The Seminar Catalog for the July 2025 Summer Classics program will be published in early February 2025, and Registration will open on February 18, 2025 at 10 a.m. MT / Noon ET.
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The information below is from Summer 2024 and is kept on the website to demonstrate the kinds of seminars that are offered. All new seminars and descriptions will be announced for 2025.
Whether you choose to attend in person or online, Summer Classics offers an opportunity to follow your heart or get to the heart of an idea in the company of fellow lifelong learners.
Choose from a roster of 32 captivating classes, 24 meeting in person and eight meeting online.
All online seminars will use the Zoom platform.
Gregory Freeman and Lee Goldsmith Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
In the books of Exodus and Leviticus, we see a people liberated from slavery and beginning to form a nation under its own laws. But what are the qualities of this people? Presumably, over the course of their sojourn in and escape from Egypt they forged a national character. Moreover, that national character must have some relationship to the divine power that saved them. What, then, is that character, and to what extent is it defined by the sacred rituals and spaces by which they relate to God? To what extent do the laws by which they relate to God—and each other—define who they are?
Text: Torah/Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Recommended editions include:
Patricia Greer and David Townsend Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
This text is a fundamental work on happiness, nobility, the Good, friendship, virtue, moderation, and community. Aristotle teaches us to think about ethics and to do philosophy, practicing as we read together. Join us in building a republic capable of reflection, as we think about the ethical relation of the individual to the community, of the soul to the body, of discipline and habit to freedom, and of spirit to nature.
Text: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (tr. Joe Sachs). Focus/Hackett, ISBN 978-1585100354
Allison DeWitt and Patricia Locke Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
Reading Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is an opportunity to explore the questions of gender, class, and social mores that are so relevant to all of Austen’s novels. However, this novel also adds considerations about the enslaved labor that contributed to her world of country houses, balls, and social climbing. This backdrop allows us to consider the relationship between economic conditions and the various hierarchies that bear upon the characters’ lives. This lesser-studied novel is enjoyable for those who have read her other novels many times and may invite new ways of thinking about Austen’s relationship to her society and the politics of her age.
Text: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park. Oxford World’s Classics, ISBN 978-0199535538
Joshua Mirth and Peter Pesic Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 4-6 p.m. EDT / 2–4 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
We first learn numbers as children, but their mysteries never stop deepening. The modern concept of number owes much to Richard Dedekind’s foundational work, which we study carefully and slowly in his two famous papers on the theory of numbers: "Continuity and Irrational Numbers" and "The Nature and Meaning of Numbers." Accessible to someone comfortable with high school algebra, Dedekind cuts the Gordian knot of number.
Texts:
Eric Salem and Marsaura Shukla 3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is remarkable for its brevity and intensity of expression. When approached with care, her best poems unfold to reveal an intricate and deep analysis of the ambiguity of the modern self’s position in the world as an observer of nature, as a member of a human community shaped by inherited traditions, and as a mortal consciousness facing its own death.
Text: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. R. W. Franklin). Belknap Press, ISBN 978-0674018242
Charlie Barrett and Christopher Cohoon 3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
In this class we look carefully at Plato’s Symposium, whose explicit topic is eros and logos, although the connection between the two is ambiguous. One way the theme shows up is as a contest between philosophy and poetry over the nature of eros; the poets get a rare opportunity to speak for themselves and Socrates makes a rare claim: I know erotic things. Yet his claim is strange, since philos, not eros, is constitutive of philosophia, and eros as a blinding passion seems antithetical to knowing. Thus two questions: 1) Can we have erotic longing for wisdom? 2) What would it mean to say we have expert knowledge of erotics? Poetry and philosophy, then, seem to disagree about what humans long for, which they agree fundamentally characterizes human beings. They, therefore, disagree about what it means to be human—a fairly important disagreement. The stakes of the contest are high. So we start at the obvious, and if we make good progress, we end big by asking: What in the world is eros, according to Plato?
