Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson—the Louise Cowan Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Dallas, recipient of the 2019 Hiett Prize for the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and author of numerous books including Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov–joined us for our discussion of “The Nature and Significance of Liberal Education.” Joining Dr. Bainard Cowan in response to Dr. Wilson’s remarks was Dr. Mary Mumbach, Magdalen College, UD BA ’70, IPS Ph.D. ’77. The readings for this meeting were all taken from Donald Cowan’s Unbinding Prometheus, pp. 71-103:
- “The Spirit of Liberal Learning”
- “The Three Moments of Learning”
- “Universal Liberal Education”
Learn more about “The Nature and Significance of Liberal Education” by Jessica Hooten Wilson on UDigital Commons here.
A Texas flower, of all places!
Though you arouse some disagreement I became enchanted with the purity of your presentation– a reminder of my European days growing up as a refugee from Stalin and the rest of my life spent in the post-WWII Europe that was Stalin’s for the taking.
You make a unique effort to understand Solzhenitsyn as an idea expressed through his writings. I had a chance to meet him twice: once on his arrival and several times in Vermont. We spent a lot of time, me a Romanian neurosurgeon, he a fish out of water trying to express his disappointment, nevertheless, great love for America. But he had to go back because America seemed devoid of mysticism. the essence of our Faith and the tests it imposes on our faith. Last time I saw him, he saw no salvation for Russia, “as it has become liquid shit!”
But you may be seeing him as paper and ink and in sinews he was a rather desperate man who felt like an ignorant peasant. This rage against others and himself was based on disappointed with how humans live in Hell– devoid of dignity. So, it you get to understand him, you will have greatly grown, though becoming desperately disillusioned. He was only a man….but a great and wonderful man who felt as though paraded as a captured tiger, paraded by the Praetorian Guards [KGB] paraded so docile as sniffing inquisitors of their new land.
I knew him in Vermont, before returning to the Red Bloc to honor my father by attending his medical school, in my case under the Communists. Everyone there talked of Solzhenitsyn, some nice some bad.Please, try to know the man through personal enlightenment, not impersonally discussed but in desperate honesty in searching for that mysticism that kept us all alive.
I hope we can talk. AS a surgeon and research neurobiologist, I am clinically and experimentally, in utter frustration, seeking to understand the workings of his. BUT ABOVE ALL, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, look past all the obvious and note the MYSTICISM that characterizes the Eastern Church….a Church we carry with us. Despair is the route to understanding the cross that we of the Eastern Church see our suffering and our ever rare joys. We live in faith, a mystical faith that my mechanistic materialistic view of life as carbon bonds has nothing in common. I hope we can talk at your convenience. My wife is Chinese and only exposes me to yet another barrier to oneness because of the profound synaptic fixation life imposes on one’s central nervous system. I would love to discuss with you my Christianity, that of my wife, that of my children (with no two alike). But we’ve always taken the Holy Sacraments , yet that did not end the petty crises. CoV2 is a teat of faith in God, Nature and ourselves, an immense struggle, much like that of the Early Roman Church. So now how does Jesus cleanse us, I would ask you, because your discourse fails to note how the WWII Eastern Europe and after that we lived through as humans whose faith was tested that made World War what you all fear from a global nuclear to this day.
My cell phone number is (908) 421-1334. I would love to start dialogue with you and then parade you through campuses on the NY/NJ area so you can see how abused faith has become today.
God’s blessings upon you,
DE Teodoru