Switching up Authors and Books in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction Series

We're in year six of the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series - which moved from in-person to entirely online due to covid-19 - and I've decided to switch things up a bit.  I had put together a full list of 12 authors and their works (two of which we've done already - Liu Cixin and Philip K. Dick), but as I have been rereading to prepare for the third session, it has struck me that some changes are in order.

The third session was to focus on R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy - The Darkness that Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and the Thousandfold Thought - and we'd try to cover all of that in one single 90-minute video, followed by the usual 90-minute Zoom session.  There's two main obstacles to that.

One is that it's a LOT of reading.  Bakker's books are quite readable, but there's a number of characters, many connected sub-plots, and a ton of world-building revealed in each of them.  They come in at about 600, 640, and 540 pages.  So, just a bit under 1,800 pages for participants to read before the session.  Well. . .  that's a lot to expect of people to plow their way through!

The second consideration is that, upon my second read of the first volume, there is so much content to cover in these rich works that, in order to do justice to them, I think we'd need more time. Between the magic system, the back-history, the different races, the religions, the geography, the philosophy there is so much packed into these books that there's no way that we can cover enough of this in 90 minutes.

What I've decided to do is pretty simple.  We're going to spend the next three sessions - March, April, May - discussing Bakker's trilogy.  This is like what we did last year when we covered  Ursula K Leguin's six Earthsea books (each of which was 140-200 pages long) in two sessions.  Looking at the schedule, I've also decided to break the Philip Jose Farmer session, focused on his six World of Tiers books, into two sessions as well.  So that means that someone's gotta go!

Here's what I'm envisioning now:

March - R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy

• The Darkness That Comes Before

April - R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy

• The Warrior-Prophet

May - R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy

• The Thousandfold Thought

June - Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers novels

• The Maker of Universes
• The Gates of Creation
• A Private Cosmos

July - Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers novels

• Behind the Walls of Terra
• The Lavalite World
• More Than Fire

August - A.E. Van Vogt's Weapon-Makers novels

• The Weapon Shops of Isher
• Weapon Makers

September - Stanislaw Lem's Ijon Tichy stories

• The Star Diaries
• The Futurological Congress
• Peace on Earth
• Observation on the Spot

October - Neal Stephenson's Anathem

• Anathem

November - J.G. Ballard's modern dystopias

• Crash
• Concrete Island
• High Rise

December - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy

• Northern Lights
• The Subtle Knife
• The Amber Spyglass

Understanding Anger - Lecture 2: Jewish Scriptures

Last Saturday, at the Kingston Library, we had a very well-attended second session of the new year-long monthly lecture series - Understanding Anger.  The previous session had focused on anger through the lens of Greek tragedy and epic.  This one looked at this prevalent and perennial passion through multiple perspectives afforded by another key source for Western thought and culture -- the Jewish Scriptures.

As always, there's many more people interested than can attend -- sometimes a factor of time, but most often of place -- so we video-recorded the session (you can watch the video here).  And as usual, although I came armed with many notes and a few handouts to structure the session, a number of digressions -- all quite interesting -- added some other elements to the discussions.

Talk Radio Interview: Saint Anselm's Argument

Last night, I appeared as a guest on an internet radio talk show -- Theology Matters with the Pellews.  Devin Pellew turned out to be an engaging host, quite interested in the topic I had proposed to focus upon:  the "single argument" Saint Anselm elaborates in his early work, the Proslogion.

The first hour or so of the show was simply Devin and I, doing some back-and-forth discussion, starting with the more general, and then zeroing in on several key themes having to do with Anselm -- I'll say what those were shortly.  Then, we had the call-in segment, and I participated in some very enjoyable conversations with several different callers.

If you'd like to hear the show -- or to download the mp3 of it -- you can access it here.  For me, it was an opportunity to explore, in a different medium, some themes I've been thinking about for a long time, and to communicate my own interest in these themes to a broader, less academic audience -- the sorts of people actually, that Anselm himself spent much of his time working with, counseling, and even teaching.

So, what did we range over?  A number of topics that I think would make good starting points for future blog posts.  To start with, Anselm's "argument" turns out not to be the "ontological argument" (a name he wouldn't recognize, since it appears only from the time of Kant onward), but rather a much broader, deeper, yet more interesting structure that runs through nearly the whole of the Proslogion. This shouldn't be surprising, really, if we look at what Anselm himself tells us the argument is suppose to attempt and attain -- or if we actually read the Monologion, for whose multiple arguments this "single argument" is supposed to substitute.

