Public Lectures

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Workshop made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation.

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This lecture explores the concept of ars vitae, Latin for the art of living. It calls on ancient ways of thinking about the enduring question of how to live in order to imagine new ways of addressing our challenges. 

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In this talk, poet and novelist Ben Lerner will consider some of the possibilities of aberrant perception – how common auditory and visual distortions, for instance, allow them to experience the constructedness and messiness of the human sensorium. What are some of the aesthetic and social possibilities opened up by hearing the limitations of their hearing or seeing the shared blindspots in their sight? What would it mean to ground the teaching of art and literature in an awareness of the ways they err together? Lerner's goal is to arrive at an optimistic reading of Niklas Luhmann’s quote that “communication is improbable”-- to refresh the wonder before the fact that there are moments, however fleeting, of common sense.

In this presentation, followed by a question-and-answer forum, Professor Tom Harrison will offer an overview of the Jubilee Centres’ and his own recent research investigating the impact of new and emerging digital technologies on the character and moral development of adolescents. Professor Harrison will outline some of the moral misdemeanors regularly perpetuated and/or experienced by adolescents and how these negatively impact human flourishing. Following this, Professor Harrison will explore how adolescents can be supported to develop digital-wisdom – the ability to ‘do the right thing at the right time whilst using digital technologies’. Research is starting to show how digital-wisdom education can mitigate some of parents’, teachers’, and wider societal concerns about the impact of digital technologies on the health and well-being of adolescents growing up in the digital age.

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In the most general sense, Melancholic Joy is about how to contend with the possibility that the rational response to reality is despair. Working with engaging and accessible examples, diverse expressions of poetic and literary insight, and clear philosophical arguments, Dr. Brian Treanor offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It is one that unflinchingly acknowledges both the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that counsel despair and the seemingly inexhaustible opportunities for joy and wonder that suggest the possibility of something beyond despair. The point is to see both aspects of reality clearly. Denying or dismissing the possibility of despair is a fool’s errand, first because there are legitimate reasons for despair, and second because much despair is not rooted in reasons at all, but rather in a kind of global mood or attunement.

However, remaining insensitive to the more salutary aspects of reality is its own kind of failure-to-see, because beauty and goodness are happening everywhere, whether it is noticed or not. Dr. Treanor's goal, then, is not to argue against despair (because there are good arguments for it, and because emotionally rooted forms of despair are not vulnerable to reason at all); rather, the goal is to be trained to see the full picture, the beauty as well as the brutality, and then to cultivate habits that maximize the former while dealing with the latter.

Religious phenomena that include rituals and written accounts of spiritual experiences have been subject to psychological analysis for a long time. Some, like those of Freud, have been discounted as highly reductive and prejudicial while some like those of Jung have been discounted as no more than spiritual accounts in another form. The approach of William James has attracted more serious and measured consideration by scholarship interested in ways of analyzing religious phenomena using psychological tools. Dr. Ariel Glucklich's approach since the mid-1990s has been to simplify the task by focusing on religious phenomena that are both embodied and basic. By basic, he refers to affect-based events. This has included a study of the uses of pain in religious life and more recently, the uses of pleasure (both embodied and mental). The descriptive component of this work is both rich and simple: there is a multitude of examples in religious life for voluntary and self-inflicted pain geared to the production of altered states of consciousness. There are just as many examples of the use of pleasure, both discursive and ritual, in religious documents and in anthropological descriptions.

In today's rapidly evolving world, the demand for ethical decision-making and wise judgment has never been more crucial. This course offers a comprehensive exploration of practical wisdom, or phronesis, within professional practice. Throughout this course, Kristján Kristjánsson, Ph.D. will delve into five key units to provide a holistic understanding of practical wisdom in professional practice with a sound philosophical basis that has been refined through well over a decade of empirical research.

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Drawing on recent work in the history of science and technology, Professor Burnett will review the changing understanding of human attention in the modern period, in an effort to draw out a distinction between "instrumentalizing" theories of human attentional response (on the one hand) and "irreducible" treatments of the same dynamics/phenomena (on the other). The aim of the presentation will be to contextualize and critique the explosive growth of a suite of industries that currently engage in what can best be called "human fracking"—the extraction of value from individuals and populations through the wholesale commodification of the human capacity to care.

In this talk based on his forthcoming book "There Is No Place for Us," Brian Goldstone recounts the experiences of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s “working homeless.” In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success—or at least stability—there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents,
low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People working full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. Families are being pushed into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

Through a series of narrative portraits, this talk examines the human cost of housing insecurity, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are America’s hidden homeless: omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive crisis.

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Workshop made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation