COMMUNITY
CALENDAR ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE JULY/AUGUST 2014 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
In this Issue: Summer Lecture Series Bread Loaf Lectures Music on the Hill
VOL. 4.14
Celebrate with St. John’s College
In 2014–2015, St. John’s College marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Santa Fe campus with a series of special events and programs. It was a bold and visionary move to establish the campus in the Southwest, to offer St. John’s distinctive and in many ways radical academic program to more students, and to demonstrate conclusively that the St. John’s program has no geographic or cultural bounds.
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The yearlong celebration honors a key turning point in the story of St. John’s College and its connection to Santa Fe and New Mexico. With its exceptional faculty, staff, and students, and over 1,200 alumni living in New Mexico, the College’s educational, cultural, and intellectual impact is integral to the character and history of our state.
Please visit www.sjc.edu regularly for updated information on the 50th anniversary.
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DEAN’S LECTURE AND CONCERT SERIES
Please join us for the beginning of the fall 2014 Dean’s Lecture and Concert Series. All lectures are free and open to the public and are followed by a question-and-answer period.
On Genesis Friday, August 29, 7:30 p.m. Great Hall, Peterson Student Center Ronna Burger, professor of philosophy, Tulane University
Ronna Burger will be giving the first lecture of the academic year, instead of the traditional lecture by St. John’s College’s dean.
Ronna Burger is professor of philosophy, Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair, and Sizeler Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. She is the author of Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago 2008) and The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (Yale, 1984; St. Augustine’s, 1999). She teaches a seminar on one work of Plato or Aristotle every semester and has directed numerous dissertations on Greek philosophy. In recent years she has extended her work to medieval Jewish thought (“Maimonides on Knowledge of Good and Evil: The Guide of the Perplexed I.2,” in Political Philosophy Cross-Examined) and studies of the Hebrew Bible. Last year she presented “In the Wilderness of Sinai: Moses as Lawgiver and Founder of a People” at St. John’s in Annapolis.
SUMMER LECTURE SERIES A Benign Self-Portrait Wednesday, July 2, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center N. Scott Momaday, artist in residence, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist N. Scott Momoday will read some of his poems as well as selected autobiographical passages.
Of Kiowa-Cherokee heritage, N. Scott Momaday has long been respected for his varied oeuvre, which both celebrates and preserves Native American oral tradition and art. His first novel, House Made of Dawn, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Since then he has published more than a dozen works, including novels, children’s stories, poetry, essays, and a memoir. In the mid-1970s, Momaday took up drawing and painting. His art has been exhibited widely in the United States, and his drawings and etchings illustrate his newer books.
Raised first on the Kiowa Indian Reservation in Oklahoma and then in Arizona, where he was exposed to the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo Indian cultures of the Southwest, Momaday developed an abiding interest in literature,
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especially poetry. After graduating from the University of New Mexico, he won a poetry fellowship to Stanford University’s creative writing program, earning a doctorate in English literature in 1963. He subsequently taught at the University of California-Santa Barbara and then at U.C-Berkeley, where he was professor of English and comparative literature and also designed a graduate program of Indian studies. Professor Momaday also taught for years at the University of Arizona. Momaday received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2007. He was the Oklahoma Centennial State Poet Laureate from July 2007 to January 2009 and has been artist in residence at St. John’s college since February.
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Forbidden Fruit: The Banning of The Grapes of Wrath in Kern County Levan Lecture Wednesday, July 9, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center Marci Lingo, former professor of English and reference librarian, Bakersfield College
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been banned throughout its 75-year history; even today it continues to be challenged for its realistic description of the plight of the Okie migrants’ life in California, its political ideology, and its graphic language. One of the first and most famous incidents of banning occurred in 1939, a few months after its publication in Kern County, California, a setting in the novel. The county had experienced explosive population growth due the influx of the Dust Bowl migrants, and the novel describes both their destitution and exploitation. The Kern County Board of Supervisors and the powerful business interests that controlled it resented Steinbeck’s depiction of the treatment the migrants received at the hands of farmers and government officials. The ban was both controversial and unprecedented; it exposed the economic, social, and political power of business organizations like the Associated Farmers. It also revealed the fragility of the public library’s power to defend its patrons’ right to read and the precarious nature of intellectual freedom of libraries at this point in American history. Marci Lingo just retired last month as professor of English and reference librarian at Bakersfield College. She received her bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of the Pacific, her master of arts degree in English from California State University, Bakersfield, and her master of library and information services degree from San Jose State University. Lingo spent her early career in the Kern County Library system, where The Grapes of Wrath had been banned.