We also talked about Anselm's own purposes in providing this argument in a written form -- he's not doing Christian apologetics as we often conceive of it, not trying to produce arguments to convince the unbelievers primarily.  Rather, he tells us that he felt joy in discovering and exploring the argument, and wanted to share that experience -- or at least its apparatus -- with others.  Interestingly, this wasn't how he felt about it at the start or in the middle of his enquiry.  Another key theme, which I'll doubtless blog about later this Fall, is how Anselm could think, for a while. . .  that the argument might actually be a trick of the Devil. 

Happy Birthday, David Hume

Today, were he still alive, would mark the great Empiricist philosopher, David Hume's 302nd birthday -- an event which (as we know from his philosophy), since conceivable, is possible -- though far enough from likely that we would give it little thought, other than play within our imaginations and discourse. 

Though I'm quite far from Hume on many philosophical matters, and  even think him dead-off on some very important  and implication-rich points, I have to admit that, like Thomas Hobbes, he remains among one of my favorite philosophers to read, puzzle over, and to teach, perhaps in some part precisely because of our considerable differences of outlook.  There is something stark -- both in the sense of being sharply clear because underdeveloped and reductive, and in the other sense of being robust, bold, daring -- to Hume's deliberately, deceptively mellifluous prose.

This last week in my Introduction to Philosophy class, we worked our way through one of my favorite works by Hume, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (video of the first of two lectures available here) It has deservedly become a classic text within the field of Philosophy of Religion, often anthologized, frequently quoted or even lifted from (sometimes, perhaps, without the person citing realizing the provenance of their ideas).  Once the students get past Hume's now-archaic vocabulary, and take a place to listen to the discussions carried out among the three interlocutors, they are confronted with the play and parry of philosophical arguments bearing upon acknowledgedly murky topics of religion -- God's existence and nature, creation and the universe, human and divine minds. . .

Classic Arguments About God's Existence in Cicero

My Introduction to Philosophy class is currently one-third of the way into Cicero's dialogue The Nature of the Gods -- a work that, like many others of Cicero, I unhesitatingly endorse as a philosophical analogue to undervalued stock.  It's a text that rarely gets taught in Ancient Philosophy classes, let alone Philosophy of Religion (where I taught it years back), or as a text by which to induct freshmen non-majors into the canons and practices of the philosophical profession.  I suspect that one reason for this lack of attention and use is that relatively few practicing philosophers have encountered it themselves -- whether in their own educational formation or in the course of their further studies.

That's a shame -- not only for On the Nature of the Gods, but also for other Ciceronian great works like the Academics, Republic, Laws, On Obligations . . .  one could go on and on.  A quite understandable tendency to underrate Cicero's role in philosophy -- construing him as merely an unoriginal eclectic who brought the philosophy he had learned in the Greek world into Roman culture -- tends to conceal the high level of philosophical discussion and debate contained in his dialogues.  If his is borrowed  brilliance, the words and arguments he places in the mouths of his characters become no less valuable or valid for replicating saying and speeches he learned from leaders of major philosophical schools in Athens or Rhodes -- particularly since it is his own artful arrangements we have to thank for passing them on to us, and down the ages.  Cicero is more than a mere digest-creator or textbook-scribbler, though -- he creates, he replicates, he articulates clashes and conflicts of modes of thought of the highest order available in his own time and place -- and like every playwright, every novelist, every poet of genius, he understands all that his characters do, and more.

Is Kierkegaard's Present Age Our Own?

I've been rereading a lot of Soren Kierkegaard's works over the last several weeks, in preparation for a new video venture -- a series of course lectures on Existentialist philosophy and literature -- and I was grateful and gladdened to get to return to one of his short works which I have enjoyed since I was an undergraduate nearly two decades ago, though admittedly I had much less of an appreciation for what he was doing in that text then:  The Present Age.  I shot roughly an hour of discussion of the key themes (available soon in YouTube), and as I find so often is the case, the mere act of explaining and unfolding the text, even before an essentially imaginary audience, not only highlighted certain themes for me, but also filled me with a greater sense of passion about the author, the ideas, their applicability.

