Speaker: Chad Wellmon
Date: Wednesday, June 23
Time: 5:30 p.m. MT / 7:30 p.m. ET

Join the June 23 lecture via Zoom
Passcode: 064125

The humanities didn't come into their own, didn’t become modern, until relatively recently, when scholars began to frame their previously disparate practices and ideals as a unique and unified resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. This new self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis, it justified itself in terms of crisis. The modern humanities are always in crisis because their defenders and detractors alike have needed them to be.

Permanent Crisis is neither a call to action nor an apology. It is a work of historical scholarship and conceptual inquiry that shows how claims of crisis are not only older than we think, but also have played a crucial role in grounding the idea that the humanities have a special mission. In uncovering this history, Permanent Crisis highlights continuities and transformations that extend from early nineteenth-century Prussia to the twenty-first-century United States. It shows how the very processes that have allowed the modern humanities to flourish and attain social and institutional value—democratization, secularization, institutional rationalization—have also consistently imperiled them. In this talk, Chad Wellmon will offer an overview of Permanent Crisis and suggest why its story offers reasons for hope in what might otherwise seem like the twilight of liberal learning.

Chad Wellmon is a Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Virginia. Read more about his work at chadwellmon.com.

Speakers: Richard McCombs and Krishnan Venkatesh
Date: Wednesday, June 30
Time: 4:30 p.m. MT / 6:30 p.m. ET

Tutors Richard McCombs and Krishnan Venkatesh discuss J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and ask: Why do we reread this book, again and again? What is it in this book that is worthy of being encountered again and again over the course of a lifetime? To a young reader, “The Lord of the Rings” is a classically simple tale of conflict between Good and Evil, of heroism and nobility, and of self-discovery. To an older reader, it seems less simple, the portrayals of good and evil seem more complex and interesting; the story is permeated by betrayal and disappointment; and instead of self-discovery we get self-loss. Indeed, the whole book is about loss of one kind and another. Join us in an exploration of this wonderfully rich book. 

Speaker: Angel Parham
Date: Wednesday, July 7
Time: 5:30 p.m. MT / 7:30 p.m. ET

In the Ethics, Aristotle notes that it is possible to have many friends in the civic sense, and that friendship acts as a bond that holds communities together. He goes on to describe civic friendship as a kind of concord where good men “wish for what is just and advantageous and also pursue these objects in common” (Book IX, vi, 1167b). How far we seem to be from such a state! How might we conceive of and practically live out a kind of civic friendship that helps us to work across lines of difference in status, politics, and identity? We explore these questions by examining the writings of Anna Julia Cooper and Martin Luther King Jr. whose lived experience mirrors something of our own fractured times, and whose political and social thought resonates with Aristotelian insights on the nature and challenges of our life together.

Angel Adams Parham is the Rev. Joseph H. Fichter, S.J. Distinguished Professor of Social Science and Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University-New Orleans. Read more about her work at angelparham.com.

Date: Wednesday, July 14
Time: 5:30 p.m. MT / 7:30 p.m. ET

Speaker: Shannon Chamberlain
Date: Wednesday, July 21
Time: 4:30 p.m MT / 6:30 p.m. ET

Sir Walter Elliott would much prefer to spend time with his Debrett’s Peerage than with his daughters. Mrs Bennet—a “woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper”—sends one of hers out in a downpour in mad pursuit of an eligible bachelor. Mr. Woodhouse has little time for anything but his own ailments. And let’s not even get started on Lady Susan, the epitome of indifferent motherhood in Jane Austen’s novels and juvenilia.

This is, in other words, a cast of characters that is difficult to defend. But a partial exoneration is the goal of this lecture, which attempts a sympathetic look at some of Austen’s parents as figures caught in the flux of changing Enlightenment attitudes about the role of the parent. Their central predicament—how to prepare their children for a world whose rules that they increasingly don’t understand, and balance happiness against the need for self-support and realism—is deeply familiar to modern parents, and one which the childless Austen treats more sensitively and generously than she appears to at first glance, with a keen and ironic eye towards the ways that we must always find new ways to hew a middle road between the extremes of theory and practice, indulgence and stoicism, and the old and the new.

Speaker: Phil LeCuyer
Date: Wednesday, July 28
Time: 4:30 p.m. MT / 6:30 p.m. ET

“Esther” is the last book to be accepted into the canon of scriptures of the Hebrew bible. The name of God does not appear in it. It is the only book in the bible written by a woman. Its scene is set in Susa, the capital of Persia, not Jerusalem. The lecture will consider these as well as other distinctive characteristics of the text.

Speaker: Ken Wolfe
Date: Wednesday, June 16
Time: 4:30 p.m. MT / 6:30 p.m ET

This introduction to the Qur’an will explore the context of its composition within the life of Muḥammad and 6th-century Arabia, its form and content, its relation to other texts and traditions (the Bible, Judaism, Christianity), and its influence upon certain aspects of the Islamic tradition.