Text: Plato, Symposium (tr. Seth Benardete). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226042756
David Carl and David Townsend 3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
This epic poem in seven books reimagines and transforms Homer. We follow protagonist Achille, a St. Lucie fisherman, as he seeks his true, authentic self and soul. His voyage takes him, Walcott, and us to the Caribbean, Boston, the American Midwest, and West Africa, journeying home. Gorgeous imagery, compelling narrative, and unforgettably poignant characters grip our spirits, hearts, and reason. Walcott won the Nobel Prize chiefly for this work.
Text: Derek Walcott, Omeros. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0374523503
David Carl and Ron Martin Wilson 6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
Winner of both the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was reassessed about a decade later as “the best novel of the 21st century to date” by a majority of American critics. Felt to have resembled the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde while wearing (of course) a Doctor Who costume for Halloween, Oscar Wao is the undersexed and overweight nerd at the heart of this maximalist American novel, called by one admiring critic a “deft mash-up of Dominican history, comics, sci-fi, [and] magic realism.” Both the coming-of-age story of this would-be “Dominican Tolkien” and the painful chronicle of an immigrant family’s emergence in New Jersey from the violence and beauty of the Dominican Republic in the bloody era of Trujillo, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also gorges upon and attempts to digest the history and culture of America itself, as well as those of the broader Americas. Readers will, therefore, experience not just a mélange of Melville and Márquez but also of Star Trek, the Fantastic Four, Dungeons & Dragons, and various alternate cosmoi that the lovelorn Oscar Wao, like so many other global youth, inhabits during his “brief wondrous life.”
Text: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, ISBN 978-1594483295
Patricia Greer and David Townsend 7-9 p.m. EDT / 5-7 p.m. MDT July 1–5, 2024 ONLINE
All in-person seminars will be held at the Santa Fe, New Mexico, campus of St. John’s College.
Michael Golluber and Ned Walpin 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni (The Libertine Punished, or Don Giovanni) is acknowledged by critics and the public as one of the greatest operas. Mozart and his finest librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, created a sublime and highly dramatic work in this dramma giocoso. Its central character can still spark heated discussions. How is it that Don Giovanni, the seducer of thousands of women, continues to seduce audiences after more than 200 years? Is there something admirable and appealing in the powerful character or is he a vile libertine who deserves eternal damnation?
No background in opera or music is necessary for participation in this seminar. Participants attend the Santa Fe Opera's performance of Don Giovanni on Wednesday, July 10, 2024.
James Carey and Frank Pagano 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
Hippias of Elis, a well-known sophist, is Socrates’s interlocutor in two dialogues named after him. The central theme of the Hippias Major is beauty. The central theme of the Hippias Minor is falsehood. A suggestion is advanced in the latter that intentional falsehood might be better than unintentional falsehood. This suggestion is connected to Socrates’s general claim that virtue is knowledge and. vice is ignorance. That Hippias is Socrates’s sole interlocutor in a dialogue treating beauty—or nobility, as they are the same word in Greek—and his chief interlocutor in a dialogue treating falsehood raises the questions of how beauty is related to intentional distortion of truth and whether truth, considered in itself, is closer to ugliness than it is to beauty.
Text: The Roots of Classical Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues (ed. Thomas Pangle). Cornell University Press, ISBN 978-0801494659
Emily Langston and J. Walter Sterling 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
“The Waste Land” (1922) is the iconic poem of the modernist literary canon and perhaps the most influential poem of the 20th century. In celebrating the centennial of its publication, Anthony Lane wrote: “’The Waste Land’ is a symphony of shocks, and, like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down.… The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless” (The New Yorker, September 26, 2022). The poem is vast in the range of its sources and its aesthetic ambitions—exploring (and deepening) the problems of modern culture and consciousness. The difficulty of interpreting it makes it particularly ripe for shared inquiry and conversation. We frame three days on this masterpiece with selected poems from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and the important essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
Two mid-20th-century novels, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, have been described as “urgently political” in confronting the ideological distortions of violent totalitarianism. Koestler used the haunting 1938 Moscow Trials, and Orwell created a future dystopia; both show the state maintaining its power by trammeling on the integrity of the individual, smothering truth, and demanding obedience. These are chilling dramas pitting a man against a creed whose machinery and psychology crushes memory and fact, erases the past, and substitutes approved right thinking. Written as warnings, driven by apprehensions of how such authoritarian deceit and its measures could become accepted, their lasting imaginative power demands we look at how they stood in their time—and also what they mean today.
