Los Altos Institute Archive

Stuart Parker delivers a guest lecture on the intellectual context into which Dune emerged in 1965 and speaks to the limitations of the human sciences

Leisl Westfall introduces the course and its objectives. 

We conclude the course with two epilogues, one from the Yucatan and one from Utah. This is the one class co-lectured by Stuart and Jacob.

In the penultimate lecture we do some theorizing about what utopias are and are not. Brace for class participation throughout!

This episode is actually missing. This is just a placeholder in anticipation of its replacement.

We spend a class setting up the social and economic conditions that would give rise to the mass of utopian projects in 1970s Anglo America.

In this episode, we discuss Metlakatla, Sointula and the Doukhobor communities of the West Kootenays as the theory of internal colonialism that made them possible. 

Paraguay has been a site of extraordinarily protracted and successful utopian projects. Students had just viewed the Mission (1987) starring Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro.

Jacob Baker takes on the many complexities of Brigham Young's kingdom in Utah.

Here, listeners can finally learn about the country after which our institute is named.

In the second of Jacob's lectures on early Mormonism, we examine the Joseph Smith ministry at its zenith.

Jacob Baker takes the wheel for episodes three and four, looking at how Mormonism arose out of a larger Jacksonian project of local autonomy and religious perfectionism.

The story that America's founders were religious refugees is a myth as persistent and as false as the belief that medieval Christians thought the earth was flat. 

This is the first episode setting up the overall approach and scope of Stuart Parker and Jacob Baker's Failed Utopias of the Americas course.

Is America's march towards holy empire inevitable? If not, what is it contingent on? We consider these questions as we wrap the course.

We examine the growth and alliance of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism in the late twentieth century and the way this changed the Republican Party.

In this episode, we look at the curious story of Willard Cleon Skousen and his profound posthumous impact of America's path towards holy empire.

We examine the convergence between normative American culture and Mormon and fundamentalist cultures due to the exigencies of the Cold War.

This section of the course covers America's rise to global hegemon and the intersection of that phenomenon with a new understanding of individual rights.

We begin our look at how Mormonism has made a unique contribution to American ideas of holy empire and place it in the context of the larger demographic shifts in the early 19th century US. 

The show discusses the unique doctrines of Calvinism and how this particular Christian movement laid the groundwork for liberalism and for white settler states like the US and South Africa.

We continue our discussion with the rise of the medieval replica city and the way that holy empire was bolstered by typological thought.

We follow the emergence of the first holy empires the Byzantine, Ummayid, Abassid and Holy Roman empires and compare it to the trajectory of Christianity in India and Aksum.

We continue our narrative, examining the evolution of politics and the incipient category of religion as we look at the emergence of henotheistic states.

We begin with a recap of the present situation and discuss the odd and uncanny aspects of the Trump presidency.