Genealogy and Tradition Reading Group

Beatrice Institute is sponsoring a Zoom-based reading group on recent work related to genealogy and tradition, with a special emphasis on Christian theology. All are welcome, regardless of institutional affiliation. (There will probably be an in-person option for Pittsburgh-area participants.)

The first book will be Anne Carpenter’s recent Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition (Fortress Press, 2022). (Listen to an interview with Carpenter on the Beatrice Institute Podcast.) Prof. Carpenter will join us for a discussion upon completion of the book. We will read the introduction and first two chapters (<100 pp.) before our first meeting in the third or fourth week of December. We will read the remainder of the book for a mid-to-late January meeting. Exact times to be decided among registered participants.

This will be followed by selections from Thomas Pfau’s writing on tradition, including parts of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). A parallel reading group will be reading this book cover-to-cover over six months beginning in January.

The spring semester will consider some works-in-progress, including a chapter of Genealogies of Modernity Project director Ryan McDermott’s book on the uses and abuses of genealogical thinking in the humanities.
If you are interested in being involved in all of this or just one part, please email admin@beatriceinstitute.org by Friday, Nov. 18.