We often talk as if the "life of the mind" was a matter of isolation, ivory towers, individual contemplation -- when the reality is that the more deeply we think, the more we also feel, and the more we find ourselves within fascinating conversations antedating ourselves, entangled with the lives and thoughts of others.  Perhaps more ought be said about that in a later post -- but for the time being, back to Kierkegaard and his diagnosis of the dangers, character, and opportunities for what he called the Present Age.  He wrote those words over a century-and-a-half in the past, though, so are they -- could they be -- as relevant today as when he wrote them?  I'd argue that some portions, certain ideas, several concerns are even more applicable to our own present situation than they were in Kierkegaard's own day

Happy Birthday, Søren Kierkegaard

More than half of my life now, Søren Kierkegaard has occupied a top seat in the shifting chorus of my favorite philosophers -- something one would hardly guess by looking at my scholarship, which has focused much more upon other thinkers: Aristotle, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas,Thomas Hobbes, G.W.F. Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Alasdair MacIntyre, each of which I've found sufficiently fascinating to be drawn into reading and rereading, taking notes upon then writing, and when lucky, publishing articles about, each one of them a great philosopher in his own right, worth studying, engaging in intellectual dialogue and musing reflection full-time the rest of my remaining lifetime.

Yet, given the choice at any given moment about whose book to pull off the shelf, crack the pages open, and begin reading anew, I find it tempting not to select Kierkegaard, particularly these days his Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Irony, and The Sickness Unto Death. That attraction has altered over time, not so much changed in the sense of transmuting entirely from one thing, away from that and towards yet another, different thing in its place.  Rather, I'd say, as with a wine, or port, or liquor whose aging permits flavors, scents, textures, already there to be sure but only in potency, to unknot their bonds, to freely mingle and wax into a more complex, symphonic taste -- that's what happened with my appreciation of Kierkegaard, though along these lines of analogy, it would be better to say that my palate gradually took on the sharpness to distinguish and more deeply enjoy drinking in the flights of draughts he assembles and then offers.

The Story of Yamantaka: Death by Infinite Reduplication

After driving down to New Jersey the day before -- to present a paper on St. Anselm's moral theory at the 6th Felician Ethics conference and then to say a few words, again about Anselm, at the 40th anniversary of St. Anselm's parish -- we made a slight detour to Staten Island, where we visited the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, a small, but very interesting collection not only of Tibetan, but also Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian Buddhist statuary, mandalas, tapestries, and artifacts.  Jacques Marchais was actually an actress (given a boy's name since her mother had wanted a son), working in the early 20th century, devoted to study of the world's religious traditions, but particularly attracted to Buddhism, and to Tibetan Buddhism specifically.

The museum -- originally a center established by Marchais in the 1940s -- is set out on grounds replicating the topography of a Tibetan monastery, ascending high up a hill, with as many stairways as plots of level ground.  As you'll see in some of the pictures below, rains had driven petals from the flowering trees like wet, soft confetti all across the slate stone grounds and outdoor furniture of the museum complex.  We were able to walk some of the grounds -- not down so far as the meditation cells -- but the main attraction for us was the collection.  And, for me, who years back had been afforded the chance to introduce prison students semester after semester in World Religions to a few of the distinctive practices and beliefs, and even to selected portions of the intricate, startling, expressive artwork of Tibetan Buddhism  -- the culmination of several weeks devoted to Buddhism -- the most gratifying parts of the entire collection was being afforded to examine, from  multiple angles, several different statues of one of the great protective beings of Tibetan Buddhism, Yamantaka, the protector who faced down, and literally scared to death, Death himself.

Reflections on Repentance, Psalms, and Philosophy

Wednesday was one particularly important days of the liturgical year, involving a ritual often viewed as distinctively or exclusively "Catholic," often to the dismay of Protestants belonging to denominations which retained enough from the Catholic church for their more radical Protestant brethren to criticize them as remaining still far too "popeish" -- Lutherans, Anglicans (including Episcopalians), Methodists (who after all were at one time Anglicans themselves). . .  really anyone who recognizes some sense or value to a liturgical year might find themselves marked by an ashy cross smudged on their forehead.  This includes those Evangelicals who, regretting losses which occurred through ever more radical waves of Reformation, are now finding value in cautiously reappropriating rituals, notions, actions, lines of thought, ways of life formerly considered far too Romish.  My partner texted to tell me how startled she was at the sight of a drive-through where one could be marked with the sign of repentance. For me, that is Evangelicals doing things as they tend to do them best, enthusiastically, exploiting aspects we Christians less experimental and settled in our ways of doing things would never think of,  sometimes introducing a bit of unintentional comedy.

