Paideia

Fr. Alexander Golitzin: Liturgy and Mysticism

Fr Alexander is one of the best kept "secrets" of Modern Orthodox academics. He has done a ton of great work. These two pdfs are just more evidence of the penetrating mind of Fr Alexander. What I like best is the grappling with the Old Covenant, a topic not much discussed in contemporary Orthodox publications.

Liturgy and Mysticism: The Experience of God in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Part I

Liturgy and Mysticism: The Experience of God in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Part II

See more here at the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism seminar @ Marquette.

Christian Ethics in a Technological Age | Mere Orthodoxy

Chris Benson over @ Mere Orthodoxy has announced a book I have already ILL'ed. This looks interesting!

"I recently broadcast new and upcoming titles of interest, but a clear stand-out emerges. Here’s the career of an inquiry.

First, there was Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934).

Then there was Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953).

Then, Jacques Ellul’s Technology and Society (1954).

Next, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).

After that Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992).

And now, almost two decades after the last book, Brian Brock’s Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (2010) promises to change everything . . . .

Christian Smith (University of Notre Dame): Christians are often so naive about the power of technological culture in our lives. Brian Brock isn’t. With sobering realism and Trinitarian clarity of vision, Brock shuts down happy optimism and focuses hope only in cross and resurrection, as worked out in the nitty-gritty particularities of our lives. The voices of Bonhoeffer, Barth, and Augustine, which Brock here brings to bear on the overwhelming domination of technology, are a gift to any seeking an alternative vision.

Stanley Hauerwas (Duke Divinity School): This is as good a treatment of Heidegger’s account of technology as any that we have, and a more appropriate theological response. Brian Brock is going to be one of the most important theologians of the future.

Michael Banner (Trinity College, University of Cambridge): A considered and mature statement of a serious position on a highly pertinent topic . . . . An extremely valuable contribution.

Bernd Wannenwetch (University of Oxford): Remarkable . . . . It is easy to criticize the technocratic spirit, but  much harder to point out an alternative. The books does.

John Webster (University of Oxford): A fine treatment, both in its scope and its perceptive analysis. . . . Brian Brock articulates judgments with force and clarity.

Hans Ulrich (University of Erlangen): Brock’s Christian Ethics in a Technological Age is not just one more contribution to the ethical and moral discourse on technology assessment. It pushes that discussion to a whole new level by meeting the need for a fundamental reflection on the ethical challenges presented by modern technology."

via mereorthodoxy.com

A New Orthodox College? St Katherine College in San Diego

From all I can tell a recently released website and a few bloggers ( AOI and Fr Gregory)are spreading info on a brand new Orthodox Liberal Arts college.

This is also interesting in light of this recent call from SVS (here).

from Fr Gregory's blog

"One of the greatest needs for the Church in America is an Orthodox school system.  With few  exceptions, Orthodox Christian children attend public schools.  Yes, some attend private religiously affiliated or secular schools.  But there are very few Orthodox parochial school.   A noticeable exception to this, is Three Hierarchs Eastern Orthodox School (THEOS), “a private, non-public, non-profit religious school” that services children in the metropolitan Pittsburgh area.

Turning from elementary school children to older students, the lack of Orthodox educational options is even more striking.  With the exception of Hellenic College, in Brookline, MA there are simply no Orthodox institutions dedicated to undergraduate education.  While there are no doubt a number of reasons for this, it is hard for me to avoid thinking that all of this represents a significant failure of the Church in America.  For all practical purposes, with the exception of seminaries, the Orthodox children are educated by State, by the faithful of non-Orthodox Christian communities and by the faculties of private educational institutions.

God willing, at least as far as undergraduate education is concerned, all of this will change in the Fall of 2011 when St Katherine College begins offering classes in San Diego, CA.

For the last several months, I have been in conversation with the founder and president of SKC, Frank Papatheofanis, MD, PhD.  Reflecting on his reasons for founding St Katherine College, an Orthodox Christian, a physician-scientist and educator with over 30 years of experience in academic medicine and science, Dr Papatheofanis turns first to Scripture.  “St Paul writes in 2 Peter 1:5-10,” says, that  “we increase in our faithfulness to the Lord.”  He points out that the Apostle

…first mentions goodness as an important quality for us to seek before identifying knowledge as another desirable quality. St Paul tells us we should increase in knowledge about the Lord. Some come to know, increasing their knowledge of, Christ from a spiritual direction whereas some come to understand Him more from knowledge of His Creation or other routes. As a physician-scientist I have been supported in my faith through glimpses of the Divine in the created world. The notion of “inquiry seeking wisdom” emerged from these experiences. Rigorous inquiry is the bulwark of scholarship and research. But why? Why does inquiry matter? I think it matters because Wisdom, Jesus Christ, is revealed to us as we learn more about what He has created. I think such an approach to scholarship probably reigned when the world’s great centers of learning were organized. I also think that an institution founded around such a principle is again needed in the world today.

St Katherine’s will “emphasizes teaching and research—with relevance to the practical world and Christian witness as guiding principles.”   The College will offer  “degree programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees in Art, Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Economics, English Language and Literature, History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Music, Philosophy, Public Policy, and Theology.”

Besides the natural challenge of starting a new college, one of the things that I find most interesting–and exciting–about SKC is that the academic program will not only “encompass several academic disciplines and degree-granting programs …  leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees in Art, Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Economics, English Language and Literature, History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Music, Philosophy, Public Policy, and Theology” but do so within the context of “interdisciplinary collaborations, laboratories, and programs whose work cuts across traditional departmental boundaries.”  Where typically an undergraduate education leads to a fragmentation of knowledge the goal at SKC  is to create “a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere” that educates “students to become creative members of society.”  Finally, and I think most importantly, all of this is within the context of the tradition of the Orthodox Church.

