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As perhaps the classic embodiment of the “rags-to-riches” American Dream, Andrew Carnegie developed a well-thought-out perspective on the proper place of wealth — the getting of it, the living with it and the giving away of it — in a democracy. Indeed, Carnegie both articulated what came to be known as his “Gospel of Wealth” in numerous writings and speeches and manifested it in his life, including in his numerous charitable gifts. Through an examination of Carnegie’s works, this lecture will explore Carnegie’s perspective on wealth, with special attention to those aspects that drove Carnegie to become the father of modern philanthropy. ◊ More →

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Although many ancient peoples created national literatures of self-glorification, the Israelites were perhaps unique in adding a large measure of self-castigation to theirs. The Hebrew Bible thus has something of a Tale of Two Cities stance toward the “chosen people” as both “the best” and “the worst” of peoples. This lecture will survey these themes in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as well as the ways they manifest themselves in the New Testament. ◊ More →

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Although the Gospel According to Matthew is generally and naturally thought of as a “Christian” work, historical and literary evidence suggests that both the text’s author and intended audience may well have been Jewish. Indeed, in some ways Matthew “makes more sense” as one of the last books of the Hebrew Bible than as one of the first books of the New Testament. This lecture will survey the historical and literary contexts in which Matthew was originally produced as well as the religious contexts in which it has been subsequently read in order to consider a new thing in an old light. ◊ More →

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Despite its hallowed status, the United States Constitution of 1787 is an imperfect text which sometimes obscures more than it reveals. Such is the case with the long-and-widely misunderstood Constitutional provision for “impeachment”. This lecture will attempt: first, to explicate the true meaning and operation of “impeachment” in the Constitutional sense through a close reading of the 1787 text within the 1787 context; and, second, to survey and explain the history of post-1787 (mis)understandings of this aspect of the Constitution. The possible contemporary political significance of a better understanding of the impeachment provision of the Constitution will be studiously avoided. ◊ More →

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Although a long line of American authors have written about the United States in positive and even utopian terms, others have written about a darker place, even imagining a dystopian America. For example, in 1935 Sinclair Lewis published a novel depicting a fascist dictatorial takeover of the United States along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. For many the very notion of an “American dictatorship” is a contradiction in terms and thus too absurd to merit serious consideration: America is often believed to be self-evidently “exceptional” and thus immune to ills that can befall other nations. As Lewis’s title somewhat mockingly put it: It Can’t Happen Here. This lecture surveys several 20th-century works whose authors thought that political evil can indeed “happen here” and that Americans ought to be vigilantly on their guard against “it.” ◊ More →

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Chicago — both the city and the university — is arguably the “Great Books Capital of the World”, having developed and disseminated a concept (“The Great Conversation”) and a technique (“The Socratic Method”) that briefly took America by storm in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and even now continues as a flourishing sub-culture. As part of the celebration of the 125th anniversary of founding of the University of Chicago in 1890, this lecture will survey Chicago’s Great Books history and place it within the larger context of the University of Chicago’s enduring adult liberal education mission. ◊ More →

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Although the three Abrahamic scriptures grew largely out of a common textual tradition, with the exception of the paired “Old and New Testaments” they are rarely read together. The lecture, however, will argue that reading the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur’an together as an “Abrahamic Trilogy” facilitates both a better understanding of each scripture on its own as well as of the relationships between and among them.  These deeper understandings, in turn, can enable us to better understand our own religious traditions as well as those of our neighbors. ◊ More →

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Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians (or, more generally, between Jews and Arabs or even between Jews and Muslims) is not ancient in origin. Rather, it is the modern product of the rise of conflicting Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms. In this absorbing presentation, Adam Rose will take you back in time to the origins of this modern conflict as he discusses the history of the region and traces the development of various forms of Jewish and Arab nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You’ll be fascinated as Mr. Rose chronicles the major events in the conflict and presents different interpretations of “what happened and why.” And you’ll gain greater insights into the 1990s peace process that was supposed to end the conflict as Rose discusses what went wrong and how it led to the subsequent intifadas, as well as the state of the conflict today. If you’ve ever wished you had a clearer understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is one lecture you won’t want to miss. ◊ More →

