As a community, we’ve hosted a number of experiments in shared learning, beginning with reading Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness after our first Wednesday dinners. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been meeting virtually, allowing us to host discussions organized around great texts and ideas, facilitated by scholars from around the country. In this work, we are inspired by the Catholic Worker vision of the “agronomic university.” In Peter’s words, the agronomic university was to be a place where “the scholars could become workers, and workers scholars; where a philosophy of work would be restored to people; where they would regain a sacramental attitude toward life, property, and people in relation to them.”
See below for a sampling of the texts we’ve gathered around so far, and reach out if you’re interested in joining our Thursday discussions (5-6:15pm PST / 8-9:15pm EST, on Zoom, schedule below). In addition to our Thursday gatherings, we are hoping to offer our “Liturgy and Communion Economy” course again soon, in partnership with Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. Check out our Communion Economy page for more details.
2021-22 Academic Year: Recapitulation
Check out our full calendar of readings here.
Sample readings:
- After Virtue (Full Text PDF)
- After Virtue Chapter Summaries (from The New Atlantis)
- Weekly Discussion Questions
Summer 2021 Reading
(Short pieces and films exploring themes related to The Brothers Karamazov and setting up our reading of After Virtue.)
- (7/1) Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”
- (7/8) Flannery O’Connor, “Parker’s Back”
- (7/15) Jean Luc-Marion, “Evil in Person,” from Prolegomena to Charity
- (7/22) Tree of Life (film)
- (7/29) Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
- (8/5) My Dinner with André (film)
- (8/12) Ratzinger’s Introduction to Introduction to Christianity
- (8/19) Silence (film)
- (8/26) Excerpts from Weil’s The Need for Roots
Past Readings
- Simone Weil, selected readings (see our Resources page)
- Alan Jacobs, How to Think
- Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
- Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, led by Professor Caryl Emerson
- Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, led by Professor Paul Contino