April reading up

This month we sought something more lighthearted, if anything as dire as the truth of the soul can be lighthearted.

If it can't be sometimes, though, then what good is it?

On the recommendations of friends, such as the redoubtable Ben Kozlowski of Suffolk County, New Jersey, we've come up with The Town, by William Faulkner.

EDIT-- We'll meet to discuss it on Thursday, May 12th in BBC 109.

Meeting tomorrow

Back refreshed from the break, we are ready to meet in room 109 of the BBC to discuss the readings from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and Talks to Students. Four o'clock, Thursday the 24th. Hope you can make it.

Welcome

Spring break is coming up already (Mar 4-20). So here's what we'll do--

An interest meeting will be held 4:30-5pm on Monday, February 28 in room 109 downstairs in the BBC. Please have a look around the site and read over the Kalman essay before that.

The first substantial meeting will be in the week after the break. Have the James readings done by then so we can talk about them. They aren't long.

If anyone would like to take part and can't make the meetings, or if you have ideas for readings, just let me know -- wesley.schantz@fulbrightmail.org or the oh-so-cool campus mail method.

Meetings will probably be once a month at 4 on Mondays or Thursdays.

Details to follow.

Twenty minutes' sleeping

Partly this idea came out a conversation we were having the other night. Can you really sleep just twenty minutes at a time, every four hours, and be healthy and functioning and happy with all those hours you save?

Evidently some people say so. Such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and certain unnamed monks have been said to do so.

It made me think of this amazing blog, since there are some charts there where proof of Jefferson's sleep schedule should reside, among many other things. Consider it a preliminary supplementary delightful reading.

And thinking of that blog, coupled with our readings for the past few seminars--the Book of Job in the Old Testament, and the Gospel according to St. Matthew in the New--made me want to start this blog and this reading group.

I still sleep at night, for now.

What's this for?

A reading group, so far imaginary, formed by graduate students at St. John's College, Annapolis.

The name comes from the experimental theologians in the other Oxford of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. What they do there is actually something like physics, only with a peculiarly theological curiosity regarding dark matter, or, in Milton's phrase, His dark materials. Good stories ensue.

(Not to be confused with the Experimental Theology blog belonging to professor Richard Beck.)