Grant Franks and Mahmoud Jalloh 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
C. S. Peirce has fittingly been called the American Aristotle and the father of the philosophy known as pragmatism. His intellectual concerns included geophysics, the foundations of logic and probability, the nature of truth, experimental psychology, mechanisms of evolution, infinity, and collective consciousness. We read some of his most influential works at the border of philosophy and science. Our focus is on his methodological (or "logical") writings, which provide a new grounding for natural philosophy in a fundamentally chancy world. We also get introduced briefly to some of his speculative evolutionary metaphysics. No training in mathematics or formal logic is assumed. Those interested in making their ideas clear are welcome.
Text: The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867–1893). Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0253207210
Peter Pesic and Ken Wolfe 10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
Quantum mechanics challenges our ordinary experience and intuition even as it underlies the physics that has transformed the world. We spend a week not just discussing Richard Feynman's inspired description of the fundamental quantum processes but experiencing them for ourselves by doing experiments with a sensitive apparatus capable of registering the behavior of a single quantum of light. With it, we can see as directly as possible what quanta can do, even as we discuss and work through experimental explorations of quantum interference and quantum erasers. This is a unique opportunity to encounter and study quantum phenomena such as the "wave-particle duality" through hands-on experience.
Text:
Emily Langston and J. Walter Sterling 2–4 p.m. MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
David Carl and Aparna Ravilochan 2–4 p.m. MDT July 8–12, 2024 IN-PERSON
Satyajit Ray is widely acclaimed as the most influential Indian director in the development of world cinema and one of the greatest movie directors of all time, and these three films, centering around the life of Apu, are his masterpieces. At once intense dramas of domesticity, human love, and tragedy set in rural Bengal and urban Calcutta in the decade after independence from England, they are quiet triumphs of the human spirit and stunning works of cinematic beauty and technical innovation. Ray’s transgenerational portrayal of Apu’s coming-of-age story, from child to adult over the course of these three movies, is beautifully filmed with a brilliant soundtrack by Ravi Shankar that helped introduce Indian music to a wider Western audience.
Film: Satyajit Ray, The Apu Trilogy (The Criterion Collection)
Seth Appelbaum and Claudia Hauer 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
We read Emmanuel Levinas’s essays on the Talmud, with some selected readings from the Talmud as accompaniment. Levinas offers a radically ethical reading of these fundamental Judaic scriptures. Levinas delivered these essays as commentaries in the 1960s and 1970s in Paris. His readings suggest ways in which ancient Jewish texts can respond to turbulent current events, such as one pressing issue of his time: whether and how to prosecute Nazis for war crimes against Jews. Levinas’s reflections are both timeless and timely, as Israel finds itself once again immersed in conflicts that rouse polarizing passions around the world, and we are called to revisit the ethical and non-political meditations that are the core of Judaism.
Grant Franks and Eric Salem 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
In these four interlocked plays, Shakespeare tells the story of the English monarchy in a crucial transformative period. Richard II, a better poet than a king, loses control over factions in his state and descends into tragedy. Henry Bolingbroke seizes the throne and then finds himself surrounded by challengers who see Henry’s actions as encouragement for their own rebellion. His son, Prince Hal, retreats into the taverns of East London where, in the company of Falstaff and against the expectations of his father and the establishment of nobles, he grows into the most glorious leader of English history. That, at least, is the superficial narrative. The depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s characters invites ever more interesting reflections on this fascinating story.
David Carl and David Townsend 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
Blood Meridian is a violent tale of the American Southwest and its border with Mexico. Based on historic events, McCarthy’s novel is a profound meditation on good and evil, violence and humanity, damnation and redemption. His characters known simply as “the kid” and “the judge” have taken their place alongside similarly morally ambiguous heroes of American fiction, such as Melville’s Captain Ahab and Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen. Against the backdrop of bounty hunters and Indian wars, McCarthy’s tale unfolds in prose as gorgeous as the disturbing quality of the violence and conflict it describes.