Ash Wednesday introduces the season of repentance -- with prayer, alms-giving, fasting as the traditional pillars.  Every religious tradition I have studied -- and I've not only been researching religions since I was a teenager, but had the opportunity to teach a Religious Studies curriculum for 6 years at a former job, so I've covered quite a few -- every religious community has some way of marking time, of structuring the cycles and patterns of life, something akin to a liturgical year, in which narrative intersects with and is enacted within calendar, where feasts or fasts for some at least are prescribed or proscribed, where space and time, and even silence for self-reflection is opened, where the theme of sin, distance from God and from neighbor, from the persons we ought to be (and study of actual world religions, in their practice, in their scriptures, will tell you that the notion of sin is a lot more widespread than some polemically maintain), becomes a focus.  Sin is multiform and multifaceted, and may be grasped by numerous holds, some of them intellectual, some of them much more affective, some more global, involving universal experiences and conflicts, others so personal that the one holding them within may doubt whether anyone else has ever felt, suffered, done, and regretted what -- or like --  they have.  And all of those complexities and stances, realizations, and progressions and degenerations of moral life are rolled up, implicitly, into the ordering of Ash Wednesday, and Lent, and the Passion, and Easter and . . . .

I pray the Liturgy of the Hours (these days using iBreviary) -- at some times of my life diligently, at others desultorily -- or better put, since I hardly feel as if I'm praying them, I read them, I speak them, or I sing them.  This is another one of those complex intersections of text, ritual, daily practice, tradition of whose depths and fertility some Evangelicals, among others, are becoming aware and enamored.  The Liturgy consists in arranged prayers, many of them Psalms, read at given points in the day. There is a cycle to it, where canticles and verses, Scripture readings and commentaries (in the Office of Readings) bob and weave, dance and chant their ways in and out of the weeks and months.  The Liturgy of the Hours is a complex pattern woven largely out of Scripture, and if one desires or aims to know Scripture better, particularly the Psalms, it is highly recommendable.

Anselm's God, the Sun, and the Unfathomable Ocean

At the end of (though technically at the beginning) of weeks simply saturated by concerns of faculty development, business ethics, course design, the CLA, my three sections of Critical Thinking this semester, articles on disparate topics I committed to, and seemingly endless meetings, I want. . .  better put, I need to read, think, and write about something other than those matters.  I had hoped Sundays after mass I would make time to start reading my way piece by piece through the volumes of the writings of the Church Fathers I bought on a bargain four years back.  But, inevitably, undone work and unfinished products from the previous week intrude.

Unable to stick to my first intention, I decided on a plan which would combine some sabbatical conversation with great Christian thinkers but which would also tie in with my current projects.  I made my bones a while back as an Anselm scholar, and continue publishing articles, giving talks, and even writing a book on his thought. My Anselmian explorations have had to be placed on hold so far this semester (except to write an application for an NEH Summer Stipend to work on the book), so Sundays will provide the space and time to follow along with the great Benedictine saint and philosopher.

One of the paradoxes of Anselm's theocentric writings is that in them he tells us that God is both known and unknown, that we can have an idea of God, but not comprehend God, that in fact our language even at its most theologically precise can just barely gesture towards God.  Anselm has been called everything from a rationalist to a mystic.  Both labels do apply, in fact (if they are not understood exclusively), because in Anselm they are not opposed but complementary, and this is precisely because of the object his thought strives towards, the person he communicates with, the ultimate reality he extends his mind, human language and concepts, to grasp:  God.

Religious knowledge: does Pew get it right?

Yesterday, the results of a study by the Pew Research Center made national news.  And ever-media 2.0-conscious Pew even added a mini-version of the quiz readers can take.  Blogged, tweeted, facebooked about, the new findings cascaded through the world of social media, gathering new interpretations and speculations like a rolling snowball. 

My curiosity -- or rather suspicion -- was raised almost immediately.  A quick multiple-choice test for "religious knowledge"?  Atheists and agnostics scoring higher as an aggregate than Evangelical Protestant Christians or Catholic Christians?  That leads by lightening-quick inference to tweets [links removed] like