar is intended especially for readers interested in Greek mathematics, the quadrivium or the mathematical arts, the history of astronomy and cosmology, and the origins of mathematical science.
No prior background in Plato or in mathematics is required.
Catullus in Latin
Mondays, 7-9p ET | July
Leader: Eric Stull
How could he have been so bad and so good and died at 30? A question that answers itself perhaps. We’ll take a break from the relentless
magnificence of The Aeneid this summer to sample a handful of specimens of this poet’s exquisite work, whose motto could have been Odi et amo:
we’ll look at the sparrows, the imitation of Sappho (alongside her original), the goodbye, girl (along with Bob Dylan’s lyrics walking on down the road),
the address to Lesbia that Marlowe channeled (in The Passionate Shepherd), the hail and farewell. N.B. This will be a good opportunity for
intermediate or aspiring Latinists who haven’t read much or are out of practice to translate short but lovely things that can be savored without the
loss of too much hair.
Meeting Dates, Days, Time: 5 weeks, June 29-August 7 (NO MEETING July 13), Monday, 7-9 PM ET
Text: disseminated selections from Peter Green’s bilingual edition pub. By the University of California Press.
Bach Listening Lab, St. John Passion (8 sessions)
Tuesdays, 12-1:30p ET | July
Leader: Jeff Johnston
Bach Listening Lab: the John Passion. In his resignation letter, the 23-year-old organist at Muhlhausen complained that he had not been given the opportunity to achieve his aim: "to create a well-regulated church music to the glory of God." Fifteen years later, a more mature 38-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach managed to become the musical director for the entire town of Leipzig, a position that finally gave him that chance. He immediately set about building a full annual set of cantatas. But Bach soon looked to augment that set with pieces for special occasions, and the first was his spectacular first great passion: the John Passion. Bach later wrote the even grander Matthew Passion; but he performed the John Passion regularly for the rest of his life, frequently reworking it, shifting pieces around, rewriting sections, and adjusting it to match his vision. The magnificent and magisterial John Passion stands today as one of Bach’s greatest works, combining instrumental and vocal music with texts from many different sources. — In this group, we'll be listening through the whole John Passion while watching it proceed in the score, taking note of the historical sources for Bach's music and texts. An overview of how it works will be given, so no prior understanding of music theory is required. [Tuesdays at 12pm Eastern, 8 sessions, July 7 through August 25]
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (12 sessions)
Tuesdays, 5:30-7p ET | July
Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga
Was Henry Adams an American Socrates?
Henry Adams (1838-1918) aspired to exercise great influence without being elected or appointed to any public office, and said he had failed in his ambition. Yet he was the unappointed co-Secretary of State with his intimate friend John Hay, the official Secretary of State, to the chagrin of President Theodore Roosevelt–he seemed to be the senior in that partnership. He was as much an insider as it was possible to be (The Five of Hearts, and his remarkable network of accomplished friends on both sides of the Atlantic,of which he was the central node). He said he had wanted an education and had failed at that: “I know that I do not know.” He said he had got very little of the classics at Harvard College, but he was a master of the classical prose style, and an accomplished poet. He could be enigmatic.
If we place ourselves within his lifetime, rather than look back upon it, we see just how unstable, uncertain, and fraught his world was. And if ever there were insiders, he was one. When he was 10 the United States had nearly duplicated its territory at the expense of Mexico, and with that came mass migrations and brutal Indian wars. His first 23 years were a time of wealth such as his grandparents could not have dreamt. That all came crashing down with what Northerners called the Civil War and Southerners called the War of Northern Aggression, followed by Reconstruction, military occupation, martial law, a mass exodus of planters to the Empire of Brazil, sharecropping, African American migration North, the forced incorporation of the Southern economy and society into the Northern one. Then another explosion in wealth, the Gilded Age, a massive restructuring of the American economy by railroads, the first corporations that replaced small business groups such as Astor & Co. The closing of the frontier in 1890. The admission of the US into the club of European powers after the Spanish-American War in 1898. During the last decade of his life America became more urban than rural following a long and accelerating trend. And in the last years of his life, the entry of the US into the Great War that broke the stalemate and forced the capitulation of the Central Powers, the end of the Ottoman Empire and division of the near and middle East, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Central Europe, the end of monarchy in Germany and the imposition of Weimar, Versailles and revanchist reparations aimed at economically crippling Germany to the advantage of France and Britain (or so the latter thought, but guaranteeing a resumption of the War), and the beginning of decolonization (with disastrous consequences for the decolonialized). It was more than enough to make anyone dizzy, and risk being shocked, paralyzed, or crazy. To all this Adams had a direct, front row seat as it were. He saw the expansion of the canals, railways, all weather gravel roads, the typewriter, pneumatic tires, bicycles, the automobile, steel, coal-powered oceanliners, airships, aeroplanes, telegraph, the phonograph, wireless communication by radio, motion pictures, the telephone, electric lighting. Sounds familiar, yes. He knew perfectly well that the changes wrought in America were but her part of global changes. He chose to try and make sense of this, to understand what was happening, and to bring to that essay his great gifts as historian, poet, diplomat, and thinker. Let an American master show us how we may make sense of our crazy world. Indeed, we shall see how much Adams was ahead of his time. His time and ours is of one piece. And we do well to look back in order to understand ourselves, and to gain a better view of what may lie ahead.
