Agronomic University Online
May 23 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm PDT
Agronomic University Spring Semester: The Order and Beauty of the World
Thursdays, 5-6:15 pm Pacific via Zoom, beginning February 1st
This spring and summer’s agronomic university semester will be devoted to contemplation of what Simone Weil calls “the order and beauty of the world.” In what will serve as the theme-setting piece, her essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” she points to an underlying affinity between science, art, religion, and personal love. Each involves our relationship with particular “images” or models of God’s creation as a whole – as beautiful, as coherent, as obedient, or as responsive to us, respectively.
When we contemplate such images with attention, Weil claims they function as “sacraments”– even the cosmological and mathematical models that will be our focus. Like sacraments [from Greek, mysterion] proper, these images are icons of the mystery of Truth itself–functioning this way for us because of, rather than in spite of, their limiting particularities.
With this potential in mind, we will turn our attention to an eclectic set of images/models: from cosmology (ancient Roman, modern, and Biblical), geometry (Pythagorean, Byzantine iconography, and as applied ethically/spiritually), and “pattern language” as it is described by the architect Christopher Alexander. Rather than a formal class, our time together will take the form of shared exploration with occasional help from guest presenters and facilitators.
Our discussions take place on Thursdays, 5-6:15 pm Pacific / 8-9:15 pm Eastern via Zoom.
During our first session on 2/1, we will discuss Weil’s “Forms of the Implicit Love of God.”
During the rest of February, we will be joined by Andrew Brown – a Ph.D. Candidate in physics at Princeton, poet, and an incredible teacher! – who will lead our unit on ancient and modern cosmology, taking Roman poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as our primary texts.
You can find a full (tentative) calendar here.
For background on the Simone Weil Catholic Worker’s “agronomic university” project, including past courses on recapitulation and Scripture, check out our website.