Upcoming Lectures & Talks
8 upcoming lectures and talks from Center for the Study of World Religions, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Tue Oct 13 · 12pm
Abolitionists all claimed to follow Jesus but disagreed about who he was. Columbia's Ryan Carr argues that Frederick Douglass's Jesus, fully human yet speaking with a special authority, took shape in conversation with the Transcendentalists, and that Douglass claimed that same authority to speak about slavery from his own experience of it. Carr is the author of a study of the Mohegan minister Samson Occom.
Mon Oct 19 · 12pm
At the Brook Farm utopian community in 1844, Marianne Dwight joined the “Fancy Group,” women hand-painting goods for sale in Boston in pursuit of independence and equality. Sorbonne researcher Alice de Galzain reads Dwight's botanical watercolors, bound into flower “books,” as a language for Fourierist reform that joins the Transcendentalist search for harmony with nature to early feminist and labor politics.
Thu Oct 22 · 9am
Marking the centenary of Stanley Cavell's birth, this conference turns to the least-examined side of the Harvard philosopher's work: its religious dimension, drawn out through his long engagement with Emerson and Thoreau. Four keynote addresses and a closing panel take up what Cavell has to say about selfhood, community, skepticism and moral perfectionism, the Emersonian idea he made his own.
Mon Oct 26 · 12pm
Philosophers are pictured with their heads in the clouds, but Nietzsche and Thoreau, Emerson's two great heirs, turned instead to what Nietzsche called “the closest things”: the small, squalid, usually ignored matter of embodied life. Nicholas Low borrows Adorno's idea of micrological analysis to set the two side by side, and to ask where a passionate attention to the particular reaches its limits.
Mon Nov 2 · 12pm
Caroline Dall wrote her Patty Gray's Journey books to tell children the truth about slavery, the Civil War and their aftermath, convinced that resilience comes from hard knowledge. Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, a professor of religious studies, traces that conviction to Dall's Unitarian and Transcendentalist faith in self-culture, starting from the series' first volume, Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands.
Mon Nov 9 · 12pm
Robert Thorson introduces his new book, The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau. He starts from two images in Walden, yellow pitch-pine pollen afloat on the pond and blue lake ice, to show how Thoreau's eye moved from art to science and on to transcendental literature, then finds the science at work in each of Walden's eighteen chapters.
Mon Nov 16 · 12pm
A Concord house tied to a founding benefactor of Harvard Medical School is threatened by a state road project. Thoreau was the first to look into its owner's enslavement of Brister Freeman, who lived in Walden Woods before him and protested poll taxes decades before Thoreau did. The lecture argues that Harvard's reckoning with its slavery history continues a Transcendentalist project.
Mon Nov 16 · 4pm
A century after Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's lectures on the Hindu view of life, historian Neilesh Bose returns to the nineteenth-century Bengali reformer Keshab Chandra Sen, who compiled passages from many religions' scriptures and reached well beyond Hinduism. Bose presents Sen's comparative projects as a forerunner of Radhakrishnan's thinking about how religions borrow from one another as their peoples mix.
