Community Seminars are special opportunities for community members to read and discuss seminalworks in the same unique manner as our students. Seminars are discussion-based and small in size in order to ensure spirited dialogue. There are topics to pique every interest, and for many participants the discussion-based learning model is an entirely new experience.

Please call 505-984-6117 to register for any of the seminars. Full-time teachers with proof of current employment can enroll in a Community Seminar at a 50-percent discount. Community Seminars are free to 11th and 12th grade high school students (limited spaces available).

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Tutor: David Carl
Dates/Times: Six Tuesdays, January 10, 17, 24, 31, February 7, 14, 5-7 p.m.
Cost: $210
Heralded as the novel that launched the post-modern revolution in contemporary fiction, Gravity’s Rainbow is in fact part of a long tradition of English novels that stretches back as far as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and continues through Moby Dick to the works of 20th century novelists such as William Gaddis, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace. Gravity’s Rainbow lies at the heart of innovative fiction— weaving together pop culture, modern science, and the carnivalesque into a vast novel about World War II and beyond. Pynchon’s account of the modern world is a vision of paranoia, corporate manipulation, military cabals, and the comic struggle for personal freedom.

Please note: Pynchon’s novel contains explicit and disturbing scenes of violence, sexuality, and corporate and personal exploitation. This seminar is intended for serious readers willing to discuss a difficult and controversial work in a mature context.

Francis Bacon, "New Atlantis"
Tutor: Topi Heikkero
Dates/Times: Saturday, January 21, 9:30-11:30 a.m.
Cost: $35
In “New Atlantis” (1624), Francis Bacon picks up Plato’s story about technologically advanced Atlantis. Bacon turns the island Bensalem —“New Atlantis”— into a utopian society with highly advanced state-sponsored science. Studying Bacon’s intriguing vision enables us to consider some central features in the modern idea of science-based progress.

'Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Tutor: Michael Wolfe
Dates/Times: Three Saturdays, January 21, 28, February 4, 1-3 p.m.
Cost: $105
“We are these bird-beings searching for the source of what we are together.” - Coleman Barks
This twelfth-century Persian allegory depicts the stages of the Sufi spiritual path. It tells of a motley flock of birds on an arduous pilgrimage through Seven Valleys in search of a king — a narrative that threads together a series of shorter tales told in variegated styles. Despite its fame in the Muslim world and its resemblance to familiar Western classics like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘Attar’s poem is only beginning to gain recognition in the English-speaking world (exemplified most recently by a newly published, whimsically illustrated edition by Peter Sis). No prior knowledge of Sufism or Persian literature is required.

Ovid, Metamorphoses
Tutor: Guillermo Bleichmar
Dates/Times: Four Tuesdays, January 24, 31, February 7, 14, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Cost: $140
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the great poems of antiquity and a sweeping treatment of classical myth, explores the mystery of how and why we become other than we are. Seminar participants will read the stories of Orpheus, Daphne, Midas, and Cadmus, among other tales of transformation.

Charlies Peirce and John Dewey, on Philosophy as Experimental Science
Tutor: Michael Bybee
Dates/Times: Six Wednesdays, January 25, February 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 6-8 p.m.
Cost: $210
The Civil War’s horrors and the Great War’s mindless carnage convinced many that established European religions and philosophies have no value, for their adherents had not prevented these wars and some had even engaged in their most sickening atrocities. Among others, Charles S. Peirce (after the Civil War) and John Dewey (after WWI) asked, “What went so wrong with conventional philosophies and religions? With what can we replace them?” They jettisoned the notion of philosophy-as-modeled-on-geometry and reconstituted philosophy on the model of experimental science. In so doing they redefined American political, religious, and educational institutions. In the Cold War’s aftermath and in the midst of a “War on Terror,” we may profit from taking this quintessentially American thinking seriously: How can moral values unfold from a philosophy based on experimental inquiry? How and why does American democracy differ from other democracies? What are the aims of an American liberal education?

On the Natural Powers of the Solitary Human Being: Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale
Tutor: Arcelia Rodriguez
Dates/Times: Five Saturdays, January 28, February 4, 18, 25, March 3, 10 a.m.-noon
*Please note that seminar will not meet on February 11th*
Cost: $175
Seminar participants will read Ibn Tufayl’s very influential Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, the medieval work that inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The book presents itself as a beginner’s guide to what Ibn Tufayl tantalizingly calls “the secrets of the oriental philosophy,” through the story of a solitary man who attains the highest form of knowledge with his own natural powers. It is a lovely introduction to medieval philosophy, the whole body of Aristotle’s works, and the complicated relationship between philosophy and religion and what this relationship teaches us about being human.

Tales by Henry James
Tutor: Patricia Greer
Dates/Times: Four Wednesdays, February 1, 8, 15, 22, 4-6 p.m.
Cost: $140
Henry James is arguably America’s greatest writer of fiction. Known for his magisterial novels, such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, he is a master of the short story as well. Seminar participants will read three of these tales: “The Aspern Papers,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Turn of the Screw.”

Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova
Tutor: Arcelia Rodriguez
Dates/Times: Saturday, February 11, Sunday, February 12, 10 a.m.-noon
Cost: $70
The New Life is Dante Alighieri’s beautiful idealized story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, interspersed with poems and the emotions and thoughts behind them. The seminar is a wonderful opportunity to get acquainted with Dante’s “sweet new style” of poetry and to reflect on romantic love and how it flourishes into divine love.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Tutor: David Carl
Dates/Times: Six Tuesdays, March 27, April 3, 10, 17, 24, May 1, 5-7 p.m.
Cost: $210
Beyond Good and Evil is a collection of interconnected, carefully organized aphorisms in which Nietzsche develops the main strands of his philosophy. Encompassing sections on religion, morality, the task of philosophy, the pursuit of nobility, politics, and nationalism, Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche’s most sustained and ambitious philosophical work. Seminar participants will have the opportunity to read carefully this controversial, profoundly influential, and often misunderstood work by one of the most enigmatic philosophers in the Western Tradition.

The Handbook of Epictetus
Tutor: Topi Heikkerö
Dates/Times: Saturday, March 31, 9:30-11:30 a.m.
Cost: $35
The Handbook of Epictetus contains a succinct summary of Epictetus’ (55-135 CE) stoic teaching. His seriousness and practicality made it a widely read educational manual both in Antiquity and in Renaissance Europe. “What upsets people is not the things themselves but their judgments about the things” is perhaps the most well-known dictum from the Handbook.