St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of an online panel discussion with tutor Claudia Hauer, tutor Alison Chapman, and current senior Zion Peart held on February 5, 2021 as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event : "In Strategic Humanism, St. John’s College tutor Claudia Hauer explores how Thucydides’ and Homer’s account of the problems of leadership rema...

Audio recording of an online lecture given on January 29, 2021 by Nicolas de Warren as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series and the Carol J. Worrel Annual Series on Literature. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event : "Although Dostoevsky struggled with the problem of evil and forgiveness in many of his writings, my aim in this lecture is a discussion of evil and forgi...

Audio recording of an online panel discussion with Benjamin Baum, Caroline Randall, Piér Quintana, Cesar Cervantes, Martha Franks, Guillermo Bleichmar, and Walter Sterling on September 16, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event: "For our annual event recognizing Constitution Day, this Wednesday afternoon a panel of faculty...

Audio recording on an online discussion with Alfredo Corchado held on October 2, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series and the Carol J. Worrell Annual Series on Literature with student and alumni co-moderators David Adah-Ogoh, Onysha Boak, Salomon Cordova, Nani Detti, Mario Moreno, Miselo Matipa. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Join us for a convers...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Steven Forde on September 4, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series with student panelists Alejandro Ross, George Stengren, Bridget Lynch, and Seungyoun Bang. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The ancient poet Hesiod was roughly contemporary with Homer, but his Works and Days seems decidedly un-Homeric. It is playf...

Audio recording of a lecture given by J. Scott Lee on November 6, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Liberal education is in deep trouble. The path to rescue lies through artistic invention. What is the trouble? Recruitment. Why is this trouble? Most defenses of liberal education rely on ineffective persuasives. W...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Martha Franks on November 13, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "'What is Justice?' we ask at St. John’s, and do careful readings of texts to look for an answer. Johnnie and lawyer Martha Franks discusses how the conversations about Justice and the reading of books that...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Erika Martinez on October 23, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "In Genesis, God calls things into being, demonstrating speech at its most powerful. Two of his creations, though—the man and the woman—cannot speak to each other and in fact never do. Thinking about the gar...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Diana Schaub on December 4, 2020 as a part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Having originally been a severe critic of Abraham Lincoln, the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass grew to appreciate Lincoln’s prudential statesmanship. In his 1876 “Oration in Memory of Lincoln” he recapitu...

"Can beautiful speeches give rise to beautiful deeds?" Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Cary Stickney on October 21, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series.

Audio recording of an online panel with panelists David Carl, David McDonald, and Krishnan Venkatesh. The panel was held on September 25, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "How do we respond to a photograph as a work of art rather than as visual document? How do photographs move us aesthetically? How can we learn...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Daryl Haggard on March 12, 2021 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, highlighted by the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Kit Slover on February 26, 2021 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant confesses that the 'Transcendental Deduction' of the categories is the section of his work that cost him the most effort to produce. In the centuries since i...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Charlotte Thomas on March 5, 2021 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Thucydides gives a scathing account of Nicias’s failures in Sicily and then says, just before his awful death, that Nicias was least among the Hellenes to deserve such a fate because 'the whole of his life had bee...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean J. Walter Sterling on August 26, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Mr. Sterling will explore the contested idea of freedom that underlies any authentic liberal education, including the St. John’s Program of Instruction. He will argue that the difficulty of specifying the...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors Chris Cohoon, Claudia Hauer, David McDonald and Sarah Stickney on September 2, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey stand at the beginning of the St. John’s Program as foundational accounts of the deepest human questions: loss, death, war, lo...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by Judith Adam, Seth Appelbaum, Grant Franks, Eric Poppele and Ahmed Siddiqi on September 9, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Because it attempts to engage directly with the natural world and the question of Nature, Freshman Laboratory is possibly the most radical of beginn...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Martha Franks on September 16, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The United States Supreme Court has recently rendered several newsworthy, controversial rulings. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for example, the Court overturned an earlier Supreme Court...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Richard McCombs on September 23, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Pascal’s almost unrelenting emphasis on the weakness, vanity, misery and sinfulness of humanity can be hard to take. This lecture focuses on what is arguably the most beautiful and widely appealing aspec...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad on September 28, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "An examination of the problem of time and eternity in the context of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) and the problems and paradoxes raised by this in Islamic philosophy. Thi...

Audio recording of a lecture given by O. Carter Snead on October 7, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The natural limits of the human body make us vulnerable and dependent on others. Yet law and policy concerning biomedical research and the practice of medicine frequently disregard these stubborn facts. O. Carter...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Elaine Scarry on October 21, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor John Cornell on October 28, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Goethe’s character Faust – based on the medieval legend about a man who makes a pact with the Devil -- is an archetype of the Western soul. Dissatisfied with life, Faust pursues the most intense adventures wh...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Janet Dougherty on November 4, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Cyrus, Xenophon tells us in the first chapter of the Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus), knew how to rule humans, animals who are notoriously difficult to govern. In his manner of ruling Cyrus seems to co...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Hillel Fradkin on November 11, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "This lecture will explore the literary character of the Torah and follow that with literary and substantive interpretations of its first two stories – The Story of Creation and The Story of Abraham."