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George Anastaplo (1925-2014) has long been a legend for his decade-long Cold War fight against the State of Illinois’s refusal to admit the young World-War-II veteran to the practice of law on the basis of Anastaplo’s assertion of fundamental rights he believed enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. This lecture will combine a review of Anastaplo’s case (from its obscure 1950 Chicago beginning through its famous 1961 U.S. Supreme Court culmination) with a survey of Anastaplo’s understanding of the constitutions of the United States in an attempt to illuminate both the man and the myth. ◊ More →

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Because the West has long thought of itself as the fusion of Greek “reason” and Hebrew (Judeo-Christian) “faith”, the secularization which followed the Enlightenment has typically been seen as the West’s disavowal of its Hebrew heritage in favor of its Greek one. Indeed, it is not uncommon today for modem secular humanists and classical Greeks to be considered much of a muchness. Unfortunately, such a view tends to blind us to important features of Greek life, even in figures as seemingly familiar to us as Socrates and Plato. A careful consideration of Plato’s Apology, however, can help resurrect these religious features of these two men who can be seen in many ways as not dissimilar to a range of Hebrew religious figures including, perhaps most strikingly, Jesus and Paul respectively. ◊ More →

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Both in its conception and in its execution, Virgil’s Roman epic the Aeneid is intimately dependent upon Homer’s Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Indeed Virgil goes out of his way to both imitate Homer’s poems and to connect his story with Homer’s stories.  This lecture will explore the various relationships between Virgil’s work and Homer’s works in order to better understand both the Aeneid as a work of literature and Virgil’s cultural project to portray Rome as an integral part of the classical Greek world. ◊ More →

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One of the great insights of the modern era is that notions of what a “person” is, as well as notions about the “cosmos” those persons inhabit, vary from culture to culture. Indeed the two are linked. In this talk, we will explore the interconnections between cultural notions of “self’ and “cosmos” by considering the cases of ancient Greek culture on the one hand and ancient Judaic culture on the other. In each case, notions of creation were correlated with notions of the cosmos that in turn were correlated with notions of the nature of man and the nature of wisdom. In Athens, the cosmic (sense of) self was that of a cosmic agent, while in Jerusalem it was that of a cosmic patient. ◊ More →

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This paper is an attempt to weave an account of developmental psychology that is alternately descriptive and normative.  In the descriptive mode it takes the discipline as data for which it seeks an explanation.  In the normative mode, it takes the discipline as an enterprise for which it seeks optimal goals, theories and methodologies.  Descriptive, it is anthropological, examining a Western sociocultural artifact.  Normative, it is psychological, participating in a scientific undertaking to systematically study human ontogeny.  Descriptive, it is on the outside looking in; normative, it is on the inside looking out.  Collectively this paper claims that developmental psychology neither is what it says it is nor what it ought to be and asks: What is this project called “developmental psychology” and how ought it best be conducted? ◊ More →

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Despite its Eastern origins, the Bible is widely accepted as a foundational text of Western civilization. This lecture will uncover the Eastern roots of a “Western” classic and challenge common misconceptions about the Bible. What are the underlying assumptions that cause people to think of the Bible as a “Western” work? What problems do these assumptions create when we seek to understand the Bible and other texts related to it, such as the Qur’an? This lecture is an opportunity to explore a familiar text from a fresh perspective. ◊ More →

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Although the Iliad and Odyssey are often understood as two parts of a single larger story that manifests a single, coherent “heroic” worldview, an alternative perspective sees the Odyssey as essentially a repudiation of, and replacement for, the values of the Iliad. Indeed, from this point of view the Odyssey is often seen as standing in relation to the Iliad much as the New Testament is often seen as standing in relation to the Hebrew Bible.  This alternative perspective can be deepened by analyzing the two epics using Freud’s theory of the tri-partite psyche (a process that Freud himself often employed  when interpreting classic literature and other works of art). From this Freudian perspective, the Odyssey appears as the epic celebration of the hero of the superego (Odysseus) that repudiates and supersedes the Iliad, the epic celebration of the hero of the id (Achilles). ◊ More →

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Although American political independence is traditionally considered to have been achieved on July 4, 1776, the formation of a distinct American national identity took considerably longer than one day. Indeed, for many years after the successful conclusion of the American Revolution, American intellectuals of all kinds worked hard to forge the “new American”. James Fenimore Cooper was one such intellectual and The Last of the Mohicans the product of such work. In this talk we will explore the ways in which Fenimore Cooper’s work of historical fiction — it was published in 1826 and subtitled “A Narrative of 1757” — participated in the shaping of an emerging American identity. We will also consider the ways in which it continues to influence the notion of “Americanness.” ◊ More →

