Narrative Reflections: Philosophy in Literature & Film

"When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered... To this day I cannot remember when that feeling of being loved left me. I just know that one day I was no longer precious... I did not know what I had done wrong. And nothing I tried made it right... We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing."- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions preface.

Join us for a close reading on selected chapters from bell hooks' All About Love: New Visions, the first book in her Love Song to the Nation trilogy.

This close reading session will be focusing on four chapters from All About Love. Those chapters are chapter one - Clarity: Give Love Words, chapter two - Justice: Childhood Love Lessons, chapter four - Commitment: Let Love Be Love in Me, and chapter eight - Community: Loving Communion.

Note: Please read what you're able to. Some members have already read the book, and others may want to hone their focus in on a couple of the listed chapters.

Let's talk about death.

Join us for a loosely structured open discussion where we talk about our understanding, thoughts, fears, and experiences, among other things, in regard to death and dying.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines utopia as “An imagined or hypothetical place, system, or state of existence in which everything is perfect, esp. in respect of social structure, laws, and politics.” This term, now used in common parlance, was first used by Thomas More in his highly influential text where he dreams of a society free from the grievances of his social reality. Although the properties of an “ideal” society have been debated and defined for millennia, Utopia remains one of the most controversial and provocative texts of moral and political philosophy to this day. Was Thomas More writing satirically, sincerely, or somewhere in between? How was his writing influenced by his era of history? What can we salvage for our own lives?

Join us to wrestle with these questions and more in our close reading of the text. We encourage you to read this short, often humorous, philosophical work (just over 100 pages!) which is linked below. If you would like to do some optional supplemental reading, we will also briefly discuss China Mieville’s introduction to the work, “The Limits of Utopia,” which examines the utopian ideal in relation to the current threat of environmental collapse.