Any complete edition will do, the chapters are short. The Library of America is one fine edition. Reading load is about 40 pp./week.
Great Books, Great Readers:
Plato, Symposium w/ commentaries (12 Sessions)
Tuesdays, 8-9:30p ET | July
Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel
Love, Amor, Eros, Desire: Typically, for Hellenic writers Eros is at least as much bitter as sweet. In Plato’s Symposium, seven famous men of Athens (and possibly one woman) variously praise Desire, and together clarify this maddening passion, without which we may not be able to live. Our eponymous Symposium Institute is named after a Hellenic drinking party, their conviviality, fun-seriousness/serious-fun, fellowship. This is the second of our Great Books, Great Readers series. The intention of the series is for us to become better and deeper readers of particular texts, partly by doing, and partly by accepting a bit of help and example from magisterial commentators. We will read leisurely, accompanied by two brief, running commentaries, that of William S. Cobb (Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, College of William and Mary), which will be provided; and, that accompanying our translation by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Focus Philosophical Library series, an imprint of Hackett Publishing, 2017). Once we have finished we will look back upon the whole, and read a short commentary by a master, Seth Benardete. We will read no more than 20 pages per week.
Required text: Translation by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem, Focus Philosophical Library series, an imprint of Hackett Publishing, 2017.
Shakespeare, Henry VI-2 (12 sessions)
Wednesdays, 2-3:30 pm ET | July
Leader: Eric Stull
If it were Jack Cade who says he wants to “kill all the lawyers,” we might charge Mr. Cade with being a little uncharitable, but it is not the great rouser of public passion who speaks these words, though he seems to agree with the sentiment, when he replies to their speaker: “is not this a lamentable thing, that of the innocent skin of a lamb should be made parchment; that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?” (2H6, 4.2.72-75) Did the son of a glover write that line? Just asking. Did the poet make or unmake Jack Cade in this play? Both, maybe? He does not survive his own rebellion, but after 400 years’ continuous appearance in print, we can safely say he won’t soon be disappearing from parchment. The poet makes him illiterate but eloquent: he speaks in prose and verse, but could not read the play in which he dies immortally. Even if we fancy a neat formula in which history happens in prose and gets turned into verse in drama, we still have to ask, how can music be made of civil strife as monstrous as that of the Wars of the Roses? Shake the pen the right way and the spear writes itself?
Meeting Dates, Days, Time: 12 weeks, July 8-September 30 (NO MEETING July 15), Wednesday, 2-3:30 PM ET
Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican,
Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers
Aristotle, Politics, Books 7-8 "On Education"
Wednesdays, 4-5:30p ET
Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga
This section is continuing from previous quarters, but the final books of the Politics on the best regine and the education that supports it can be read with some profit. Join us in June or July (starting Wendesday 6/10 or you can join in July and read the first few (short) chapters of Book 7 on your own).
Joyce, Ulysses
Wednesdays, 7:00-8:30 pm ET | (cont.)
Leader: Randy Wootton
This session is continuing from the previous quarter.
Dante, Paradiso
Wednesdays, 8-9:30p ET | (cont.)
Leader: Jeff Johnston
This session is continuing from the previous quarter.
Knox, Englishing the Bible (12 sessions)
Thursdays, 8:00-9:30 pm ET | July
Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Clare McGrath-Merkle
Symposium offers the study of core texts from the Jewish and Christian tradition, which alternate each quarter. This is the first summer “palate cleanser” in the series on translating the Bible into English. In 1936 the bishops of England and Wales asked Msgr. Ronald Knox to translate the entire Bible from Greek and Hebrew sources. The New Testament was completed in 1945, and the Old in 1950. The Knox Bible is one of the classic translations. The very learned former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said “Ronald Knox's translation of the Bible remains an exceptional achievement both of scholarship and of literary dedication. Again and again it successfully avoids conventional options and gives the scriptural text a fresh flavour, often with a brilliantly idiosyncratic turn of phrase. It most certainly deserves republication, study and use." In 1949 he wrote a famous series of eight essays entitled On Englishing the Bible. It is at once a profound reflection on the art translation, extremely funny, and irreverent. CS Lewis called Ronald Knox “the wittiest man in Europe.” He is also a very clear writer.
