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Winter 2017

Jeffrey Kosky, Washington & Lee University Title: “Portraits of Enchanting Secularity: Notes on faces, prayers, and criticism for those disenchanted with disenchantment” May 12, 2017 Ever since Max Weber, in 1917, famously characterized “the fate of our times” with the memorable phrase “the disenchantment of the world,” it has been customary to equate modernity, secularity, …

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Fall 2016

Matthew Mutter, Bard College Title: “‘What is Joy?’: Yeats, Paganism, and the Passions” November 3, 2016 W.B. Yeats claimed that the governing tension of his poetic imagination could be characterized as a competition between the “swordsman” and the “saint.” His writing figures this tension in multiple ways—Oedipus v. Christ, Homer v. von Hügel, Michael Angelo …