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Although “wealth” has long been subjected to economic analysis (which postulates humans as rational beings) and more recently to behavioral analysis (which postulates humans as emotional beings), Thorstein Veblen’s groundbreaking Theory of the Leisure Class famously subjected “wealth” to anthropological analysis (which postulates humans as social beings). From this point of view, “wealth” is important not so much for what can be done with it or for the internal feelings that it can evoke, but rather for what it can signal to others about the social dominance of its possessor. This lecture will offer an overview of Veblen’s theory as originally presented in 1899 and consider its usefulness in making sense of the contemporary phenomenon of Donald Trump. ◊ More →

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If better thinking can lead to better living and if dying is an inevitable part of living, then it follows that better thinking ought to lead to better dying. And yet the history of Western civilization demonstrates that clear thinking about death is exceedingly difficult. This seems particularly true nowadays due to the rise of a modern form of medicine that has both largely removed death from everyday life and promoted the conceit that death can be — and ought to be — perpetually forestalled (if not conquered outright). This lecture will review some of the key historical Western approaches to human mortality in an effort to consider what lessons those who lived and died in the past may have to offer us who live and will die in the present. ◊ More →

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In contrast to Plato’s ideal polity ruled by a “philosopher-king”, an ideal democracy must be ruled by “philosopher-citizens”, each of whom pursues wisdom through independent, critical thinking. One of the central ongoing tasks of such free thinking is the recognition, analysis, and rebuttal of the assorted “big lies” (i.e., propaganda) perpetually perpetrated by foe and friend alike. Lifelong liberal education grounded in the great books can help us do this. As the preface to an old University of Chicago reader once put it: “If citizens are to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are to judge well, they must be wise. Citizens may be born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the business of liberal education in a democracy is to make free men wise.” ◊ More →

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Over the 70 years since 1946, the University of Chicago Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults has provided opportunities for intellectually curious adults to read and discuss selected “great books” under the guidance of staff instructors. Why? And why have intellectually curious adults continued to take advantage of these opportunities? In this lecture, I will attempt to answer these and related questions as part of a general reflection on the ends and means of lifelong liberal learning, drawing upon my own 20+ years of experience as a Basic Program instructor along with ideas as old and distant as Socrates’ and as recent and near as those of the late University of Chicago professor Herman Sinaiko. My starting point will be a 1958 observation by Warren Winiarski, then a Basic Program staff instructor, that in the Basic Program:
“[W]e re-open the universal problems and questions, and thus call into question the particular and specific answers which constitute the adultness of adults; we unmake adults — we make adults into children. Adult education of this kind is not a continuing of their education; it is the possibility of their being re-educated. For to be educated in this way means, in so far as the principles, answers and beliefs constitutive of adultness are questioned — to be de-educated or to unlearn what we learned before.” ◊ More →

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Since it was first produced on Broadway in 1959 and by Hollywood in 1961, Lorraine’s Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun has been widely ranked as a modern classic — though perhaps not a completely understood one. For a full appreciation of this self-consciously-literary work requires not only, in general, a deep appreciation of a large number of subtle allusions in the text, but also, in particular, a deep appreciation of a few seemingly-trivial allusions to two of the most important American movies to come out of the World War II era: Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Once these contextual and intertextual allusions are fully understood, individually and collectively, the full significance of A Raisin in the Sun as a “war film” about the “home front” of America’s “race war” — indeed, as an “African American war film” about the “home front” of America’s “race war” — comes easily into view. Hansberry’s work thus exemplifies the dictum of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: that no artist “has his complete meaning alone” but rather can only be fully appreciated when set “for contrast and comparison, among the dead”. ◊ More →

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In tough economic times, people naturally cut back on “non-essentials,” the little “luxuries” in life they can do without until better times return. For many people, these cuts include “culture” in general and “liberal education” in particular. After all, “great books” and “deep thoughts” don’t pay the rent or put food on the table. This lecture, however, will explore the contrary thesis: that it is precisely in hard times that liberal education is most essential, and “great books” and “deep thoughts” are most valuable — when “living well” most depends upon “living smart.” ◊ More →