Thinking about my undergraduate education as a Roman Catholic at the University of Dallas (itself a Roman Catholic institution) I remember how important it was for me, and for the majority of the students, to see our professors not only in the classroom but to stand with them at Mass and receive Holy Communion together.  I also remember how formative it was to have priests as professors. These men not only taught in the classroom, they celebrated Mass in the chapel, heard our confessions, and celebrated our marriages.  Especially through their example, many of us became priests or, in the case of the women, entered became religious sisters and nuns.

Speaking as a psychologist for a moment, the four years that are typically spent at college are incredibly important to a person’s religious faith.  If the empirical evidence tells me anything it is the local parish and the campus Orthodox Christian Fellowship simply can’t be expected to meet the spiritual and developmental needs of 18-21 year old Orthodox Christians.  And, to be fair,  institution like St Katherine College isn’t going to meet the needs of anything but a small fraction of Orthodox Christian undergraduates. But this shouldn’t stop us from wholeheartedly supporting SKC.

Please let me encourage you to look at their website and, if it looks like something that might be of interest to a young person you know, place along the link.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory"

It seems Fr Hopko, Scott Cairns, and others will be joining them! Very interesting!

Lethal Loyalties: Dulce et Decorum Est | William Cavanaugh's New Book

A review of William T Cavanaugh's new book "The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict"

by John Medaille. 

It is, alas, a story we hear almost everyday. A “terrorist” straps explosives to his body and walks into the crowded market to cause mayhem. Or “Holy Warriors” fight endless battles to prevent the spread of democracy in their homelands. When we see these things, we shake our heads and lament that in the name of God, these people not only commit terrible crimes, but resist the very things—democracy and liberalism—which will bring them the same peace and prosperity that we enjoy. We have no doubts about how these events are to be interpreted, for we know that misdirected and irrational violence is part of our own history, a history from which we were rescued by the liberal state, and the separation of religious and temporal affairs.

But what if our understanding is wrong? What if the nation-state was not the cure but the cause of the wars that we term “religious”? In other words, what if all that we “know” isn’t so, is in fact a myth used to justify the nation-state and marginalize certain kinds of discourse, most particularly “religious” discourse? This is the theme of William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence.

We know the story very well: after the Reformation, Europe fell into a murderous cycle of sectarian violence, from which we were rescued by the nation-state, which cordoned off “religious” concerns from the temporal order, imposing a political tolerance on the contending faiths while concentrating on building prosperous kingdoms (at first) and then liberal democracies, in which the religious realm was kept separate from the secular. It is this story which provides us—all of us, whether “left” or “right—with the framework by which we view both domestic and international events, and most particularly the Muslim world.

But is this story a history or a myth? Prof. Cavanaugh contends that it is a myth, one that simply does not conform to the facts of history. In support of this thesis, he makes a number of remarkable claims:

• Religion in not a severable category from cultural political, and economic life. In fact, “religion,” as we understand the term, is a creation of the modern West, and would have been unintelligible to previous ages and cultures.
• The modern state precedes the so-called wars of religion, Indeed, the “wars of religion” weren’t about religion at all.
• There has been a transfer of the sacral from the religious order to the political. Far from separating religion from the state, the modern state creates its own sacred space, with its own rituals, hymns, and theology, and its own universal mission.

The universal mission of this new Church is mainly tied up with practical solutions to particular problems that are elevated to the status of transcendent truths. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.

If Cavanaugh is correct, then his thesis should profoundly effect the way we view the world, or rather, the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. Humans always tell themselves stories about how things are; it is the only way to organize information into a coherent whole. But it does help if the story bears some relationship to the way the world is, or was; if its details can in general be correlated with some actual history. In this case, the story does not correspond with reality. Even if we allow that religion is not something severable from the rest of life and culture, can we go along with Cavanaugh’s claim that religion itself is a modern invention?

The moderns would hold that “religion” is a trans-cultural, trans-historical reality, a universal genus of which “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” and “Islam” are particular species. The problem is, any attempt to define this genus in such a way as to include what the moderns want to include and to exclude what they wish to exclude turns out to be contradictory. Nationalism is no less a cult than Catholicism. Including a belief in God would exclude many major “religions.” One might attempt to limit religion to the “transcendent,” but ideas such as “the nation” or “liberty” are transcendent ideas, as are all values. Hence, there is no coherent way to distinguish “religious” from “secular” violence. What counts as “religious” or “secular” in any given society always depends on the configuration of power within that society. Indeed, the demarcation of the “religious” sphere is itself an expression of secular power, a political act.

Our concept of “religion” was simply unknown to the ancients. There is no word in Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Aztec, Chinese, or the Indian languages that precisely corresponds to our term. The Latin religio, “re-binding” referred to the rites which bound the social order together, and would include anything from the Japanese tea ceremony to the Greek rites of hospitality, to the temple rites of the various gods. When Augustine wrote De Vera Religione, “Of True Religion,” his subject was not Christianity. Rather, it was about worship, which can be given either to the creator or to the creation. True religion is directed toward the creator alone, and religion is not something contrasted with a secular realm. In the City of God, Augustine uses the term religion to refer to the worship of God, but he finds the term ambiguous, because:

In Latin usage…”religion” is something displayed in human relationships, in the family (in the narrower and wider sense) and between friends; and so the use of the word does not avoid ambiguity when the worship of God is in question. We have no right to affirm with confidence that “religion” is confined to the worship of God, since it seems that this word has been detached from its normal meaning in which it refers to an attitude of respect in relations between a man and his neighbor.

When we turn to a work like Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, we would expect it to be concerned with what we call “religion,” but Thomas uses the term only once. Religion is one of the nine virtues that are a part of justice; it is that part which renders to God what is due to God and refers to the rites and practices that offer worship to God. It is not a term that designates a sphere of human activity that stands apart from some other sphere, called the “secular.” Indeed, the terms “religious” and “secular” in the middle ages normally referred to the two orders of clergy, those bound to monastic vows and those which were a part of the diocesan structure. The different “religions” were Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, etc.

