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Mary Oliver once confessed, “I don’t know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” Are we sure prayer and attention are so different? Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that prayer is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God,” and that “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.”
This seminar takes Weil’s challenge seriously. We will exercise attention through the close reading of prayerful writing from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions—from the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez to the contemplative philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Kafka. We will attend closely to the language that creates and sustains the pursuit of divine connection through a variety of attentional practices: reading and re-reading, aloud and in silence, repeating sentences like mantras until we glimpse their meaning and, if we are lucky, the deeper experience beneath them. How can attention to texts bring us closer to the divine?
Led by Julia Kornberg, novelist and PhD candidate at Princeton University.
Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm EST
February 9th-23rd
55 Washington St. in DUMBO
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Mary Oliver once confessed, “I don’t know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” Are we sure prayer and attention are so different? Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that prayer is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God,” and that “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.”
This seminar takes Weil’s challenge seriously. We will exercise attention through the close reading of prayerful writing from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions—from the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez to the contemplative philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Kafka. We will attend closely to the language that creates and sustains the pursuit of divine connection through a variety of attentional practices: reading and re-reading, aloud and in silence, repeating sentences like mantras until we glimpse their meaning and, if we are lucky, the deeper experience beneath them. How can attention to texts bring us closer to the divine?
Led by Julia Kornberg, novelist and PhD candidate at Princeton University.
Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm EST
February 9th-23rd
55 Washington St. in DUMBO
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.