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Although the spread of Greek culture that followed Alexander the Great’s conquests is often considered one of the great steps forward in world civilization, not everyone has thought so.  Indeed for many traditional Jews  of the time,  Hellenism was a great pagan enemy of the God of Israel.  This lecture will explore the holy war against Hellenism depicted in the First and Second Books of the Maccabees that cured the desecration of the Jerusalem temple through the rededication of the House of God in 165 BCE — an event memorialized in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. ◊ More →

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Despite our habit of talking about it in the singular, “the Bible” is an anthology of many books from different times and places. But not every book that could have made it into the Bible did so. This lecture will survey the processes by which the biblical anthology was put together and explore some of the books that were left “on the cutting room floor.” ◊ More →

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In his Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche traces what he calls the “slave revolt in morality”, an episode of the “transvaluation of values” in which Western notions of “right” and “wrong” were inverted. As a consequence, the “master morality” of the Greco-Roman world (embodied in its epics) was replaced by the “slave morality” of Judeo-Christian world (embodied in its scriptures) and what was formerly “good” became “evil” and what was formerly “bad” became “good”. This lecture will apply Nietzsche’s paradigm to Beowulf — arguably a “Christian Viking” work about the “pagan Viking” past — in an effort both to better understand the poetic significance of the life and death of the great hero Beowulf and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s theory. ◊ More →

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For most of its history, “distance education” meant correspondence courses in which teachers’ lessons and students’ responses (if any) were transmitted by surface mail. With the development of the Internet, however, it is now possible for individuals who are separated physically to come together intellectually in shared virtual learning environments — including virtual environments that are beginning to support the most “high touch” learning of all: “Socratic Method” seminars structured to facilitate students’ critical, collaborative, first-hand engagement with classic texts. After providing a brief overview of distance education in general and contemporary online learning environments in particular, this lecture will examine the realities and possibilities of online Socratic Method seminars today and consider the contributions that such seminars might make to adult congregation education. ◊ More →

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Every people has stories that it tells about itself-stories about where it comes from, about its place in the universe, about its essential characteristics. Indeed, one of the key functions of “culture” is to impress these stories on each succeeding generation. When successful, this process makes these stories so “obvious” to insiders as to be self-evidently true (despite the fact that these same stories remain self-evidently dubious to outsiders). In these respects, the American people and American culture are no different than any others. From the beginning, Americans have constructed stories —political, historical, literary — as a way of defining themselves and their place in the world and thus as a way of shaping their destiny. A look at works as diverse as The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, The Scarlet Letter, The Gettysburg Address, and “Paul Revere’s Ride,” can illustrate this phenomenon and help us temporarily stand outside ourselves as we seek a better understanding of who we truly are. ◊ More →

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Although The Merchant of Venice is today often perceived as “anti-Semitic”, a careful consideration of both the play and the label suggests that this is not so. Rather, Shakespeare’s play dramatizes both a critique of “legalistic Judaism” similar to the one made by Paul (who arguably lived and died a Jew) in his “Letter to the Romans” and an exaltation of “graceful Christianity”. As such, The Merchant of Venice can be properly understood as the “anti-Judaic comedy of Antonio” rather than as the “anti-Semitic tragedy of Shylock”. ◊ More →

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Written between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche’s best-known and most-read work. Yet it may not be his best. For despite the fact that Nietzsche was a mature man of about 40 when he wrote the work, Zarathustra often seems to have an adolescent tone — a tone that does nothing to advance the argument and indeed often seems to detract from it. In this talk, we will attempt to understand both Nietzsche’s argument and his style in this famous — and to some infamous — rant against the Victorian world view. ◊ More →

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Although often pigeonholed as “African-American intellectuals”, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois thought deeply about the nature of man and America when developing their programs for “Negro advancement”. This lecture will examine their analyses and conclusions as reflected in their two best-known works, Up from Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk, as well as consider how and why they arrived at what are often understood as diametrically-opposed and mutually-exclusive perspectives and programs — for African-Americans in particular and human beings in general ◊ More →

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This lecture will explore how the Book of Job transforms the Hebrew Bible’s concept of God (from a large-but-finite and explicable deity to an infinite and fundamentally inexplicable one) and therefore, the proper behavior of both humans and God in the relationship they share and the possibility of a covenant between them. ◊ More →

