Gravitas

In case I have not yet said anything to you personally ….

Olivia has her first violin concert at Orchestra Hall on Sunday, December 9, and 2:00 p.m. It is a free concert (no tickets necessary). She will be playing with a bunch of other violinist and violists from McPhail together with the Minnesota Orchestra.

 She would be quite thrilled if any of you be able to make it.

If we are going to have a retreat sometime this winter we are going to have to start thinking seriously about it. We need to think about three things: where, when and what.

I think the what is the most urgent question. Here is a suggestion:

We have been reading a bit about culture. At this point some sort of concerted effort would be helpful; we should have a conversation in which we all try to understand where these writers are in relation to one another, and what each contributes to the greater conversation about culture. In short we should see what we, the August Body known as Gravitas, make of this odd phenomenon. Perhaps we could distribute among ourselves five or six books and write our papers either as a review, a critique, the exploration of a suggestion found in the book or in the author’s works, or what have you. That will allow for a range of possibilities as to what you do your paper on and it will allow a certain roundness of approach if we pick the right books.

So we have these authors: Arnold, Dawson, Eliot, Weaver, Pieper, Barzun, Williams and Scruton.

I think the easiest way would be to take a book and use it as the basis for an intelligent paper, but if, for example, you wanted to take on the whole Weaver opus and lecture us about a certain theme, that would also be fine. You might want to refute somebody or compare and contrast some of them. Even if all we do is explain the argument of a book it will be profitable.