5 November, 2023
Dear Reader,
SUMMER SCHOOLS
We are keen to firm up numbers for our three five-day intensive courses in January – in Western Civilisation, Latin and Biblical Greek. Full details appear below, and on our website. You can easily enrol using Humanitix.
NB – Enrolments for Greek are poor, though we had six last year. Would it interest more people if we held it in Hobart instead of Launceston? Please advise me urgently if that would be helpful.
Here are a couple of my recent pieces from The Epoch Times: the first is A Simple Guide to the Good and Bad Guys of the World. The second is a sort of meditation for Thanksgiving Day. I originally titled it Kissing Cousins? but the editors changed it to the somewhat blander America: Australia’s Older Cousin That We Don’t Always Understand..!
With best wishes to all,
David Daintree
IN THE NEWS
A HISTORY OF ‘WOKE’
This excellent article by Dr Ian McFarlane has been posted on our website. It’s too long for inclusion in the newsletter but deserves respect. Ian McFarlane lectured at the University of Tasmania in both History and Aboriginal Studies and is now retired. Publications included Beyond Awakening: Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania: A History and Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History (co-authored with Murray Johnson) and more recently South West Tribes of Tasmania: A Cultural, and Contact History. Prior to his academic career he worked as a Union Delegate on the Melbourne Waterfront for many years before serving as Tasmanian State Secretary as well as Federal Council and Executive member of the Waterside Workers Federation.
‘THE ORWELLIANISM IS OFF THE SCALE’
Nobody says it quite like Brendan O’Neill! His article, The Normalisation of Savagery, focuses on the mindless hypocrisy of too many young activists in the modern university: ‘these cloyingly sensitive sons and daughters of privilege will demand a safe space when a controversial speaker darkens the door of their Ivy League college, yet they don’t seem to think Israeli Jews deserve a safe space from Hamas’s neo-fascists.’
PROF JOHN HALDANE gave a splendid talk on ‘Catholic Education and the Common Good’ at the Hope and Anchor Tavern, Hobart, last Thursday 12 October.
It will shortly be posted on our YouTube Channel here.
COMING EVENTS
COLLOQUIUM 2024 – DATE CLAIMER
The 2024 Colloquium will be on SATURDAY 6 JULY
Topic: Authentic Humanism and the Crisis of Culture
SUMMER SCHOOLS JANUARY 2024
SUMMER SCHOOL ON WESTERN CULTURE 2024
Monday 8 to Friday 12 January 2024 inclusive
Hobart – Royal Botanical Gardens
The Dawson Centre was founded to advance the notion that the Christian Faith and the intellectual tradition that grew up with it are essential components of our civilisation, not optional extras, but core elements in the very fabric of the culture. Christopher Dawson maintained that a true human culture cannot exist at all without a religious component, and the Christian religion is inherent in and inseparable from our Western culture. ENROL HERE
What are some of the great and distinctive achievements of the West?
We are offering this course for the third time as a sort of a ‘taster’, a broad and sweeping view of the terrain and some of its principal landmarks. It cannot claim to be any more than a sketch of the panorama, but we hope it will meet a need and inspire participants to delve further into our fascinating and rich heritage. ENROL HERE
SUMMER SCHOOL – LATE AND ECCLESIASTICAL LATIN
Monday 15 to Friday 19 January 2024
at Notre Dame Priory, Colebrook, Tasmania
The Latin school assumes some prior knowledge of the language and leads participants through a selection of important readings in poetry and prose, sacred and secular, from authors such as Augustine, Jerome, Bede, Peter Abelard, Aquinas, the Carmina Burana, and even Dante. In date our selections range from the poet Virgil to the abdication speech of Pope Benedict! Accommodation is available on request at Bethany House in the Priory grounds. ENROL HERE
SUMMER SCHOOL – BIBLICAL GREEK FOR BEGINNERS
Monday 22 to Friday 26 January 2024
Launceston or Hobart
The New Testament and Koine Greek school is for beginners who want to experience the excitement of reading parts of the Bible in the original language. We shall read extracts from the Gospel and Epistles, as well as some important passages from the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament), as well as some pieces from the early Fathers of the Church and the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Accommodation at the Centre is available on request. We are trialling the Emmanuel Centre for the first time – it sounds ideal. ENROL HERE