Episode #28 - A Conversation with My Brother (the other one)

Though my brother Robert is an Anglican rector down in the Research Triangle down in North Carolina, he was a musician will before he ever considered ordination. Our conversation here, consequently, is on matters strictly musical. You can see he dressed for the occasion. The exchange took an unexpected turn. We began by discussing aspects of the performer's art and some of his own compositions, then shifted to Chopin (who was supposed to be the principal topic), only to veer off onto an extended discussion of The Beatles.

#27 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 5 of 5

And, at last, the final chapter in the sprawling epic that was this year's Stanton Lectures. That infernal machine the "Owl" seems to me to have done an especially bad job of separating voices from the ambient sound in the lecture theatre, but that's what makes technological progress so exciting: it's as likely to make things worse as it is to make them better. In fact, the audio in the live recording is sufficiently bad in this case that I have recorded an alternative version, which I have used for this podcast here and over at the Substack page for Leaves in the Wind (https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com).

If one wants to follow the lecture easily, it might be better simply better to listen to this recording. If then wants to try to listen in to the final question and answer session of the lectures, one could start the original video at about the 47-minute mark and try to make out the exchanges recorded there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDYXOsEtURE.

In time, the lectures will be published, in considerably longer forms than the versions delivered live.

Episode #26 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 4 of 5

The penultimate chapter in this year's Stanton Lectures, again recorded--with questionable success--by the diabolical contraption known as the "Owl."

#25 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology", Lecture 3

This is the third of this year's Stanton Lectures, once again captured by that unpleasant little automaton the "Owl." How well that device dealt with the acoustics of the lecture theatre is something of an open question; much depended upon how it was placed on any given day.

#24 - "The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology" - Lecture 2

Here is the second of this year's Stanton Lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge earlier this month. In this case, the lecture was recorded at the time of its public delivery. The device that captured the "performance" was something called an "Owl," a rather macabre little object that tracked movement and sound and then created a (to my mind) annoying composite image. I would have preferred a simple single-aspect camera, even one of relatively low resolution, as well as a dedicated microphone; but omnia mutantur and all that.

Since I have been asked by two friends, I should note that the object under the back panel of my jacket was an elastic padded brace for a muscle I pulled in my lower back. I was not smuggling contraband or concealing a phonograph (like the one Harpo uses to impersonate Maurice Chevalier in Monkey Business) or sporting an obi makuro. Honest.

It turns out that the audio recording of the first Stanton Lecture, captured on Catherine Pickstock's phone, was successfully made. It also does not include the questions that followed the lecture, but it does include Catherine's introduction to the series; and so I post it here for anyone who may wish to hear that.

Episode #22 - "The Light of Tabor" Lecture 1: "Notes Toward a Monistic Christology" by David Bentley Hart

This is the first of the Stanton Lectures that I delivered at the University of Cambridge at the end of April and through the first week and a half of May this year. It is not, however, a recording of the lecture as delivered on the first night of the series. Due to some errors of planning, which led to technical issues of an irresoluble nature, that recording was never made. The rest of the lectures were properly recorded, however, and will be posted in due time.

I apologize for my somewhat torpid performance here. In part, it is the result of having no one to react to whenever I turned my eyes up from the page, but in larger part it is because I am still in a very melancholy frame of mind.

Episode #21 - "Fields as Formal Causes"

[I am DBH’s temporary guest-editor while he and his family take time to themselves to continue to adjust to the loss of someone they love.]

This conversation was recorded on the evening of 10 May, at the London home of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his wife Jill Purce. Dr. Hart and his son (Patrick) were visiting for dinner, at which A. N. Wilson and his wife Ruth Guilding were allso guests; but, before everyone had gathered, there was time for Rupert Sheldrake and David Bentley Hart to slip upstairs to the study for this quick conversation.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist, biochemist, parapsychologist, philosopher and historian of science. He secured his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge for his work on plant hormones and development.

Recently, Giulia Leo, a student at Columbia University's Graduate School for Journalism, conducted a short interview with me for an audio story to be broadcast on Columbia's own Uptown Radio (for information regarding which, one may go to uptownradio.org).

The topic of the piece is eclipses and it is directly related to the book "Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts", edited by Tom McLeish and Henrike Lange (to which I contributed an essay). More specifically, her story principally concerns Native American beliefs, practices, and traditions. I found it a delightful conversation. Her piece appeared today (28 March), and it incorporates some material from the interview; but here is the interview in its entirety.

Episode #19 - A Conversation Between Philip Ball and David Bentley Hart

I spoke recently with Philip Ball, the prolific and extremely gifted writer on the sciences, principally about his recent Book How Life Works, but with occasional oblique references to other of his books, such as The Book of Minds and Beyond Weird. We discussed many things: a possible shift of paradigms in the life-sciences, the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, cognitive systems in organisms, xenobots, batrachian epithelial cells, medicine--and even a little metaphysics.

Philip Ball holds a degree in Chemistry and a PhD., in Physics from Oxford.