If there is no analytical severable category of “religion,” then the idea of the “wars of religion” from which we were saved by the secular state can’t be correct either. The neat narrative of a struggle with Catholics on one side and Protestants on the other simply doesn’t work out. The framework of the 30-Year’s War was a struggle between three Catholic monarchies, the French and the two branches of the Hapsburgs. Prof. Cavanaugh gives of 10 pages of examples that run counter to the standard narrative: Catholics allied with Protestants against Catholics, Protestants allied with Catholics against Protestants, Protestants battling Protestants, etc. Obviously, the facts exceed the narrative.

Nor was the rise of the modern state the solution to the problem, it was the cause. Long before the Reformation, the state was expanding its power at the expense of the Church. The taxing of the clergy, the consolidation of ecclesial courts into civil ones, intrusion into the educational system, the replacement of the Church’s charities with the welfare state, and royal control of clerical appointments were some of the signs of the expanding power of the state. The Reformation itself was part of this process, since so many of the “reformers” were more than willing to replace the pope with the prince to enforce a confessional conformity. The Reformation depended on lay power, and gave a justification for that power. The biggest source of power is always property, and the wealth of the Church was a tempting target. In 1524, King Gustav Vasa of Seeden welcomed the Reformation because it allowed him to transfer the tithes from the Church to the crown, and three years later he appropriated all Church property, nine years before Henry VIII did the same. In France, “secularization” meant the transfer of Church property to the crown.

But this confessional conformity required that local privileges and independence to be overturned. The Catholic Monarchs desired absolutism as much as did their Protestant counterparts. Charles V made war against the Protestant princes, with the help of at least some Protestants, in an attempt to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a centralized, sovereign state. In France, the crown attempted to unite the country under un roi, une foi, une loi, which required a war against the nobility. The nationalized churches became part of a clientage system, so much so that Pope Julius III could write to the French King Henry II, “You are more than pope in your kingdoms.”

After the state caused the wars, its apologists proposed the state as a solution. Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau saw a strong state (or even a state religion) as a necessity. After all, membership in a religion was voluntary, but membership in the state was compulsory, and the state required a degree of conformity. It is not that the new state would be intolerant. On the contrary, it would enforce religious “tolerance,” but only for a “religion” shorn of any civil interests. Religion was to be a private passion—or fantasy—one which would not be allowed to serve as a source of resistance to the totalizing state. Hence, Catholics were excluded from this tolerance, not because of bigotry, but on the quite rational grounds that the Catholic Church could never confine itself to being a “religion” that could be conveniently domesticated and striped of its civil and economic concerns. This church could never fit into the truncated category of religion, and hence could not be compatible with the modern state. The actual trajectory is that first the state was “sacralized” by absorbing the powers of the Church, and then the state was “liberalized” by being tolerant of the “religions,” but only insofar as they present no genuine opposition to the power of the state.

Seen in this light, the so-called “separation of church and state” is a complete sham. As Robert Bellah put it, the state becomes “an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion” that “has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.” the real issue is where we place what Cavanaugh calls our “lethal loyalties,” which have been transferred to this new religion and its universal mission: the imposition of democracy and market economics on the whole world. None of us would think of killing for the faith, but killing for the state becomes “patriotism.” It was in the trenches and the gas attacks of World War I that Wilfred Owen discovered the price of this new religion in “the old lie, Dulce et Decorum est, pro patria mori.” And of course, what we die for, we also kill for.

The actual trajectory of history is that the state absorbed the powers of the church, and then “solved” the problems this creates by offering “tolerance” to any church which would become a “religion,” a domesticated, private fantasy that could pose no challenge to secular authority. As Christians, our best response is to accept the role that Hobbes and Locke assigned to us: permanent outsiders, to be viewed with suspicion at best and persecution at worst. This new state, actually just another cult, rationalizes some forms of violence and condemns others. We are horrified at the violence of those whose countries we invade, but “shock and awe” over Baghdad is a regrettable, but rational form of violence in a noble cause; in the end, it will bring free trade, democracy, and better phone service.

The obedience that the state requires is total, and dissent is worse than traitorous, it is unpatriotic. Every combat soldier instinctively recognizes the truth of Randall Jarrett’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, and tells his own version of the grim joke:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

via www.frontporchrepublic.com

International Conference of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies

It seems that the Volos Conference has been underway and overviews of the specific papers have been provided via the website for the Volos Academy.

Here is a general outline:

Holy Metropolis of Demetrias

Volos Academy for Theological Studies

 

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

 

Neo-Patristic Synthesis or Post-Patristic Theology: Can Orthodox Theology be Contextual?

 

June 3-6, 2010, THESSALIA CONFERENCE CENTER,

(MELISSIATIKA), VOLOS

 

The conference is organized in collaboration with the Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University, the Chair of Orthodox Theology of Münster University, and the Romanian Institute for Inter-Orthodox, Inter–Confessional, and Inter-Religious Studies (INTER) Cluj-Napoca

 

 

                                                                                PROGRAMME

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 3rd 2010

 

18.00-18.30          Registration

 

18.30-19.00          Opening – Greetings

 

Session I

Moderator: Dr. Pantelis Kalaitzidis

Director of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies

 

19.00-19.30                          Rev. Dr. Vladan Pericic, Professor of Patrology, former Dean of the Theological Faculty, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Liturgical Theology as Contextual Theology in the Patristic Era and Today

19.30-20.00                          Dr. George Martzelos, Professor at the School of Theology, University of Thessaloniki, Greece

The Role of Contextual Theology in the Orthodox Tradition

 

20.00-30                                Discussion

20.30                                      Dinner

FRIDAY JUNE 4th 2010

 

Session II

Moderator: Dr. George Demacopoulos

Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director,

Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University

 

09.00-09.30                          Dr. Marcus Plested, Director of Studies, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK

The Emergence of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis: Content, Challenges and Limits

 