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Besides being an object of general intellectual curiosity, the decline and fall of the ancient Roman Empire has long held a special fascination for those concerned with the health and well-being of a subsequent empire. After all, if the later empire could understand the mistakes of the former one, perhaps they — and the attendant imperial decline — could be avoided. Edward Gibbon, who wrote his monumental, six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the British Empire was arising and the American Empire was aborning, certainly seems to have thought so. This lecture will survey Gibbon’s account of “the beginning of the end” for Rome as told in volume one of his work, with special attention to the lessons Gibbon believed he had gleaned from that pivotal period — most of which deal with a perceived decline and fall of the Roman national character. ◊ More →

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Although a relatively late Abrahamic scripture, the Qur’an has quite a bit to say about figures and events in the Abrahamic tradition that preceded it and that Islam understands itself to be built upon. Among other things, the Qur’an contains within it an account of Jesus’ life and mission that in some sense amounts to yet another “gospel”. This lecture will present an introduction to this “Gospel According to Muhammad” and consider the Qur’anic version of the Jesus story in comparison with New Testamental versions of the story as well as with several non-canonical “Christian” versions. ◊ More →

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Although the partisans of the great books have always emphasized the universal and timeless aspects of the great books, the emergence of “great books” as a widely recognizable concept is an American cultural phenomenon centered on the particular time and place of mid-20th-century Chicago.  Despite roots in New York and beyond as well as branches around the country and now around the world, the great books movement achieved critical mass in Chicago with which it has been and continues to be identified. ◊ More →

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Despite the fact that “Uncle Tom” has become a negative cultural stereotype connoting a Black who is abjectly servile to Whites, a close reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom was no “Uncle Tom”. Indeed, imposing such a characterization on the novel’s protagonist undermines one of the central messages of the book. This lecture will examine the novel and the history of its interpretation as a means of deriving a fair reading of both the text and its key character. ◊ More →

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Although the notion of a dialectical (or reciprocal) relationship between psychology and culture has been nominally acknowledged for over a generation, it is only recently and tentatively that the study of developmental norms has begun to be shaped by this fact.  This paper presents a theoretical outline of this relationship and the resulting need for a self-conscious (or reflexive) study of developmental norms. ◊ More →

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Although there is a long tradition of projecting contemporary understandings of the American polity back onto its beginnings, a close examination of America’s “Founding Documents” reveals a range of notions about the nature of “America”. This lecture will survey some of the key documents and notions in an attempt to understand the documents themselves, the evolution of the concept of “America” and the vestiges of these various notions that survive to this day. ◊ More →

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In a capitalist society, retail investing can play the role that sexual love plays in Plato’s Symposium: the blunt, material force that can lure us onto a path towards subtle, ethereal wisdom. For, analogously to the ”ladder of love”, investors’ initial ”wealth focus” often evolves into a ”wellness focus” (as we re-discover the ancient truth that money is a means and not an end in itself) and then into a ”wisdom focus” (as we re-discover the ancient truth that wisdom is needed in order to live a good life). From this perspective, therefore, lust – be it for sex or for money – turns out to be something of a ”noble lie” that delivers something much better than it promises – and something we probably would not have sought at all if lust had not started us on our journey in the first place.
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Published in London in 1789 as part of the effort to abolish the African slave trade, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African; Written by Himself is usually understood as the autobiography of an African who was kidnapped and transported across the infamous Middle Passage into a life of slavery from which he emancipated himself — and thus as one of the works that established the “slave narrative” genre. This talk, however, will argue that the book is something else and more: an evangelical text that employs the author’s life-story as a means of bringing readers to a true understanding of Christianity and, thereby, of the godliness of abolition. As such, the work has little in common with the genre it is supposed to have helped found. ◊ More →

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Today often considered both anti-imperialist and profoundly racist, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness can be understood as simultaneously affirming and rejecting the “imperial logic” epitomized in Rudyard Kipling’s contemporaneous poem “The White Man’s Burden”. This lecture will attempt to offer a holistic interpretation of Conrad’s novella that makes sense of its apparent internal contradictions by examining Kipling’s “imperial logic” and Conrad’s critique of it — a critique grounded in the profoundly multivalent contention at Heart of Darkness’s unspoken, “horrific” core: that “Whiteness is only skin-deep”. ◊ More →

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While the gods (and goddesses) in most religious systems have personal names (think: Zeus, Jupiter, Athena, Mars, etc.), many people think that the god of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament does not — that “He” is simply “God” or “The LORD”. The truth, however, is more complex and subtle. This lecture will survey the evolution of the name(s) of the god(s) of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament as well as explore the philosophical implications of deity naming (and non-naming). ◊ More →