Text: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. Vintage, ISBN 978-069728757
Michael Dink and Rebecca Goldner 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
In the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator finds himself revisiting and intensifying his relationships to characters we have already met. Among these are the Duchesse de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, Charles Swann, and Albertine. In this volume, the French aristocracy, which had seemed to be something mysterious and mythic beyond his ken, becomes an object both of personal experience and of evaluative scrutiny. Characters who seemed removed from him now inhabit his everyday life, both because he has become neighbors with them and also because he is becoming a part of their social world. We enter this world with him, a world with its own rules about wit, art, hierarchy, and status. Running through the novel as an undercurrent is the Dreyfus affair, raising questions about loyalty, patriotism, and antisemitism.
Text: Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (ed. Christopher Prendergast). Penguin Classics, ISBN 9780143039228
John Cornell and Natalie Elliot 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
In the first decades of the 20th century, Stefan Zweig was a global literary phenomenon. He penned biographies that celebrated the creators of Europe’s open society and stories that captured the fragile elegance of pre-war Vienna. The urbane society he lauded and loved would be ruined by fascism; his civilized vision seemed lost forever. But its relevance today is being reappreciated, as suggested by new collections of his fiction, tales archly interwoven in the 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Indeed, the charm of Zweig's characters endures, and their dilemmas are painfully recognizable. In this seminar we read five novellas by a writer who knew that the past is always present, even when one feels one's world rapidly fading away.
Text: Stefan Zweig, The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig (tr. Anthea Bell). Pushkin Press, ISBN 978-1782277071
Grant Franks and Eric Salem 2–4 p.m. MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
James Carey and Khafiz Kerimov 2–4 p.m. MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
Descartes is held to be the founder of modern philosophy, as distinct from modern political theory and modern natural science. Whereas Spinoza’s Ethics addresses, criticizes, and develops observations of Descartes’s that pertain to metaphysics and theology, Locke’s essay addresses, criticizes, and develops observations of Descartes’s that pertain to the articulation of consciousness, the nature of language, and the scope of human knowledge. Locke’s classic occupies a central position in early modern philosophy. It provokes significant and extended responses from Leibniz on the one hand and from Berkeley and Hume on the other.
Text: John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Oxford World's Classics, ISBN 978-0199296620
David Carl and Clara Picker 2–4 p.m. MDT July 15–19, 2024 IN-PERSON
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) all imagine possible consequences of the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity. While each movie approaches this topic in its own way and from distinct historical vantage points, all three ask what sort of relationships are possible between human beings and AI, and how these relationships play out in the context of different societies. Taken together, these three movies represent a 45-year span of cinema’s engagement with the question of how AI might change the human condition.
Films:
Grant Franks and Eric Salem 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
Herodotus has been called the “father of history.” He has also been called the “father of lies.” His history is the heroic narrative of the great conflict between the Persian Empire and the (more or less) united city states of Greece, culminating in the Battle of Marathon and the famous last stand of the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. It is also a leisurely tour around the Eastern Mediterranean world and the Near East in the 6th century B.C.E., guided by someone resembling no one so much as your crazy uncle who knows all the good stories. For some, Herodotus’s Histories are a fuzzy memory of undergraduate readings that went by too fast, leaving only a vague desire to “go back to that someday.” (Now is your chance!) For others, it represents a new, exciting, informative, and entertaining experience. Five sessions permit a complete and leisurely reading of this endlessly fascinating text.
Text: Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (ed. Robert Strassler; tr. Andrea Purvis). Anchor Books, ISBN 978-1400031146
Patricia Greer and Michael Wolfe 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
The 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi has enjoyed enormous popularity among American readers in the last few decades, giving rise to numerous English translations in divergent styles. While spiritual in nature, Rumi’s poems take on various worldly shapes, from passionate love poems to dramatic narratives. In this seminar we approach a selection of Rumi’s lyric poems and poetic stories from multiple angles, reading the poems in multiple English formats—both literal translations and non-literal “versions”—as well as listening to splendid recitations in the original Persian. This multifaceted approach deepens our understanding of the Persian poetic tradition as well as the Islamic mystical (Sufi) tradition to which Rumi belongs.
