St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Richard McCombson June 24, 2026 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.  The Graduate Institute Office has providedthis description of the event: “After rejecting Christianity and God, George Eliot continued to speak, seemingly with approval, of conversion, saints, worship , and religion .  Onemight be tempted to write off her extensive...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Michael Grenkeon May 15, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided thisdescription of the event: “In his novella, Benito Cereno , Herman Melville depicts the aftermath of a slave uprising aboard a Spanish ship.  The ship is encountered by an American vessel, and the unknowing and friendly American captain vi...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Sarah Stickneyon May 8, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This lecture will look at Prince Hal’s passage fromtavern brawler to battlefield hero in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part I.  Many elements of the play suggest that Hal will fail and Harry Hotspur will triumph; why d...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Jim Carey onApril 24, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “According to Aristotle, there is a science (epistēmē) that considers being as being, or that which is insofar as it is.  This science later came to be known as ‘metaphysics,’ a word that Aristotle himself does not...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor emeritus Howard Fisher on April 15, 2026 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "A puzzling phenomenon observed by Edison in one of his early light bulbs seemed to disclose a kind of electric current that did not fit the received ideas, for it was not confined to a co...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors AlisonChapman, Krishnan Venkatesh, and David Carl on April 3, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “What is aportrait?  The English word comes from the Latin word protrahere, ‘to draw forth,’ ‘to drag forward,’ ‘to bring tolight,’ ‘to produce for inspection,’ while th...

Audio recording of a lecture given by John Peters on March6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “As far as we know the most complex thing the universe has brought forth, besides itself, is the human mind.  Among many other things, minds know things.  But what should we make of the fundamental fact that knowledge i...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Ken Wolfe on February 6, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the Origin of Species , Darwin points to analogies between biological and linguistic evolution and classification.  How strong are those analogies?  Why do they exist?  What do they tell us about human evolu...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor emeritus Howard Fisher on February 18, 2026 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Overland telegraph technology implicitly embodied a familiar image of electricity as being a mobile substance confined to conductors. But phenomena encountered in undersea telegraph ca...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Claudia Hauer on January 30, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “Emmanuel Levinas is a moral philosopher of the highest order. A student of Martin Heidegger’s, Levinas absorbed the tools of the phenomenological method, yet was repulsed by his teacher’s (at best) moral neu...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Andrew Nicholson on January 23, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (c. 4th century CE) have been an inspiration for philosophers and yoga practitioners for over 1500 years. For just as long, the meaning of certain terms in Patañjali’s celebrated te...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Baker on December12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “People who are concerned about technological change,or who resist the adoption of new technologies, are often depicted as motivated by either an irrational fear of novelty or a purely material concern for their live...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire on December 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In both the Republic and the Laws, the leader of the philosophical conversation claims that the goodness of the πóλις and its citizens depend on the goodness or fineness of its civic play (παιδιά) (cf....

Audio recording of a lecture given by Erik Dempsey on November 14, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This talk offers a close reading of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, focusing on the discussion of the economy of salvation in chapters 5-8. It looks especially at the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Annapolis Assistant Dean Ron Haflidson on November 7, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In this lecture, I explore the largely neglected and perhaps totally wrong possibility that when Jesus spoke about “hell”, he wasn’t talking about the afterlife. The inquiry proceeds by fo...

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Miller on October 24, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the summer of 1965, Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek returned to his native country to deliver and address at the unveiling of a memorial plaque in honor of Anton Webern in Mittersill, the village in the...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Davis on October 3, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Those living in the various versions of the best city described in Plato's Republic are to feel perfectly at home, but none of those present for the description is at home. The education of the philosopher...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Qiu Lin on September 26, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In Mencius 7A35, Tao Ying poses a dilemma to Mencius: Suppose Shun's father had committed murder—what would Shun have done? Mencius famously answers that Shun would have 'cast aside the world (tian-xia) a...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Daryl Haggard on September 19, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, particularly for Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horiz...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus John Cornell on September 12, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "Dante’s Comedy is widely assumed to champion the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Surely the test case for this conventional view is the episode in Paradiso where Dante imagines meeting up with th...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Tutor Emeritus Phil LeCuyer on September 5, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: "In this lecture arrays are contrasted to sequences as paradigms of thought. Sequences are based on causation. What are arrays based on? Several examples of arrays will be considered, including...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 29, 2025 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "St. John’s students often have the experience of coming to beautiful realizations and insights that seem to push past the ordinary—to touch that which is most important about life, about being human...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Philip Ording on May 2, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “There is no shortage of evidence that professional mathematicians describe their work in aesthetic terms, but the terms they use, at least publicly, are limited. The oft-repeated ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ may be importan...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Kit Slover on April 25, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “In the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet the northern prince stumbles upon the grave of Ophelia, leaps in, and declares himself to the funeral goers: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (V.1, 279). By calling himself th...

Audio recording of a lecture given by David Hayes and Jeremy Schwartz on April 18, 2025 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has providedthis description of the event: “The ‘Love Test’ in King Lear is widely understood to be the central puzzle in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.  As part of a political succession plan, it seems unnecessary.  As part of aloving...