SEMINARY HOSTS BOOKTALK SERIES

BookTalks is a collaborative effort of Barbour Library and the Center for Writing and Learning Support featuring in-person and webinar conversations with PTS faculty and community members as well as other guests whose work is theological in nature. Our host not only highlights the books' subject matter, but also discusses the authors' writing processes, welcoming audience questions throughout. BookTalks are enhanced by library staff-curated subject guides and library displays for those interested in finding related resources. Recorded and linked to the PTS website and social media channels, BookTalks are envisioned to be creative resources that engage all who participate in theological and spiritual reflection and knowledge.

 

Upcoming BookTalk Events

The Ethics of Immediacy: Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty with Jeffrey McCurry

Thurs., May 1, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom and In-Person at Barbour Library

In The Ethics of Immediacy (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Jeffrey McCurry examines how Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Woolf’s modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in one’s own life and times?

Dr. Jeffrey McCurry is director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and affiliated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, his research centers on the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, and he has published on Augustine, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Derrida. He is also a member of faculty in the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

Dr. McCurry will be joined in conversation by Mark Russell, research and instruction librarian at Barbour Library, PTS.

Please register in advance. Attendees will receive the Zoom webinar link for the event.

For more information, visit our Libguide of curated resources for this event.

Past BookTalk Events