Upcoming Conference Calls

UPCOMING CALLS

We now have a schedule for the calls for the next six weeks after Easter. March 30 and April 6, we will finish the Armstrong. I'll copy and send a few passages out and we'll read and discuss them over the phone.

On April 13, featured conference speaker Michael Nagler, founder of the UC Berkeley Peace Studies Program and award winning author, will be talking to us. You might want to prepare by reading his The Search for a Nonviolent Future and/or Our Spiritual Crisis: Recovering Human Wisdom in a Time of Violence.

Following that, on April 20, will be featured speaker Robert Inchausti, who will talk about Thomas Merton, perhaps the most important American figure in the reclaiming of the wisdom tradition we've been exploring in Jaspers and Armstrong. For that you might want to read Merton's classic The Seven Story Mountain or Inchausti's great book on Merton, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy.

Our last five calls will turn from exploring the wisdom tradition in general to issues in education, and our speakers will be people who are unable to attend the conference. On April 27, we will hear from Svi Shapiro, education columnist for Tikkun Magazine and its Network of Spiritual Progressives, the education wing of which has several members coming to our conference. Svi's most recent book is Losing Heart: The Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America's Children.

On May 4, the three founders of AEPL--Dick Graves, Alice Brand, and Charlie Suhor--will all join in conversation for the first time in many years, to talk about the founding of this organization and how it helped to answer the yearnings for a deeper understanding of education in the field of English, and helped to form a deeper kind of professional community than is commonly available.