Recent Mary: with Jonathan Pageau, and "Thomophobia" in Washington, DC

And, coming up: Symbolic World Summit, May 14-16

Two recent Mary A/V appearances that may be interesting to readers of this newsletter. I always feel slightly weird promoting my own work like this, but I really enjoyed both of these and perhaps you will too. Also: two upcoming Mary IRL dates, in May, one in the USA and one in Wales.

First, my Socrates in the City conversation with Jonathan Pageau. In it we discussed his work as an icon carver, the return of the symbolic, medieval cosmology, the difference between memes and icons, the Book of Revelation, and much else besides.

Secondly, in the first week of March I was honoured to visit Washington, DC to deliver a lecture for First Things. (This is why I failed to publish an update here - between travel and dashing about I was just too tired. My apologies to you all.)

My title was Our Crisis is Metaphysical. In it I set out to explain how I began with the puzzle presented to me, as a new mother, by our culture-wide mother-shaped blind spot, and ended up eventually discovering that the root of this seems to be the way, outside niche circles, there exists an implicit, but pervasive, prohibition on publicly citing St Thomas Aquinas. If that connection seems counterintuitive to you, maybe I can persuade you:

Finally, I’m pleased to announce I’ll be in the USA at Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World Summit on May 14-16 in Broadview Heights, OH. My talk will pick up a theme I touched on briefly last week, in my address at Pusey House: “rebuilding the monasteries”. Several people have written to me since the Pusey conference, about that one line, which rather suggests it needs elaborating. So elaborate I shall. Perhaps I will see you there?

A couple of weeks after that, I’ll also be in Hay-On-Wye in the Welsh Marches, for How The Light Gets In, a festival of arts and ideas. I’ll be debating “Feminism and the Freedom Trap” alongside Kathleen Stock, and “Gutenberg Vs Zuckerberg” with Cory Doctorow. It’s a three-day festival, with tons going on, and you can book tickets here.

More later in the week, most likely on this week’s hot topic: do Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have an inner life? Noted VC Marc Andreessen recently sparked this debate by claiming in an interview that no: great men of history are characterised by zero introspection, and therefore you should not introspect either. This caused a lot of Discourse, but feels to me like it raises more questions than it addresses.

Not being a great man of history, I’m going to ruminate on this question for a few more days before I post. But I have lots to say. See you there, perhaps?