Select Invited Talks
I love the opportunity to think through new ideas in community. All of my books had their origin in lectures or seminar classes, for my students, for students at other universities, or for more general audiences.
“What We Lost at Notre Dame”
An attempt to use modern photography and medieval scholarship to re-create the “feel” of the world’s greatest medieval cathedral, as well as advice for Macron on how to rebuild.
“The Nine Billion Names of God”
Begins with Clarke’s famous short story and argues that medieval natural philosophy has much in common with contemporary cosmology and systems thinking. This will be the concluding chapter of the book I’m working on now: What Were Humans?
“What Were Humans?”
I described our culture’s techno-utopianism as the “late autumn” of the Scientific Revolution, by comparing Mendelsohn and Rihanna, Yeats and Zuckerberg, Descartes and Boyle. Guess what author I ended with…
February 2022: Purgatorio in California and Inferno in Rhode Island
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The Disputatio Project. Providence College.
Rick Barry invited me and Brendan Case to debate whether or not Dante’s vision of hell is compatible with a God of Christian love.
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Valor Institute. Kingfisher Fellow.
The Valor Institute invited me give a long-weekend seminar on Dante’s Purgatorio. Come to find out, it’s easy to talk about the Earthly Paradise in La Jolla, California.
In September 2021 I continued to think through the long-term effects of the scientific revolution and how it affects how we think and feel about the humanities in the age of technology.
“Here is One Who Shall Increase Our Love”
I describe Paradiso as a marriage of the lyrical and the epic, to create an ambitious incarnation of mystical theology.
“Globalism, Technology, and… Poetry?”
Talk at University of Arkansas analyzing contemporary technological optimism. I draw on Wendell Berry, Gretel Ehrlich, and an advertisement campaign conducted by Clemson. Yes. Clemson.
“Our Ancient Inheritance: Silence, Contemplation, and the Medieval Cathedral”
A Cistercian monk once glossed the Psalm, “deep calls unto deep,” as gesturing at how God’s oceanic depth calls out within my own heart. I use such images medieval metaphors of height and depth to “read” cathedrals.
“The Medieval Model and the Christian Future”
Talk given at the C.S. Lewis Society in Oxford, UK. Now making up a part of my upcoming book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How the Great Books Made a Great Mind (IVP, 2022)
“Evil Enchantment and the Weight of Glory: What Dante Taught C.S. Lewis”
All-school lecture at my home institution on why Lewis loved Dante so much. Now a chapter in my forthcoming Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.