Here are some of our past classes in this category:
The American Dream, An American Utopia, and Death
This was not a course on the much-mourned, -celebrated, -proclaimed so-called “death of the American Dream.” Rather, it was an investigation into the way in which the American Dream, utopia, and death are inextricably linked.
The course was structured around three primary texts: 1) Edward Albee’s play The American Dream; 2) Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia; and 3) Jean Baudrillard’s America. The first session presented a novel interpretation of Albee’s play to interrogate the shifting meaning(s) of the American Dream and learn that it isn’t so dead after all. In the second session, we started an Eisenhower-era joke and quickly moved into Jameson’s utopian vision wherein “rational revolutionary calculations necessarily give way to fantasy.” The final session, drawing on the examples laid out in Baudrillard’s aphoristic travel book, America, and informed by Lacanian interpretations of Freud’s death drive concept, sought an answer to a question discussed across several of Baudrillard’s essays and interviews: “What are you doing after the orgy?
Introduction to Ivan Illich
Ferociously brilliant, Illich’s rise to fame was meteoric in the in the early 1970s, when he published books such as: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and many more. Very widely read and celebrated at the time, he was the enfant terrible of the 70s. Although his background was in Medieval history, he was keenly observant and presciently attuned to the spirit of the times in which he wrote.
The primary goal of this introductory course will be to examine the themes that are found throughout his body of work: Conviviality, alienation, disembodiment, respect for limits, and the damage done by institutions that develop in ways that undermine their original intentions. A personalist, Illich wants to prioritize relationships over consumption, and autonomy over dependency, similar to Peter Maurin.
Archive
- The American Dream, An American Utopia, and Death (concluded December 2025)
- A three-part series that discussed, in turn, the historical and ideological aspsects of the American Dream, the desire called utopia contained in the American Dream, and how ideology and utopia intertwine in the American Dream via Lacan’s notion of death drive.
- What AI Means (And Doesn’t Mean) For Our World, Stephen Paff (concluded October 2025) [VIDEO]
- A conversation between Laurie Johnson and guest speaker Stephen Paff about the truth(s), limits, possibilities, and critiques of AI as it exists in late 2025.
- Nature, Nurture, and Natality, Dave McKerracher (concluded August 2025) [VIDEO]
- A guest lecture by Dave McKerracher of Theory Underground that draws on some of McKerracher’s ideas in his Timenergy book.
- An Introduction to Ivan Illich (concluded July 2025) [VIDEO Intro]
- A four-part series that covered the major themes persistent throughout Illich’s work, such as conviviality, alienation, and malignent institutions. Illich is presented as a personalist and his connections with Peter Maurin were discussed.
- Introduction to Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics (concluded June 2025)
- A four-part series on Aristotle’s viture ethics, including the place of Aristotle’s ethics in broader moral philosophy, the extension of Aristotelian ethics by modern thinkers, and the application of virtue ethics to Christian living.
- Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, Benjamin Studebaker (concluded March 2025) [VIDEO]
- A guest lecture by Benjamin Studebaker. The lecture is based around his book Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.
- Can Societies Fall Ill? Diagnosing Social Pathology, Fred Neuhouser (concluded February 2025) [VIDEO]
- A guest lecture by Fred Neuhouser on the concept of social pathology in social science and philosophy. Neuhouser draws on his book, Diagnosing Social Pathology and draws on thinkers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim.
- 1848 Revolutions, Chris Cutrone (concluded April 2024) [VIDEO]
- A guest lecture by Chris Cutrone, “the last Marxist,” on the so-called “Springtime of Nations” and the lessons that those revolutions of 1848 taught Marx and Engels.
- Gift Economies (concluded February 2024)
- A five-part series on Gift Economies. This class pulled strongly on The Gift by Marcel Mauss and David Graber’s book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
- Taylor Swift as Cultural Symptom: A Theory (concluded December 2023)
- A single-lecture cultural analysis of Taylor Swift. Drew upon the work of Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek to examine Swift as a symptom of 21st century American millennial culture.
- Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World (concluded June 2023)
- A discussion focusing on Guardini’s crucial concepts of “Not-natural nature”, “non-cultural culture”, and the “un-human”, as well as how he puts them in tension with human agency and Divine Providence.
- On the Sublime and the Beautiful: The Impact of the Technological Sublime (concluded May 2023)
- Exploration of the elusive concept of “the sublime” as articulated by thinkers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and David Nye, with a special focus on the modern technological sublime and its relation to modern ideology.
- Distributism (concluded July 2021)
- An introduction and overview of distributist thinking, including work from folks like Pope Leo XIII, Hilaire Belloc, and Eugene McCarraher.