In 1888 the youngest child was born of Ellen Penelope French and the Anglican Rev. Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, Rector of St. Wilfrid’s Church, Kibworth, and Fellow, Tutor, and Dean of Merton College, Oxford (and later bishop of Coventry, and bishop of Manchester, of Ulster Scots background). This boy, Ronald, was sent to Eton College, as first King’s Scholar. There he was elected to Pop, and became school captain. In 1904 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as the first classics scholar. There he won a series of important prizes, including ones for Greek and Latin verse composition. In 1910, already a very noted classicist, he was elected a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and for a short time tutored Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912 and appointed Trinity College chaplain. During the First World War he served in military intelligence. In 1915 the headmaster of Shrewsbury School invited him to join the faculty, and he served as a beloved master of the Vb Form. In 1917 he resigned his chaplaincy, and converted to Catholicity. The following year he was ordained a Catholic priest. From 1919 to 1926 he taught classics in St. Edmund’s College, f. 1568, the oldest continually operating, post-Reformation Catholic school in the country. From 1926 to 1939 he was the Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford, in 1936 receiving the honor of monsignor. While at Oxford he started writing detective fiction, novels and short stories. In 1930 he co-founded the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, GK Chesterton, AA Milne and other writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. In 1926 he inaugurated the mock Holmesian criticism, and in 1929 published the decalogue of detective fiction. In 1957 he became quite ill. The prime minister invited him to stay with them at 10 Downing Street while he consulted a London specialist, who confirmed he had terminal cancer. He died on 24 August 1957.
Of Ronald Knox’s five older siblings, at least four were public figures. One was an atheist, celebrated papyrologist and classicist at Kings College, Cambridge, and a chief cryptographer in both World Wars, appointed to lead one of Betchley Park’s research sections and later Intelligence Services Knox (ISK), where Alan Turing worked (Turing was their house guest for a while), and who contributed to cracking the German Enigma machine. Another was a well known satirist and poet, who was the editor-in-chief of Punch from 1932-1949. Another was a beloved Anglo-Catholic priest and scholar who worked amongst the very poor. Another, Lady Peck by marriage, was a celebrated novelist and biographer. His paternal grandfather was the first Anglican bishop of Lahore in India. Outside of his immediate family Knox was a central figure in “the Second Spring” that stretched from SRE Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman (1850) to roughly JRR Tolkien (circa 1968-1974).
The book is available in paperback (and hardcover) on Amazon: On Englishing the Bible: Ronald Knox: 9798989992812: Amazon.com: Books or from the publisher, The Knox Page | churchlatin.com At this site, one can listen to a recording of him speaking about his translation (keep in mind that he is an Englishman of the Establishment circa 1950. Reading load is about 10 dense pages per week.
Tolstoy, War and Peace (12 sessions)
Fridays, 3:00-4:30 pm ET | (cont.)
Leaders: Eric Stull and Linda McConnell
This session is continuing from the previous quarter.
Early-Mid 20th C. Women Poets (12 sessions, then continuing in October)
Fridays, 5:30-7p ET | July
Leader: Clare McGrath-Merkle
In this seminar, we will explore the writings of major and award-winning women poets of the early and mid-twentieth century, with special attention to poets who received major literary recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. The course also includes Jessica Powers, a significant American poet.
Each week focuses on one poet and three representative poems. Through careful reading and guided discussion, participants will encounter a wide range of poetry, including lyric, devotional, modernist, contemplative, and socially engaged forms.
Poets to be explored, in chronological order:
Leonora Speyer [1872–1956]
Amy Lowell [1874–1925]
Sara Teasdale [1884–1933]
Margaret Widdemer [1884–1978]
Marianne Moore [1887–1972]
Gabriela Mistral [1889–1957]
Edna St. Vincent Millay [1892–1950]
Louise Bogan [1897–1970]
Marya Zaturenska [1902–1982]
Jessica Powers [1905–1988]
Audrey Wurdemann [1911–1960]
Gwendolyn Brooks [1917–2000]
Average Weekly Reading: 3 poems
Check back for notices about changes or cancellations prior to the starting date.
All Times Eastern Daylight (EDT March 8-November 1) & Eastern Standard Time (EST Nov 1-March)