For Kirsten Esengo, Birte Hannah, Simeon Gustav, Samuel Gregory, who before they were born were beyond my knowing and the moment after the world was new reflected by their singular presence, the nearby ones. – David Goa
#1 – Childhood formation; Growing up in three cultures: Bible, Norway, British Canada; Conversation, grappling & gravity; The memory of natural community & common “wells”; Immigration, grief, and tending (or not) the graves of ancestors; Encounter, others, hospitality, & revelation; A city full of story; My father’s Gethsemane.#2 – Awakening to the intellectual life; Meeting Arius and Athanaisus; A Pietist “Yeshiva”; Discovering America; Thinking with Aquinas & Cervin; Reading the great tradition; Story, a way of knowing; Conversation as a way of life; Despair and the landscape of wilderness.#3 – The aims of education; History, the presence of the past; Tradition, the living faith of the dead; Philosophy: what does it mean to know; Theology, Tillich, and the play of meaning; The gift of thinking together; Eliade and religion as a form of consciousness; The dialectic of the sacred, iconic vision, liturgical time.#4 – Spiritual sobriety; On God who comes to mind; Returning home as “as private scholar”; The gift of being present; Joseph and His Brothers; Working in the fields of meaning; Living tradition, cultural memory, historical experience & sense of place; Alberta, a living laboratory of human culture.#5 – Confession and human solidarity; The gift and dangers of spiritual friendship; Liturgy, the art of arts; Being present to what others are present to; Friendship and obligation; Taking for granted those “near-by”; That stance of presence; Exhibitions as landscapes of encounter.#6 – Spiritual Life – Sacred Ritual; The museum as domicile, the community as home; The marginal belong; Interpreting Pharaoh’s dream; The Apostle Paul’s body theology; The Rabbi and the Imam; Buber and Beckett on dialogue; Politics of representation; Seasons of Celebration: ritual in eastern Christian culture.#7 – Reading the church fathers and spiritual mothers; Present to the Passion of Jesus Christ; Liturgy or passion plays; The culture of amnesia; Anno Domini: Jesus through the centuries; Walking Christian pathways from Nicaea to the Wartburg; The Gospels as Midrash on Genesis 3.#8 – The politics of Anno Domini; Museums: institutions, temples of memory, places of encounter; The gifts and limitations of my formation; In the company of Jaroslav Pelikan; The double act: caring for the particular and for continuities; God loves a good story. #9 – Writing In the Fields of Meaning; Founding Director, The Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life; The past coming to meet me from the future; Too important to be left for universities: issues of religion and public life; Conversation across deep difference; The Babylonian captivity of the humanities; Hospitality with the other.#10 – Shaping the work of the Ronning Centre; A new conversation on contested issues; Working in and with religious communities; Partnerships; The oil of gladness poured on the wounds of the world; Working in the House of Islam; The love of the local and global challenges; Tussling with the hermeneutic of suspicion.#11 – The art of conversation; Thinking together; The gifts of working in the fields of meaning; Contestation or caring differently; The matter of tradition and ideological captivity; “the surprised delight in discovering what I didn’t know I knew”; Antidote to fundamentalism; The co-dependent twins. #12 – Fear, faith and blasphemy; A walk with Athanasius and Arius; Thinking again about the prophet Muhammad; Dignity and free speech; Satire, the satirical spirit and dismissive laughter; Kitsch, the enemy of language; Intimacy and reconfigured self. #13 – Poetry, the polemical stance and the novel; The shape of the Ronning Centre work; The good company of so many; Contemplation and fasting; The Moses narrative draws near; Institutions, careerists and the importance of being a trickster; The civil purpose of the university.#14 – Intellectual companions and seminal ideas; The great cloud of witnesses; A five-decade conversation; Pietism and existentialism; Knowledge bearers on local ground; Tradition in conversation with a living faith; Persistent narratives; Myths for “the time being.”#15 – Persistent ideas; Matters of the polis; The delicate matter of welcoming presence; Appetites and idolatries; Community and fraternity; The end of natural community; Engaging the other and spiritual maturity.#16 – Community, the stranger and difference; Belonging and longing to be; Habits of the mind and habits of the heart; Putting the ax to the tree of culture; Putting the ax to the tree of civil life; The Enlightenment experiment; Encounter: usurpation, diminishing or deepening; Living out the heart of tradition; The Bushman’s revelation.
