Posts Tagged ConWest
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September 28, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Emergent Christianity
The main subject of tomorrow’s first lecture on the New Testament is going to be the question of how the model of culture as the interplay of dominant, residual, and emergent forms can help us to understand the relationship between the New Testament and the Old, particularly the way in which the New appropriates, reconstructs, [...]Archive
September 26, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Musical Moment
Well, it happened: one of the moments to which I always look forward whenever I’m teaching a lecture course. It’s been my practice for quite a while now to play songs before and after each of my lectures that are somehow related to the day’s major ideas. Sometimes the lyrics are important, but sometimes it’s [...]Archive
September 23, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The J & P Mash-up
I spent a lot of time during Monday’s ConWest lecture talking about the “Documentary Hypothesis” formulated by the nineteenth-century German philologist Julius Wellhausen that suggests that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) are not, as tradition held, authored by Moses as the result of divine revelation, but rather a compilation of [...]Archive
September 22, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
High Anxiety (II)
The Mets’ bullpen blew another one this afternoon, this time against the Braves in Atlanta. Leading 4-2 going into the bottom of the seventh, the bullpen gave up one run in that frame, and four more in the next. Carlos Delgado hit a two-run homer in the top of the ninth to make the final [...]Archive
September 17, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Evil, Choice and Rationalism
The subjects of my second Con West class on Zoroastrianism are going to be Zoroastrianism’s approach to the problem of evil and its stress on the importance of free choice. I’ll most likely be using excerpts from the Gathas (included in the Zoroastrian liturgy known as the Yasna) to illustrate these points. I’ll probably also [...]Archive
September 14, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Zoroastrianism and Cosmopolitanism
Zoroastrianism was mentioned in John McCain’s interview last week on the ABC morning television show The View. (It happens at 2:10 in the YouTube clip above.) Trying to get McCain to talk about the implications of his choice of Sarah Palin to be running mate, Whoopi Goldberg asks McCain whether he believes in the separation [...]Archive
September 10, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The Playlist So Far
Some years ago I began to play songs before each of my American Literature I lectures. I was teaching on the eighth floor of NYU’s Main Building (now the Silver Center), a building that wasn’t really designed for the number of students that flooded into and out of it at the beginning of each class [...]Archive
September 9, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Moby-Dick Looming
Before Monday’s lecture, the instructor who teaches in my room during the previous time slot asked me what songs I’d be playing. “Songs with ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the title,” I replied. “Oooh, we don’t like cosmopolitanism,” she said, going on to explain that she and her teaching assistants were all classicists, and they felt that cosmopolitanism [...]Archive
September 7, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
