St. John's College (Santa Fe) Lectures

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor David McDonald on November 18, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "In a letter often called “The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux,” the poet Petrarch tells of climbing a mountain in the year 1336, in what is now southern France. This is the first documented instance in the West of t...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Jill Leovy on December 2, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The Iliad supplies a detailed and recognizable description of what the Italian mafia scholar Maurizio Catino has dubbed “horizontal” governance -- that is, lateral rule by peers rather than top-down rule by a central...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Patrick Schaefer on December 7, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "While trade flows inherently serve to unite distant communities, they also generate great divisions. In New Mexico, Tribal Nations now stand at the center of Transpacific and North American commerce, at the lea...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Patrick Goodin on December 9, 2022 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Quite early in the Phaedo Socrates famously describes philosophy, correctly understood, as the practice of dying and being dead, after which he goes on to discuss its meaning in detail. Out of this discussion eme...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Peter Pesic on January 27, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "What does it take to understand something, especially something you feel you can’t understand? Is it possible to really understand something (or someone) yet still not agree with them? This lecture tries to ma...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Alexander Rehding on February 3, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The nineteenth century was a time of progress but also of crisis – and the study of musical sound was no exception. While around 1800 a sense prevailed that scientists like E.F.F. Chladni and Thomas Young had...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Rita Dove on February 21, 2023 as part fo the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Rita Dove reads a selection of her poetry with commentary."

Audio recording of a lecture given by P. Adams Sitney on February 24, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Just as all English speakers casually refer to lines by Shakespeare, all Italians quote Dante. Film viewers must pay particular attention to these citations and similar scene structures. Examples will be given...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Joseph Macfarland on March 3, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series.

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Peter Pesic, (with performances by Consuelo Sanudo and David Forrest) on March 29, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Harmonics are “little sounds” made by lightly touching a vibrating string at special points. Long used by string players, harmonics had a bad reputation...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Maurizio Viroli on March 31, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Against current scholarly trends that maintain that Niccolo Machiavelli was an evil man and a teacher of evil, I claim that he was a good man and a teacher of good. I also claim that his goodness was the foundatio...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Ahmed Siddiqi on April 7, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "In the Muslim world, as in the world at large, there is an ongoing debate regarding the proper scope of reason’s authority in religious matters. Should we feel entitled to legislate for ourselves in pursuit of...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor James Carey on April 12, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "John Duns Scotus (c. 1266 –1308) was a Franciscan friar and theologian so renowned for his logical acumen and ingenuity that he early on acquired the appellation “the subtle doctor.” His argument for the existen...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Phil LeCuyer on April 14, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Join tutor Phil LeCuyer for a lecture on the Book of Genesis with a focus on Chapter 24."

Audio recording of a lecture given by Stephanie Jamison on April 21, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "A curious episode in Iliad, the Teikhoskopia (viewing from the wall), in which Helen is asked by her father-in-law Priam to identify the Greek warriors massed below the wall, is compared with another reabduction...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Howard Fisher on April 26, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The technology of alternating current was developed almost entirely in response to the emerging demands of large-scale power generation and transmission. Perhaps for that reason, educational institutions tend...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Claudia Brodsky on April 28, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that, of all the abstract ideas that actively orient, ground (or upend) the practical lives and histories of human beings, the inherently relational notion of “justice” is p...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Frank Hunt on May 3, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The lecture uses Heidegger’s 1966 “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” in an attempt to elucidate his assertion in the final section of “The Question Concerning Technology” that the essence of technology...

Audio recording of a tutor panel given by tutors Seth Appelbaum, Phil LeCuyer, April Olsen and Ken Wolfe on March 10, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Robert Sacks, a long-time tutor and one of the College’s most original and esteemed thinkers, was mentored by and became a colleague of Jacob Klein and Leo Straus...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Dean Sarah Davis on August 25, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.” Nietzsche opens “The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” with this quote from Goethe. It appropria...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Richard McCombs on September 1, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Plato thinks the serious person has need of much playfulness, and his dialogues describe many things as play that we might deem to be serious matters, for example, education, religious rites, philosophica...

Audio recording of a panel given by tutor David McDonald, Curtis Johnson, Patrick Anderson, and Benjamin Scott on September 22, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The public availability of chat-enabled AI tools has stirred apprehension, excitement, and speculation. Our four panelists, David McDonald (SF93, Tutor)...

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Lin Atnip on September 29, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” — So writes Wallace Stevens, a giant of American modernist poetry, in one of his aphoristic “adagia....

Audio recording of a lecture given by Ronna Burger on October 6, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: “And God created Adam in His own image . . . male and female created He them.” The primordial, androgynous human in Genesis 1 is subsequently divided into two partial beings, man and woman; their punishment for viola...

Audio recording of a lecture given by Joshua Billings on October 20, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "The lecture will discuss the only surviving ancient tragic trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, as an example of the genre. It will discuss formal features of Attic tragedy and the genre’s historical development with a...