SANTA FE, NM  [August 19, 2024] — St. John’s College has announced its fall formal lecture series on the Santa Fe campus. On Friday evenings, members of the St. John’s College community—alumni, friends, faculty, staff, students, and neighbors—gather in the Great Hall to hear a lecture or concert from visiting scholars, artists, poets, or faculty. Ranging from a jazz trio to a lecture on Don Quixote, these events are offered free to the community.

Lecturers include members of the St. John’s College faculty—known as tutors—and professors from notable universities across the country. Each lecture is followed by a question period and an engaging discussion between the lecturer and attendees.

The Santa Fe campus’ new president J. Walter Sterling noted, “As we celebrate our campus’s 60th anniversary, it remains a point of pride that St. John’s welcomes the public to weekly lectures, concerts, and theater performances. This year’s offerings will be as robust and varied as ever, even during the exciting renovation of our Pritzker Student Center. Curiosity and the desire to learn connect us all. We hope to see more and more members of our local community join us for these events.”

The full list of concerts and lectures is here: Santa Fe Lecture and Concert Series. Please visit this page for updates. All lectures are held Fridays at 7 p.m. in the Great Hall at St. John’s College, 1160 Camino de Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, NM 87505, unless noted.

“The lecture series supplements our discussion-based program. It gives members of the community the opportunity to consider sustained arguments from scholars of diverse backgrounds across a wide variety of disciplines,” says Dean of the College Sarah Davis. “Attendees are invited to engage directly with the lecturer in the question period that follows, which is an integral and dynamic part of the event.”

The fall 2024 lectures and performances are:  

• August 30: Sarah Davis, Dean, St. John’s College, Santa Fe will deliver the Dean’s lecture, “Family Resemblance: On Knowing and Not Knowing.”  Note: This lecture will be held on the Meem Placita.
• September 6: Andy Davis, Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Belmont University, will deliver his lecture “Hegel’s Rhythm: Speculative Thinking and the Relationship between Philosophy and Poetry.”
  • What can poetry teach us about the demands of writing and reading philosophy? In this talk I explore this question through the lens of a few paragraphs at the end of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, with some passing references to his account of poetry in the Aesthetics lectures. Hegel’s puzzling account of “der spekulative Satz” [the speculative sentence/proposition] employs a comparison to poetic rhythm in paragraph 61. Just as poetry plays formal meters off of natural accents, speculative expressions of philosophical content rely on a productive conflict between the form of the proposition (subject is predicate) and the unity of the Concept in which such differentiations between subjects, objects and qualities disappear. Poetry provides a model of unity in conflict that produces a “floating center” of meaning. What might it mean for philosophical thinking to likewise embrace a “floating center?”
• September 13: Aaron Goldberg Jazz Trio
  • Described by The New York Times as a “post-bop pianist of exemplary taste and range,” Goldberg has released five albums as a solo artist and has performed and collaborated with jazz greats.
• September 20: Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at Brown University, will deliver his lecture: “The Literature of Rant.”
• September 27: Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan, will deliver her lecture on Japanese poetry.
• October 4: Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, will deliver her lecture “Geontopower, The History of Thought as a Mode of Power.”
  • This lecture introduces the concept of geontopower–a form of settler liberal power that operates through the mobilization of a long-standing western division between Life and Nonlife in order to probe the politics of ontology. The lecture asks what is at stake when we begin an analysis of being with a claim about what the world is and then proceed to see how these ontological conditions are socially distributed so that we can organize a counter-politics. What new insights about our world come into sight when we begin within the multiple global sociopolitical entanglements that commenced as European ships began crossing the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans in search of wealth and continue to provide a matrix in which various people are allowed to move, how and the direction wealth move, and the ways that toxicities and harms are located?
• October 25: David McDonald, Santa Fe tutor, will deliver his lecture on technology 
• October 30: Ron Duncan Hart, director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies and former University Vice-President and Dean of Academic Affairs at Indiana University, will deliver his lecture “Christian Nationalism: Through the Lens of Anthropology.” Note: This lecture will be held on Wednesday, October 30, at 3:15 p.m. in the Junior Common Room.
  • Christian nationalism began forming in white working-class evangelical neighborhoods in the early 1970s. This talk will analyze the cultural matrix of religion, disenfranchisement, anti-feminism, and racism that were the roots of that movement. It developed in backlash to the Supreme Court decisions banning segregation, prayer, and Bible reading in schools, followed by the civil rights legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Roe vs Wade decision on abortion. Those historic changes and the growing pluralism of American society led to the religious right organizing to defeat them. Evangelicals formed a coalition with Ronald Reagan on the promise of making America great again, which was understood as code for making America White and Christian. We will look at that coalition and the continued use of the MAGA slogan to the present.
• November 1: Obed Lira, Santa Fe tutor, will deliver his lecture “Don Quixote and the Art of Reading.”
  • What is reading? Is it an art? Few books explore what it means to read as compellingly as Don Quixote. Guided by a character who writes and reads himself into the world, the novel’s numerous characters also appear to write and read themselves into dizzying stories as the book unfolds. The world, it seems, wants to read itself in narratives. To live in the world is to read the world. And yet, as we read, the book warns us that although reading ought to be edifying and delightful, it may easily prove harmful to individuals and dangerous to society. What lies at the center of this ambiguity in reading? Jests and metafictional trickery notwithstanding, the unrelenting violence depicted in the novel suggests that Cervantes might be deadly serious about a predicament that arises when thinking about reading more broadly: how are we to read the world, and what are we to do with how the world reads us.
• November 8: Jesse Wilson, UC Irvine, will deliver his lecture on mathematics.
• November 15: Susan Paalman, Dean, St. John’s College Annapolis, will deliver her lecture “On Parts and Wholes in Living Things: Harvey, Descartes, and The Heartbeat.”
• November 22: Matt Davis, tutor emeritus, St. John’s College, will deliver his lecture on Theaetetus.
• December 6: Chrysostomos, the St. John’s College-Santa Fe theater club, present Prometheus Bound.
• December 13: Anne-Marie Schultz, professor of philosophy and director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, Baylor University, will deliver her lecture, “Socratic Philosophical Legacies: Creating Philosophers of the Future.”

ABOUT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE

St. John’s College is the most distinctive liberal arts college in the country due to our interdisciplinary program, in which 200 of the most revolutionary great books from across 3,000 years of human thought are explored in student-driven, discussion-based classes for undergraduates, graduates and life-long adult learners. By probing world-changing ideas in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, music, history, and more, students leave St. John’s with a foundation for success in such fields as law, government, research, STEM, media, and education. Located on two campuses in two historic state capitals—Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico—St. John’s is the third-oldest college in the United States and has been hailed as the “most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America” by Quartz and as a “high-achieving angel hovering over the landscape of American higher education” by the Los Angeles Times. Learn more at sjc.edu. 

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