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“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” — Aristotle
"Bare ruin'd quires": Language, Figure and Death in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 Wednesday, July 16, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center Jacques Duvoisin, tutor, St. John’s College, Santa Fe
Jacque Duvoisin will discuss Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), with special attention to the rhetorical structure of the poem— its use of tropes to work through the various ways death inhabits life. The sonnet speaks of “bare ruin’d quires,” of “death's second self,” and “the ashes of his youth”—in each case, enacting an ambiguity between the written word and the reality it names, as if to say that the reality of death is inseparable from our ability (or inability) to name it. Jacques Antoine Duvoisin received a bachelor of arts degree in 1980 from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and went on to earn a master of arts and a doctorate in 1984 and 1992, respectively, from The Catholic University of America. Before joining the faculty of St. John’s College, Santa Fe, he was a Knights of Columbus Fellow (1981-1984) and a visiting fellow in the University of London’s School for Advanced Studies, Institute of Philosophy.
What is Socrates’ Question? Wednesday, July 23, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center John Bova, doctoral candidate in philosophy, Villanova University
What is the signature question asked by Plato’s Socrates in what are sometimes called his elenctic, or refutational, conversations? This question apparently answers itself! We all know, on the authority of Aristotle, that Socrates, question is none other than this very ti esti, or What is...? question that we have used in posing this or any problem of essence. Nevertheless, I suggest that Plato’s dialogues show a different answer—that the ti esti defines only one pole of a dual Socratic question.
John Bova earned a B.S. in philosophy and mathematics from Towson University in 2002, an M.A. in Eastern Classics at St. John’s College in 2003, and an M.A. in philosophy at Villanova University in 2009. He is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at Villanova University, where he has taught courses in logic, philosophy of mind, and, at neighboring West Chester University, ancient Greek thought. Since 2012 he has been an affiliated researcher in the philosophy department of the University of New Mexico. At the time of this writing, he is in development to co-teach a graduate seminar on formalization and contemporary thought at the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS). The title of his forthcoming dissertation is The Idea of the Good: Metalogic is Ethics.
Beyond Fate, Fortune, and Providence Wednesday, July 30, 3:15 p.m. Junior Common Room, Peterson Student Center Jay Smith, tutor, St. John’s College
Starting from an understanding of the increased scope of human action as transformed by technology, Jay Smith will examine some of the ethical and education implications of this increase. Hans Jonas’s seminal work, “The Imperative of Responsibility,” will be the source text for the examination of the increased and accumulating effects of human actions, especially as regards life possibilities of future generations. Jay Smith earned his bachelor of arts degree from St. John's College, Santa Fe, in 1977, a master of arts degree in philosophy from Marquette University in 1979, and a doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University in 2002. Before joining the St. John’s faculty in 2001, Smith worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and also as an environmental consultant.
BREAD LOAF LECTURES
The Bread Loaf School of English, a graduate program of Middlebury College, has been offering courses in literature, writing, and the teaching of writing at St. John's College for more than a dozen summers. The courses are augmented by lecturers who are distinguished artists and writers, and are free and open to the public.
Kylene Beers, Former President, National Council of Teachers Tuesday, July 1, 7 p.m. Junior Common Room Peterson Student Center
Myrlin Hepworth, Hip Hop Artist and Social Activist Tuesday, July 15, 7 p.m. Coffee Shop Peterson Student center
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Celebrating its ninth season, Music on the Hill™ is a signature Santa Fe summer event. St. John’s College would like to thank the Santa Fe community and the concert series’ lead sponsors— Los Alamos National Bank, Verve Gallery, Chalmers Capitol Ford—for supporting our annual event. From early June to late July, local and nationally known musicians offer free weekly Wednesday-evening concerts in a wide range of jazz styles. Concerts take place on the college’s athletic field from 6 to 8 p.m. Parking is available close to campus, and a free shuttle runs between Museum Hill and the college’s athletic field. For details, click here [link to MOTH web page]. Concertgoers may picnic on the field. Food and water and sodas are available for purchase from Walter Burke Catering. Please note that NO PETS are allowed on campus, and that bicycles must be parked in designated areas.
JULY 2014 July 9 Annie Sellick: Jazz Standards
July 16 SuperSax New Mexico
July 23 Manzanares: Nuevo Latino This project is made possible in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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AFTERNOON CONCERTS INFORMAL LUNCHTIME CONCERT Peter Pesic, piano Tuesday July 15, 2014 12:30–1:30 pm Great Hall, Peterson Student Center
The Goldberg Project. J. S. Bach: Fourteen Canons on the Goldberg Bass (BWV 1087) and the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988).
INFORMAL LUNCHTIME CONCERT Peter Pesic, piano Tuesday July 22, 2014 12:30–1:30 pm Great Hall, Peterson Student Center
Beethoven: Six Variations, op. 34 (1802); Stravinsky: Sérénade en La (1925); Bartok: Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (1940).
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www.sjc.edu
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