09.30-10.00                          Rev. Dr. Pavel L. Gavrilyuk, Associate Professor, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA

Florovsky’s Christian Hellenism: A Critical Evaluation

 

10.00-10.30                          Rev. Dr. John Behr, Dean, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, New York, USA

                                                Going Beyond Neo-Patristic Synthesis

 

10.30-11.30                          Discussion

11.30-12.00                          Coffee-break

 

Session III

Moderator: Dr. Bruce Beck,

Director, Pappas Patristic Institute, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology,

Brookline, Massachusetts

 

12.00-12.30                          Archbishop Dr. Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokolamsk, Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, Russia            

Orthodox Tradition and Contextual Theology

 

12.30-13.00                          Dr. Tamara Grdzelidze, Programme Executive, Faith and Order, WCC

Contextualisation of the Church Fathers in the Context of Ecumenism

 

13.00-13.30                          Discussion

13.30-15.00                          Lunch

 

Session IV

Moderator: Dr. Tamara Grdzelidze

Programme Executive, Faith and Order, WCC

 

15.00-15.30                          Dr. Daniel Ayuch, Associate Professor, St. John of Damascus Orthodox Theological Institute of University of Balamand, Lebanon

The Relationship between Biblical and Theological Disciplines

 

15.30-16.00                          Dr. John Fotopoulos, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Saint Mary's College at Notre Dame, USA

Orthodox Theology and the Historical-Critical Method

16.00-16.30                          Discussion

16.30-17.00                          Coffee-break

 

Session V

Moderator: V. Rev. Dr. Maxim of Western America

Serbian Orthodox Church,

Professor at the School of Theology, University of Belgrade

 

17.00-17.30                          Dr. George Demacopoulos, Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director, Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University, New York, USA

History, Post-Colonial Theory, and Some New Possibilities for Retrieving the Theological Past

 

17.30-18.00                          Alexei V. Nesteruk, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, University of Portsmouth, UK; Visiting Professor, St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute, Moscow, Russia

Orthodoxy in the Scientific Age: From a Neo-Patristic Synthesis to Radical Theological Commitment

 

18.00-18.30                          Rev. Dr. Demetrios Bathrellos, Visiting Lecturer, Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK;  Priest of the Aghia Sophia Greek Orthodox Church, Drafi, Attica, Greece

Systematic Theology as a New Form of Orthodox Theology

 

18.30-19.30                          Discussion

 

 

SATURDAY JUNE 5th 2009

 

Session VI

Moderator: Dr Demetrios Moschos

Lecturer at the Scholl of Theology, Athens University

 

09.00-09.30                          Dr. Assaad Elias Kattan, Director of the Center of Religious Studies and Chair of Orthodox Theology, University of Münster, Germany

Essentialism Reconsidered: The Myth of a Non-Hermeneutical Approach to Orthodox Tradition

 

09.30-10.00                          Rev. Dr. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, College of Holy Cross, Worcester, USA

God. Being and Event: The Intersection between Theology and Ontology

 

10.00-10.30                          Discussion

10.30-11.00                          Coffee-break

 

Session VII

Moderator: Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou

Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director,

Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University

   

(Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou, Fr Andrew Louth)

11.00-11.30                          Metropolitan John Zizioulas, Member of the Academy of Athens, Ecumenical Patriarchate

                                                Actuality and Temporality of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis

 

11.30-12.00                          Fr. Andrew Louth, Professor of Patrology, University of Durham, UK

The Authority of the Fathers in “post-patristic Orthodox theology”

 

12.00-12.30                          Discussion

12.30-14.00                          Lunch

   

Fr Gregory's remarks on his photo: Bishop Maxim with Metropolitan John, Pantelis Kalaitzidis (the director of the Volos Academy), Fr. John Behr of St. Vladimir's, and others at lunch on Saturday. Here, they were all asking Metropolitan John to recount stories about his experiences with Fr. Florovsky (he was a student of Florovsky at Harvard).

 

Session VIII

Moderator: Dr Vassilios Makrides

Professor of Sociology of Orthodox Christianity at Erfurt University (Germany)

 

14.00-14.30                          Dr. Michail Neamtu, Senior Fellow of CADI/ Eleutheria, Romania

Ethno-theology as a Particular Case of Contextual Theology

 

14.30-15.00                          Dr. Radu Preda, Associate Professor of Social Theology, Babes-Bolai-University, Cluj-Napoca, Director of the Romanian Institute for Inter-Orthodox, Inter-confessional, Inter-Religious Studies-INTER, Romania

Orthodox Social Theology as Contextual Theology

 

15.00-15.30                          Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou, Associate Professor of Theology, Co-Founding Director, Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University, New York, USA

                                                Orthodox Liberalism: Political Theology after the Empires

               

15.30-16.30                          Discussion

16.30-17.00                          Coffee-break

 

Session IX

Moderator: Dr. Radu Preda

Associate Professor, Babes-Bolai-University, Cluj-Napoca,

Director of the INTER (Romania)

 

17.00-17.30                          Dr. Peter Bouteneff, Associate Professor, St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, New York, USA

Liberation Theologies: Challenges for Contemporary Orthodoxy from Contextual Theologies

 

17.30-18.00                          Dr. Eleni Kasselouri, Teaching at the Hellenic Open University, Member of the Academic Team of Volos Academy for Theological Studies, Greece

Feminist Theology and its Contextuality: A Challenge or an Opportunity for Orthodox Theology?

 

18.00-18.30                          Discussion

 

 

SUNDAY JUNE 6th 2010

 

Divine Service at the Christ’s Ascension Church, Volos

Departure of the buses for Thessalia Conference Center, Melissatika: 10.45

 

Session X

Moderator: Dr. Assaad Elias Kattan

Director of the Centre of Religious Studies

and Chair of Orthodox Theology, University of Münster

 

11.30-12.00                          Rev. Dr.  Emmanuel Clapsis, Professor of Dogmatics, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, USA

                                                Gospel and Cultures:  Toward a Theology of Religions

 

12.00-12.30                          Dr. Athanasios N. Papathanasiou, Editor in Chief of the Theological Journal Synaxis, Greece

Mission as a Challenge for Orthodox Contextual Theology

 

12.30-13.00                          Dr. Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Director of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies, Greece

Toward a Post-Patristic Theology?

