Upcoming Lectures
Previous Lectures
- “A Matter of Divine Contrivance”: The “Common Law Covenant” in Herodotus’ History
- “A Rich Man Who Dies Rich Dies in Disgrace”: Andrew Carnegie and “The Gospel of Wealth”
- “Even His Angels He Charges with Error”: The Hebrew Bible as a National Literature of Self-Castigation
- “For He Shall Save His People from Their Sins”: The Gospel According to Matthew as Jewish Literature
- “Impeachment” in the Constitutional Sense
- “It Can’t Happen Here”? A (Frightening) Look at American Dystopias
- “The Great Conversation” at Chicago: The First 125 Years
- “The Holy Trible”: The Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur’an as an Abrahamic Trilogy
- “The Triple Pillar of the World Transformed into A Strumpet’s Fool”: Duty and Desire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
- “Twin Sons of Different Mothers”: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Historical Perspective
- “We Must Not Be Afraid To Be Free”: The Trials of George Anastaplo
- The Apology: Socrates’ Defense, Or the Gospel According to Plato
- Aeneas Gets an Epic: Virgil’s Aeneid and the Invention of the ‘Greco-Roman’ World
- Agent in Athens, Patient in Jerusalem: The Cosmic (Sense of) Self in Ancient Greek and Judaic Cultures
- An ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ of Developmental Psychology: Toward a Scientific Study of Human Ontogeny
- Bringing the Heroic Home: The Odyssey as Homer’s Guide to Being a Mensch
- Divided by a Common Ancestor: The Multiple Meanings of Abraham in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Scripture
- DuBois’s ‘Talented Tenth’: Socrates Meets ‘The Negro Problem’
- East is East and West is West? The Bible as an ‘Asian Classic’
- Epic of Id, Epic of Superego: A Freudian Reading of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
- Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans as Native(,) American Tragedy
- Fighting Theater with Theater: Plato’s Dialogues as Philosophical Dramas
- Flaunting It: The Logic of “Conspicuous Consumption” in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
- From Judah-ism to Judaism and Back Again: Jewish Religious and Political Claims to the ‘Land of Israel’
- From the Ashes of the Second Temple: The Co-Evolution of Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity
- Getting Comfortable with Death; Or, Better Dying Through Better Thinking
- Great Books and Big Lies (“Theirs” and “Ours”)
- Group Therapy with Great Books: On the Remaking of Adults through Lifelong Liberal Re-Education
- Historic Compromise of the Moderates: The Geneva Accord and the Endgame to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
- History in Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Tolstoy’s War and Peace in History
- Home Front, War Front: “Mrs. Miniver” and “Scarlett O’Hara” as the Interpretive Keys to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
- Living Well in Hard Times; Or, Why Liberal Education is Not a Luxury
- Of Hanukkah and Holy War: The Clash of Hellenism and Judaism in 1 & 2 Maccabees
- On the Cutting Room Floor: Books that Didn’t Make It into the Bible
- On the Transvaluation of Viking Values: Nietzsche Reads Beowulf
- Online Socratic Method Seminars in Adult Congregation Education: A Look at Today’s Realities and Possibilities
- Rewriting the Bible without Changing a Word: A Look at the Talmud
- Self-Evident Truths? Origin Myths and the Founding of America
- Shakespeare’s ‘Letter to the Romans’: ‘Anti-Judaism’ (Not ‘Anti-Semitism’) in The Merchant of Venice
- Somebody Killed Something: Ambiguous Hero and Beast in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’
- Speaking of Zarathustra …
- Strategies for ‘Negro Advancement’: Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery vs. W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk
- The Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at Fifty
- The Book of Job and the Invention of Faith
- The Content of Our Character: Lessons from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume One
- The Ends of Beginnings: A Look at Some of the Functions of Genesis
- The Gospel According to Muhammad: The Qur’an’s Account of Jesus as a Non-Canonical Gospel
- The Great Books Capital of America: The Role of Chicago in the Great Books Movement
- The Koran: The Word of God Returns
- The Many Meanings of Meekness; Or, Taking the ‘Uncle Tom’ Out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- The Scientific Construction of Developmental Norms
- The State(s) of the Union: Evolving Notions of ‘Nation’ in America’s Founding Documents
- The True Value of Money: Retail Investing as a Gateway to Wisdom
- The Use and Abuse of Gustavus Vassa; Or, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano on Its Own Terms
- The White Man’s Peril: Heart of Darkness as Conrad’s Reply to Kipling
- To the End of the Earth and Back Again; Or, Whose Odyssey is It Anyway?
- Universal Monotheism and Its Others in the Late Second Temple Period
- Was Moses an Egyptian? Freud’s Account in Moses and Monotheism
- Words at War: Rhetoric as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
- You Say ‘Yahweh’, I Say ‘The LORD’; Or, Why God by Any Other Name Ain’t