Texts and Materials:
Michael Dink and Stella Zhu 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
The 19th century saw nature’s secrets revealed through great strides in the development of modern science, particularly in medicine and electricity and magnetism. It also saw the emergence of the modern genre of science fiction. We read from three forerunners in the genre: Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic, Frankenstein; George Eliot’s 1859 novella, “The Lifted Veil”; and two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In each case, fiction is a student of science, as it borrows from scientific laws and discoveries to set up its own experiment of “What if?” Yet when the experiment goes awry, fiction reveals something about science: unforeseen consequences, falsifying assumptions, and a Faustian tendency to transgress intrinsic limits. Properly conceived, these stories sit at the crossroads between scientific and literary discourses and interweave both. Following their footsteps, we interrogate the consonance and dissonance among mankind’s various intellectual labors.
John Cornell and Richard McCombs 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
Kierkegaard’s three famous works—The Sickness unto Death, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or—were composed under various pseudonyms. But he described such pseudonymous writings as being offered by his left hand—that is, not in a direct or straightforward manner. Kierkegaard’s spiritual discourses, on the other hand (here the right), developed his characteristic and challenging ideas, but in them his form of expression was simpler and more straightforward. Heidegger thought this body of signed work might well be the more important part of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Are they lay sermons, breathing new life into the old pious form? Or are they existential treatises in disguise? This seminar studies a number of exemplary and accessible texts by the most uncompromising analyst of the modern psyche.
Text: Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses and Writings on Spirituality (tr. Christopher Barnett). Paulist Press, ISBN 978-0809106486
David Townsend and Anika Prather 10 a.m.–Noon MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
The United States of America is the greatest experiment in humankind’s ability to achieve a good and just society based on ideas, virtue, practical wisdom, and law. We explore together the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights), and a selection of fourteen entries from The Federalist Papers to consider how the populace of this nation might live.
Text: Manual will be provided
David Carl and Paola Villa 9:30 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–3:30 p.m. MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
“O ye caterers of luxuries, ye gods and goddesses of the science of cookery! Deliver us from tomatoes.” Such was the plea of the editor of The Boston Courier in 1834. Half a century later, in 1889, tomato sauce was thought fit to feed a queen, and pizza Margherita was born in Naples. Fruits or vegetables, “strange and horrible things,” or “golden pomes” (as the Italians called them), tomatoes are the perfect oxymoronic travel guide for the complex and still poorly understood world of taste. Spanning the New and the Old Worlds, we explore the science and the art of transforming nature into culture while following the metamorphoses of the tomato in Mexican, Italian, and Indian culture and cuisine. In the laboratory of the kitchen, and with the help of chemistry and neurogastronomy, we challenge our senses to understand the flavor molecules that allowed this Cinderella of the culinary realm to blossom into the king of all ingredients.
William Braithwaite and Lijun Gu 2–4 p.m. MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
The author Lafcadio Hearn tells us, “Kokoro (heart) signifies the mind, in the emotional sense; as we say in English, ‘the heart of things.’” Hearn grew up in Greece and Ireland and settled in Japan. He taught English literature in Tokyo, married a Japanese woman, and became a citizen. These poignant stories sketch a Japan vanishing under new ideas of modernity and tradition, establishing Hearn as a perceptive observer of things Japanese for Western readers.
Text: Lafcadio Hearn, Kokoro: An Intimate Portrait of Japanese Inner Life. Tuttle Publishing, ISBN 978-4805317204
Natalie Elliot and Eric Salem 2–4 p.m. MDT July 22–26, 2024 IN-PERSON
Is it ironic that two of the greatest films about the American West and our emerging sense of national identity were created by an Italian filmmaker who shot them in Europe? Leone’s two Western epics (also referred to as spaghetti Westerns) further developed the themes and styles of great American filmmakers like John Ford to tell the story of America’s Civil War and westward expansion through the eyes of a European sensibility—not unlike de Tocqueville’s brilliant insights into American democracy penned 130 years earlier. In addition to being two of the greatest and most ambitious films made in the tradition of the American Western, Leone’s movies are stories of greed, violence, passion, and revenge that helped raise both Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to international stardom and feature brilliant performances by actors such as Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Woody Strode.
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