 

13.00-14.00                          Discussion

14.00                                      End of the Conference-Lunch

There are press releases in English that provide over views of each day:

Press Release 1

Press Release 2

Press Release 3

Press Release 4

A blogger I have followed for some time. Fr. Gregory Edwards, has posted pictures and his impressions here 

There is also a Greek website that covered the conference in great detail, here.

Harvard University Press Publicity Blog : Remembering Pierre Hadot - Part I

It was with sadness that we learned of the passing of Pierre Hadot, one of France's most extraordinary intellectual figures and a many-time HUP author. There have been obituaries in the popular press, but in the service of furthering this memory and elaborating our understanding, we asked Hadot's one-time student and long-time collaborator Michael Chase, currently of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, to provide us with a more in-depth look at Hadot's remarkable intellectual trajectory. Below please find Part I, in which Chase details that trajectory, from Hadot's early interest in philology and mysticism to his later engagement with Marcus Aurelius and the idea of "spiritual exercise." Tomorrow we'll publish Part II, in which Chase shares his memories of a man who practiced what he preached, a man who "like Plotinus ... was always available to himself, but above all to others."

-----

Pierre Hadot - Part I

By Michael Chase

Pierre Hadot, emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, died on the night of April 24-25 at the age of 88.

Born in Paris in 1922, Hadot was raised at Reims, where he received a strict Catholic education, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944. But he soon became disenchanted with the Church, particularly after the conservative encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950, and he left it in 1952 (Eros also played a role in this decision: Hadot married his first wife in 1953).

As a Researcher at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), Hadot was now free to devote himself to scholarship. He began with Latin Patristics, editing Ambrose of Milan and Marius Victorinus. This was the period, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, when, under the guidance of such experts as the Jesuit Paul Henry, he learned the strict discipline of philology, or the critical study and editing of ancient manuscripts, an approach that was to continue to exert a formative influence on his thought for the rest of his life. Also during this period, Hadot's deep interest in mysticism led him to study Plotinus, and, surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein, whose comments on “das Mystische” (Tractatus 6.522) led Hadot to study the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations and publish articles on them, thus becoming one of the first people in France to draw attention to Wittgenstein.¹ Hadot wrote Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision² in a month-long burst of inspiration in 1963, a lucid, sincere work that is still one of the best introductions to Plotinus. Hadot would continue to translate and comment upon Plotinus throughout the rest of his life, founding in particular the series Les Ecrits de Plotin³, a series, still in progress, that provides translations with extensive introductions and commentaries to all the treatises of Plotinus' Enneads, in chronological order. On a personal level, however, Hadot gradually became detached from Plotinus' thought, feeling that Plotinian mysticism was too otherworldly and contemptuous of the body to be adequate for today's needs. As he tells the story, when he emerged from the month-long seclusion he had imposed upon himself to write Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, he went to the corner bakery, and “seeing the ordinary folks all around me in the bakery, I [...] had the impression of having lived a month in another world, completely foreign to our world, and worse than this—totally unreal and even unlivable.”⁴

Elected Director of Studies at the 5th Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1964, Hadot married his second wife, the historian of philosophy Ilsetraut Marten in 1966. This marked another turning point in his intellectual development, for it was at least in part thanks to his wife's interest in spiritual guidance in Antiquity that the focus of Hadot's interests would gradually shift, over the following decade or so, from the complex and technical metaphysics of Porphyry and Marius Victorinus to a concern for the practical, ethical side of philosophy, and more precisely the development of his key concept of philosophy as a way of life.

At Hadot's request, the title of his Chair at the EPHE Ve was soon changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” In 1968, he published his thesis for the State Doctorate, the massive Porphyre et Victorinus⁵, in which he attributed a previously anonymous commentary on Plato's Parmenides to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist student of Plotinus. This monument of erudition arguably remains, even today, the most complete exposition of Neoplatonist metaphysics.

It was around this time that Pierre Hadot began to study and lecture on Marcus Aurelius—studies that would culminate in his edition of the Meditations⁶, left unfinished at his death, and especially in his book The Inner Citadel.⁷ Under the influence of his wife Ilsetraut, who had written an important work on spiritual guidance in Seneca, Hadot now began to accord more and more importance to the idea of spiritual exercises, that is, philosophical practices intended to transform the practitioner's way of looking at the world, and consequently his or her way of being. Following Paul Rabbow, Hadot held that the famous Exercitia Spiritualia of Ignatius of Loyola, far from being exclusively Christian, were the direct heirs of pagan Greco-Roman practices. These exercises, involving not just the intellect or reason, but all a human being's faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoint and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos. In its fully developed form, exemplified in such late Stoics as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this change from our particularistic perspective to the universal perspective of reason had three main aspects. First, by means of the discipline of thought, we are to strive for objectivity; since, as the Stoics believe, what causes human suffering is not so much things in the world, but our beliefs about those things, we are to try to perceive the world as it is in itself, without the subjective coloring we automatically tend to ascribe to everything we experience ("That's lovely," "that's horrible," "that's ugly," "that's terrifying," etc., etc.). Second, in the discipline of desire, we are to attune our individual desires with the way the universe works, not merely accepting that things happen as they do, but actively willing for things to happen precisely the way they do happen. This attitude is, of course, the ancestor of Nietzsche’s “Yes” granted to the cosmos, a “yes” which immediately justifies the world's existence.⁸ Finally, in the discipline of action, we are to try to ensure that all our actions are directed not just to our own immediate, short-term advantage, but to the interests of the human community as a whole.

