The Night School for Deeper Learning: Series 12 (Spring 2023)
The Night School for Deeper Learning with Ernest Becker
January 24, 2023 • Rick Ganz
Ernest Becker is probably best characterized as a cultural anthropologist - someone who studies the “meaning and values” of a culture as they relate to the “human project”. His book, The Denial of Death (1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (after his death), was written as he was actively dying of cancer. When I first read it, probably in the early 1980s, I knew that I had read one of the ten greatest non-fiction books that I had ever read (a personal assessment). In the book, among many other things, he is taking a long, loving look at what we think it means to become a (good) person. Becker explains how often that this is not at all what it means. Becker with brilliant and accessible analysis, and with instructive passion, cracks open this “cheat” of personhood, so that we might begin to lay hold of what being a (good) human being actually is, and how a soul/a person gets open finally to not knowing what a human being is other than a relationship of profound dependence on God.
The Night School for Deeper Learning with Frederick Douglass
February 28, 2023 • Rick Ganz
From https://faberinstitute.createsend1.com/t/i-i-qkrlra-l-y/: Frederick Douglass was a formerly enslaved man who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War. After that conflict and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, he continued to push for equality and human rights until his death in 1895. Douglass’ 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, described his time as an enslaved worker in Maryland. It was one of five autobiographies he penned, along with dozens of noteworthy speeches, despite receiving minimal formal education. An advocate for women’s rights, and specifically the right of women to vote, Douglass’ legacy as an author and leader lives on. His work served as an inspiration to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond.
The Night School for Deeper Learning with T.S. Eliot
March 28, 2023 • Paul Pastor
Paul Pastor (http://www.pauljpastor.com) talks specifically about Eliot's struggles with the human relationship with time, as seen by the growth evident between his writing of The Wasteland and Four Quartets. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, the last of the Four Quartets
The Night School for Deeper Learning with Jane Jacobs
April 25, 2023 • Rick Ganz
Jane Jacobs was fierce, brilliant, and eloquent in a tart and disarming way, about CITIES - about how “great cities” actually do work (she claimed no particular insight into towns) … or do not work. Jane Jacobs quipped: “We expect too much of new buildings and too little of ourselves.”
The Night School for Deeper Learning with The First Letter of John (c. 100 CE)
May 23, 2023 • Rick Ganz
The final Night School of Series 12 will send us to the New Testament and into the presence of the profound and serene and confident author of the First Letter of St. John. He wrote this most personal and tender of letters near the end of the first century and to a people whose challenges he knew well. “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” - 1 John 3:18