Featured Streaming Lecture – July 2020

This spring and summer we’ll be sharing with you a monthly selection from OFJ’s 45+ year collection of our past programs. We hope you’ll find them timely and resonant.

Samuel Kimbles – Between the World and Me: Where the Wild Things Live 
lecture given November 8, 2019

Our historical moment has us unconsciously living out the reality of a split between the psyche (personal) and the sociopolitical world. We locate emotional suffering in the individual and his/her immediate relationships, dismissing social context to a ‘mere’ backdrop and diminishing its major contribution to our psychological health. With such a perspective we lose the opportunity to create and use the potential space in cultural life for engaging and processing the most pressing problems of our times: racism, sexism, gender, poverty, class social justice, and the traumatogenic environment of uncertainty, pain and suffering they create for all of us.

In this talk Sam Kimbles addresses a way of thinking and working with the kinds of issues that cut across the artificial divide between inner and outer. Two stories from literature serve as his springboards for this evening’s talk:  Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild things Are; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. He uses these texts to look at destructive attitudes in our culture that reflect issues that challenge us all. Click here to read more about Samuel Kimbles.