Hadot finally came to believe that these spiritual attitudes—“spiritual” precisely because they are not merely intellectual, but involve the entire human organism, but one might with equal justification call them “existential” attitudes—and the practices or exercises that nourished, fortified and developed them, were the key to understanding all of ancient philosophy. In a sense, the grandiose physical, metaphysical, and epistemological structures that separated the major philosophical schools of Antiquity—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism⁹—were mere superstructures, intended to justify the basic philosophical attitude. Hadot deduced this, among other considerations, from the fact that many of the spiritual exercises of the various schools were highly similar, despite all their ideological differences: thus, both Stoics and Epicureans recommended the exercise of living in the present.

Hadot first published the results of this new research in an article that appeared in the Annuaire de la Ve section in 1977: “Exercices spirituels .” This article formed the kernel of his book Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique¹⁰, and was no doubt the work of Hadot's that most impressed Michel Foucault, to the extent that he invited Hadot to propose his candidacy for a Chair at the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France. Hadot did so, and was elected in 1982. Hadot's view on philosophy as a way of life consisting of the practice of spiritual exercises was given a more complete narrative form in his Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique?.¹¹

Another aspect of his thought was more controversial: if philosophy was, throughout Antiquity, conceived as a way of life, in which it was not only those who published learned tomes that were considered philosophers, but also, and in some cases especially—one thinks of Socrates, who wrote nothing—those who lived in a philosophical way, then how and why did this situation cease? Hadot's answer was twofold: on the one hand, Christianity, which had begun by adopting and integrating pagan spiritual exercises, ended up by relegating philosophy to the status of mere handmaid of theology. On the other, at around the same historical period of the Middle Ages, and not coincidentally, the phenomenon of the European University arose. Destined from the outset to be a kind of factory in which professional philosophers trained students to become professional philosophers in their turn, these new institutions led to a progressive confusion of two aspects that were, according to Hadot, carefully distinguished in Antiquity: doing philosophy and producing discourse about philosophy. Many modern thinkers, Hadot believed, have successfully resisted this confusion, but they were mostly (and this again is no coincidence) such extra-University thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. For the most part, and with notable exceptions (one thinks of Bergson), University philosophy has concentrated almost exclusively on discourse about philosophy. Indeed, one might add, extending Hadot's analysis, that the contemporary university, whether in its “analytic” manifestation as the analysis of language and the manipulation of quasi-mathematical symbols, or its “continental” guise as rhetorical display, irony, plays on words and learned allusions, seem to share one basic characteristic: they are quite incomprehensible, and therefore unimportant to the man or woman on the street. Hadot's work, written in a plain, clear style that lacks the rhetorical flourishes of a Derrida or a Foucault, represents a call for a radical democratization of philosophy. It talks about subjects that matter to people today from all walks of life, which is why it has appealed, arguably, less to professional philosophers than to ordinary working people, and to professionals working in disciplines other than philosophy.¹²

Pierre Hadot taught at the Collège until his retirement in 1992. In addition to Plotinus and Marcus, his teaching was increasingly devoted to the philosophy of nature, an interest he had picked up from Bergson, and which he had first set forth in a lecture at the Jungian-inspired Eranos meetings at Ascona, Switzerland, in 1967.¹³ Combined with his long-term love of Goethe¹⁴, this research on the history of mankind's relation to nature would finally culminate in Le Voile d'Isis, a study of the origin and interpretations of Heraclitus' saying “Nature loves to hide,” published a mere 6 years before his death.¹⁵ Here and in the preliminary studies leading up this work, Hadot distinguishes two main currents in the history of man's attitude to nature: the “Promethean” approach, in which man tries to force nature to reveal her secrets in order better to exploit her, and the “Orphic” attitude, a philosophical or aesthetic approach in which one listens attentively to nature, recognizing the potential dangers of revealing all her Secrets.

-----

Part II - HERE

via harvardpress.typepad.com

Hannah's Child | an interview with Stanley Hauerwas | Wunderkammer

Stanley Hauerwas teaches theology and ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale, Dr. Hauerwas spent the first part of his career at the University of Notre Dame before coming to Duke in 1984. For a theologian, not exactly a vocation one chooses to be well-known, he has lectured widely, his work often crossing disciplinary lines, and has found himself in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and in the wake of 9/11 on Oprah’s stage. Yet, just as commonly one finds him speaking in small churches. Many know his reputation for being a salty bombastic provocateur; this reputation allows many to miss that he is a generous and gentle person. Now almost seventy, he has recently published his memoirs Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Eerdmans, 2010). Wunderkammer sat down with Professor Hauerwas to talk about his memoir and to reflect on greed in the U.S. economy.

Wunderkammer: Knowing you for some time, you’ve always been generous with your time and have a door that is open to your students, but there is also the sense that you’ve been reticent to talk about your own biography. And now a memoir?

Stanley Hauerwas: I say in the book, it's such an odd thing for me to do—writing a memoir— being the great enemy of subjectivity and pietism. I continue to be the great enemy of the notion that my experience should count for how I understand the nature of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. But I can tell the story of why I think that the turn to the subject has not been a particularly good direction for theology. I'm still not terribly interested in my own subjectivity. I mean the philosophical psychology that shaped me basically through the reading of Wittgenstein continues to inform those reactions, so you're quite right.

WK: Another person who recently came out with a memoir who said they would never come out with a memoir is Cornel West.

SH: Yes, he told me he had done it. And, of course, I’m sixty-nine, and Cornel is what, in his mid fifties? So, he may have to do another one and I won’t.

WK: What were you trying to do with your memoir?

Stanley Hauerwas on Hannah's Child

SH: It tells the story of how I became a theologian and in particular what a surprising thing it is for me that I’m a Christian. What it has meant for me to be a Christian is what extraordinary friendships I’ve been drawn into through that avowal. I’m quite happy with the book. It also tells the story of my marriage for over twenty years to a woman who tragically had bipolar disorder and I try to be as upfront and honest as I can about that. All of that interacts with the various diverse contexts that have made me who I am, having spent fourteen years at Notre Dame was a decisive shaping for me and now twenty-five years at Duke. Hopefully, it’s a kind of story that exhibits much of the diversity of theological developments that have been characteristic of the last fifty years. I hope to reach a whole different reading public with this.

