Dr. Grace Hamman and her special guest and best friend since kindergarten, Chelsea Swanson, lose track of time as they endlessly dissect three chapters of Persuasion that perhaps have the most incredible emotional and interpersonal subtext of all chapters but the end. Plus, discussion of the most stupid Jane Austen injury: Louisa Musgrove jumps off the Cobb!

Welcome to week three of reading Jane Austen's Persuasion with the Summer Old Book Club! Today, Grace chats with her old friend Marisa Tualla, a math curriculum specialist, about ch. 7-9 of vol. I. They talk Jane Austen on gender, loneliness, the fascinating and unusual presence of children in this section, among many other things...

It's week two of the Summer Old Book Club! Read alongside Grace and her brother, John Irwin, as they discuss chapters 4-6 of volume I of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Grace and John talk about meeting Captain Wentworth (in memory) for the first time, Jane Austen's meanest and most phallic joke, Regency-era ideas about class, the wretched Mary Musgrove, and so much more...

Welcome to the Summer Old Book Club with Jane Austen's Persuasion! Grace and Dr. Jessica Ward, an English professor at Mercy College in NYC and one of Grace's grad school buddies, talk about our introduction to the characters, Austen's cutting humor, personality types, and more. 

We all know who Jane Austen is. But a little more context and background can help us to better understand her writing and her world, before we enter into her final novel, Persuasion. Join the Summer Old Book Club!

"There is in God, some say, / A deep but dazzling darkness..." What does Vaughan's famous line mean? Let's think about this beautiful poem and its Welsh 17th-century author together.

Feeling broken, distended, fragmented? Me too. This episode meditates upon spiritual and bodily wholeness, via the ancient origins of the word "whole" and supplemented by Augustine of Hippo.  

We, too, are representations of Jesus, images of God, which medieval folks know well. This episode thinks about the mystery cycles of late medieval England, Lollard heretics, and a non-medieval poem (gasp!) to help us think about the many faces of Jesus.

In honor of Good Friday, this episode considers medieval portrayals of Christ on the cross. They paid deep attention to Jesus's bodily suffering in order to recognize his divine love. Let's learn from sermons, anonymous poets, Herrad of Landsberg, Fra Angelico, and Mathias Grunewald.

How do we adapt Jesus to our agendas? How do we make him safe for us? This episode in the Lent series considers how Nicholas Love, a monk in the fifteenth-century, created a "good medieval Christian" Jesus.