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"I want to warm up what is in the box"--Alice.

I'd say that, as a group developing a multiply-angled and -layered understanding of various linked topics, and finding a way to work usefully and (warmly?) together, we have been flailing about a bit. Each of us has, in turn, pursued our own area of interest, with others responding (or not); so we've veered from Paul's discussion of "perceptual fluidity," to Ben's explication of how to use the I Ching; from Bharath and Alice's exploration of heaven as "part of a tool kit of survival and liberation," to Arlo's description of deep time; from Liz's and my presentation of "object-oriented ontology," through Wai Chee Dimock's explication of American literary history as a world event, to Peter Rose's "metaperception."

Each of those sessions interested and engaged me in a different way, but looking back now, it doesn't feel to me that they built on or extended one another very much. Just listing them emphasizes the random quality of our explorations. So I'd suggest that, going into our second year, we need more of a center to build out from and return to. It could be a shared topic that each of us might, again, speak to in sequence. The meaning and implications of "chance" is providing a locus for the morning group; might that work for us, also? Liz and I have been discussing "information" as an organizing principle for our new course upcoming on "Gender, Information, Technology and Gender," and I think that could provide another interesting focus: what is "information"? How does it differ from "meaning," from "noise"?) Or--following Alice, below--I'd love to hear how each of us might speak of love, which I would say is a primary way of giving "form" to "chaos" -- or maybe it's giving "chaos" to form"? In either case, each of us could select a text or image that illustrates our understanding, and we could all explore it together.

Or we could read a single book as a group; if not Nicole Krauss's wonderful novel The History of Love (which I warmly recommend!), then perhaps Rebecca Goldstein's newest one, 365 Arguments for the Existence of God (which has been garnering me lots of comments on the train ride to campus and back). There are of course tons of older more classic texts (William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience?) that would give us a shared location for speaking from-and-to....

Along these lines, a tease or two from Goldstein:

"Gideon Raven had always had a rigorous bent to his mind. He'd come to identify this as his major problem. It made him panicky to step from one thought to the next without some connective scaffolding, even if slippery and narrow. It was a form of cognitive acrophobia....Even in his imagination he was an earth-crawler..."

"The science is incomplete, sure. It always is. If we wait around to get it, we'll never live to see it gotten. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves."
"I don't like the sound of that."
"Life isn't a randomized, double-blind, peer-reviewed clinical trial. Big gains require big risks, and we're after the biggest gain of all...."

???