WK: As far as your normal audience goes, when Jeff Stout’s Democracy and Tradition came out in 2003, it seemed like you had different appraisals of your level of influence.

SH: I have no idea how influential I am. I have the feeling…I mean my response to Jeff was: Jesus, I had no idea that anyone thought that I had that kind of influence. My view is that Duke is one of the few places where [Karl] Barth and [John Howard] Yoder are still read with sympathy, not that there were that many places to begin with, but I think it's still pretty limited that if you go to most seminaries the narrative would still be one set by Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard [Niebuhr], and Paul Tillich, so I don't see the influence as all that great. Intellectually, there is now a phenomenon that people—young people think that they need to show why they aren't Hauerwas, which I find kind of boring. I don't know—it's not for me to say how influential I am.

WK: And who is your audience?

SH: I write for Christians, and I say most academics write for other academics. I write for Christians. I've always, from the very beginning, realized that I wanted people who are not trained in the so-called field to be able to read what I was writing—so my books are a combination of fairly hard articles, you could call them chapters, where you might need to know a good deal about Kant's second Critique in order to get it right next to an article which is an invitation to consider why we care for people with intellectual disabilities. And they are meant to work together in a way that pulls people who are not educated philosophically or theologically into the world of theology.

WK: I’m curious about one part of your readership, American Evangelicals. Considering that Evangelicals have produced some of the realities that you have spent a career resisting, how do you receive Evangelicals as readers?

Stanley Hauerwas on his evangelical audience

SH: I think that what Evangelicals bring is Jesus and energy. And insofar as evangelicals still have a high regard for Scripture and in particular the Christological center, then we are on the same side; and that they bring to that a desire to tell other people of the joy that this has given their lives is a great good that I'm all for. I try to help them recover a sense of the church that they don't have because they think that the church is a secondary reality to their immediate relationship with God, which is why they so often times they have no way to resist Protestant liberal alternatives. So, I'm very pleased that Evangelicals can recognize some continuity between what I represent and what they represent, but it's going to change them.

WK: So, is there a sense in which you appreciate the gifts of Jesus and energy but you don't want them to stay there?

SH: Yes [laughs]. But by ‘I don't want them to stay there’ I mean I don't want them to continue to presume that they have a relationship with God that is unmediated. That's the crucial issue that I see. And that one of the problems with Evangelicals, particularly as it's taken the form of church growth, is the presumption that you get to make God up, you get to make Christianity up. It’s as though they don't receive Christianity through the gifts of 2,000 years that have made them possible. I think that too often, Evangelicals have the New Testament and now. But, tradition matters and I'm a catholic in this regard. Of course, a tradition is always subject to error, but the way you know error is through the tradition.

WK: You’ve just written a short piece on greed, and I was wondering, given that our economic downturn is often attributed to greed that grew out of control, if we could talk about that.

SH: Absolutely.

WK: Greed seems to be one of those vices that we have a hard time naming. People seem confident that they can tell you what, say, lying entails and one will hear sermons about lust, but not greed, even though it was one of the seven deadly sins. So, what is greed?

SH: More. It is the need to have more and the more you have, the more you need in order to secure the more you have. That’s greed. And it’s a power that possesses us. I say, you know, we may have always been greedy, but we are the first society as far as I can see that has institutionalized it as a necessity in order to be allegedly or nearly just, because you need to be greedy to produce more so that you’ll have more to distribute.

[Alasdair] MacIntyre has this great article on Aristotle's understanding of temperance. He says:

“…from an Aristotelian standpoint, it can never be right to weigh preferences in such a way that everybody counts for one and nobody for more than one. And it would be a fundamental mistake to try to maximize the satisfaction of the preferences of all the members of a given society.”

Now that is at the heart of modern economic rationality.

WK: What do you take that to be saying?

SH: He's challenging the presumption that is at the heart of modern economic rationality—that an economy is good if it tries to maximize the satisfactions of the preferences of a given society. He's challenging the presumption that is at the heart of modern economic rationality—that an economy is good if it tries to maximize the satisfactions of the preferences of a given society. He’s saying that from an Aristotelian perspective, it’s wrong to give the same weight to the desires of the vicious as to the desires of the virtuous person, but that modern democratic societies do this. He goes on to say that in such societies, temperance isn’t generally seen as a virtue anymore. Of course, people will talk about moderation when it comes to health, longevity or to be attractive, or to support career advancement, but this is different than seeing temperance as necessary to making the kind of choices that make up a good life.

Now I take it, that, just to begin to think about how temperance as a virtue that would challenge the very presumptions of a capitalist social order seems to me a very radical perspective and that is one that I share. What we presume is that you must have constant economic growth in the hope that the more shares that you produce will be able to be distributed to those with less shares, all without the rich losing their shares. Now, exactly what Macintyre is challenging and what I would want to challenge is that in order to name the goods that are appropriate to a well-lived life, you might need to think about having an economic order that is not constantly expanding in terms of simply producing to produce. So I think that those are exactly the kinds of issues that should be at the heart of the church's social witness.

WK: So you think that temperance is an important virtue and one that we don’t really think about because it runs contrary to how our economy is set up?

SH: Classically, temperance is the disciplined formation of desire to want that which is good in a manner that my want is not more determinative of the good than the good itself. When you talk about temperance, the immediate language you are tempted to use is “how do I control my desires?” so it sounds like the task of restraining desire, rather than being an appropriate desire. Temperance is a desire that is appropriate to that which is rightly desired, namely, a good helps me discover what it means to be a human being.

WK: So, the greed operative in our society is just a function of desires that are not sufficiently shaped?

SH: Yes, I think it is. When I said it was just the need for more, “more” is just an empty cipher that you get to fill in, so there’s no good to want and that’s the problem.

WK: It seems like there is a deep fear that underlies our desire for more.

SH: Oh, there is. I think it is a fear that is fueled by a fundamental distrust of ourselves and one another. So, I have to secure my existence because there is no one that I can trust to do this. It’s a deep fear.

When people talk about economics, immediately one assumes that distribution is the primary issue, and I suggest that it is helpful to start by asking what sort of people we have to be to sustain an economic life that is not overwhelmed by greed. And that’s a different way into the conversation.

WK: So for someone who is in college or starting a career and says, “I want a comfortable life and if the money is there to be made, it might as well be made by me,” how do get through to such a person? Why shouldn’t I want that?

SH: Because it's not good for you. Because it makes you less than what you were created to be. That's what you say.

WK: So, to the inequitable distribution of wealth in our society, which seems to be worsening, you say to people that the desire for more is not good for you?

SH: Well, that’s not how desires are formed, but, yes. It’s not good for you. It's killing you. That's right. That's exactly what you say.

WK: How does it kill someone?

SH: It gives them no way to know if they are ever happy, comfortable perhaps, but no way to know if they are living a good life and that can be terrifying. Now, they will usually tell you that it is not the money itself but the skills acquired and necessary to making money that is satisfying, and I understand that. But, I think that often one finds oneself lost in a way of life with no purpose that is intrinsic to the activities themselves. It’s not to say that these people do not have virtues or that the work they do cannot produce them, but often the virtues necessary to chase after wealth, if they don’t include say justice, prudence or temperance, are disordered. And disordered virtues can kill you.

WK: Do you have suggestions that might help us become such people, people not overwhelmed by greed?

SH: In my Introduction to Christian Ethics course, I often say that one of the first things we can do is to tell other people what we make. The difficulty with telling one another what we make is not for someone like me who makes a lot of money; the problem is for those in the church who don't make a lot of money since now what you make seems so important for who you are. But I think that it's perfectly appropriate for people in the church to tell one another what we make and then to be told, "We need your money for these other people that aren't making so much." So I'm for just starting with the declaration of income. That's not a bad place to begin.

Then, of course, as a Christian, I think that a practice like the Eucharist is a practice of abundance, where we discover that the God who feeds us cannot be used up, and hopefully this helps the church learn that our lives should picture this kind of generosity. I also think that if we could find markets that are smaller, I think it would be helpful. I mean, I like farmers’ markets and that sort of thing.

WK: For what reason?

SH: The laborer’s product is not separated from the laborer, so there is less alienation and it becomes important for the buyer not only what you buy but also the people who produced it.

WK: It makes the process less anonymous, more relational?

SH: Yes. So, how to find smaller markets where the market doesn’t determine relationships, but serves relationships, is an important question.

WK: One still has some sort of relationship, some sort of relating, when one shops at one of the big box stores, a Target or Walmart, and proceeds to the cash register, right?

SH: Sure, it’s just not that interesting or determinative, and their relationship to the service they are providing is alienating in a way. People in such settings can be quite humane, and you are happy when they are, but nonetheless it is very disconnected from who they are. One may start to get to know a person in such a setting, but that is in spite of not because of the setting, so I think smaller markets where there is a deeper connection between labor and product might also be a place to start.

Dan Morehead is a former student of Dr. Hauerwas, an independent scholar and writer.

via www.wunderkammermag.com

Foreign Service Institute's Extensive Language Courses Are Available Free Online - Language - Lifehacker

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute teaches foreign languages to government diplomats and personnel for duties abroad—and its courses are available online, for free. Which means you can access audio, texts, and tests in 41 different languages.

The FSI Language Courses web site isn't actually maintained by the U.S. government itself, but the materials developed before 1989 are within the public domain (whether all of these materials came before then is not clear). Some languages contain more materials—for instance, the three texts on Sinhala isn't going to beat the giant course on French anytime soon. For the most part, most major languages have student texts in PDF format, and audio in MP3 format which you can later put onto your music player. The courses also feature tests to see how well you've covered the material. In some cases, "headstart" courses for certain regions in the world are also available.

The only major language not covered is English, which makes sense. The site is a little reminiscent of old-school language learning, but the resources are ridiculously extensive. As a native Vietnamese speaker, I didn't find the section archaic at all. Adios, Rosetta Stone.

FSI Language Courses

via lifehacker.com

h/t Richard Barrett

Thomas Hardy as Poet

The major goal this summer for me is to imbibe deeply in poetry. I thought I would share someone I did not recognize as a major poet until recently and is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. I stumbled across Thomas Hardy as a poet while reading the excellent (if sometimes dry) biography of Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner. Apparently "Red" Warren encountered this poem and loved it. 

I also ran across a great story in Blotner's biography that exhibits not only the death of a era but also the wisdom of "Red" Warren. While Warren was teaching at Yale at the end of his career the literary world was controlled by the ideology of class, race, marxism, etc. Student strikes and other issues controlled literary exploration and the actual contents of literature were left to the side.

During this time it is said Warren went into the first day of class on poetry and asked what seemed to him a simple request. "Can anyone here recite a poem?" The class looked blankly at him. No one spoke and all stirred uncomfortably in their seats. He than asked, "Can anyone tell me the outline of a short story?" Again uneasy silence. He went around the room asking people individually, hoping someone just didn't have the gumption to step into the spotlight. No one could do it. Warren got up and left the class. It was the last class he was to teach. For someone who could recite the Wasteland by Eliot and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge by heart (among hundreds of other poems) this would just not do.

With sadness I must confess I would have also been the cause of Warren's disappearance. Hopefully this summer will remedy this.

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to
mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the
moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now
passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the
night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a
shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

A Sighting of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney- lecturing this Thursday evening at Indiana University. Greatly anticipating this!!!