Coming Online and Onsite Events
Become a subscriber in the Community of Lifelong Learners for $40 per month for unlimited attendance at on-site and online events, or $25 per month for only ONLINE events. Subscribers are responsible for ordering their own books. One-day ONSITE seminar tuition is $125 per person for non-subscribers. Special events have differing tuition. Scholarships are available for teachers and students. Please inquire via email here.
Online Weekly Intensives
Online Seminar Series - NOW MEETING
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Thursday Evenings - September 19, 2024 - January 30, 2025
Why did the author of the matchless Middlemarch at last turn her pen to one of the most vexing questions of the late nineteenth century and of all European history? England had not only abolished slavery, but had emancipated, to one degree or another, its religious minorities over the preceding decades, and at the time of the novel’s publication, had a Jewish prime minister, albeit one who had converted to Anglicanism in boyhood. The sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been expelled from England en masse in 1290, almost six centuries before -- two centuries before their fellow Jews were expelled from Spain. Enter Deronda, wherein that most ancient European grudge, writ not only large but general, rooted in the rootless fantasy of religious fallacy, underlies the unease of a growingly comfortable society made secure by the exploits of a maritime empire – as it comes into the ken of one of the most acute observers of human character and psyche ever to write English prose.
Online seminars in this series will take place on Thursday evenings, 5:30-7:00PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be mailed the text. Sessions will be facilitated by Eric Stull and Dennis Gura. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 3 CEU credits for participating. This sixteen-week series is $950. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $100 through a refund. Payment options are available.
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Online Seminar Series - NOW MEETING
The Tale of Genji - by Murasaki Shikibu
Wednesday Evenings - September 4 - December 18, 2024
Written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman, poet, and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikoku, The Tale of Genji is considered the first classic novel and a masterpiece in Japanese literature. Much of the tale follows the life of the handsome and sensitive Genji - the son of the Emperor and a low-ranking concubine - with each of his loves described in great detail. Against the backdrop of the central story, the reader is delighted with images of refined court life, the beauty of nature and a wide array of human emotions. The Buddhist understanding of impermanence is also skillfully woven throughout the story in beautiful images. During this time in Japan, Chinese was the court’s scholarly language while Japanese was initially used by women and in personal accounts of life at court. Works written in Japanese and in prose were not taken seriously. All that changed with the creation The Tale of Genji.
Online seminars in this series will take place on Wednesday evenings, 5:30-7:00PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be mailed the text. Sessions will be facilitated by Roxana Zirakzadeh and Andy Gilman. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 3 CEU credits for participating. This sixteen-week series is $950. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $100 through a refund. Payment options are available.
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Free Community Series
Free Onsite Ojai Chautauqua Panel
The City and the Valley of Ojai - Understanding and Enhancing the Relationship Between the City and County
Monday, December 2, 2024
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An evening of conversation between Matt LaVere - District 1 County Supervisor, Ben Harvey - Ojai City Manager, and Andy Gilman - Director of the Agora Foundation
This free community event will explore the various boundaries between the City of Ojai and the Unincorporated Ojai Valley. How do these local governments collaborate, communicate, and work toward shared goals. Topics will include homelessness, land use, safety, and housing. Bring your questions and ideas!
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Schedule:
5:30 - 7:00PM PST​
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Location:
The Ojai Retreat Cultural Center
160 Besant Road
Ojai, California 93023
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Free Onsite Community Seminar Series
Eastern Classics
The First and Third Tuesdays of each month
Next Session is December 3, 2024
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Like the west, the east has its own tradition of influential texts that address the perennial questions of human kind. Centering around the bodies of work from China, Japan, and India, this series will focus on the texts of Taoism, Confucius, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We invite you to join us and attendees can feel free to join intermittently.
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The December 3 reading is:
The Tao Te Ching - Chapter Twenty-One
Click icon to download, or click here
for all chapters.
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Schedule:
12:00 - 1:00PM PST
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Location:
111 East Ojai Avenue
Ojai, California 93023
Free Online Community Seminar Series
The Foundations of Our Republic - The Federalist Papers Complete Series
Saturday, December 7, 2024
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What are the fundamental principles of our Republic? Are these principles based on a view of objective reality/nature, or simply the "consent of the governed"? Depending on how one addresses the previous question: Are these principles changeable, and if so on what grounds? How should one read the founding documents? What authority does the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary branches have? What are rights? Are they based on nature or consent? Are they inalienable? Please join us as we explore these political works through monthly weekend meetings.
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The December 7 reading is:
Federalist Papers 37-40
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Schedule:
12:00 - 2:00PM PST
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Readings in the series:
Complete Federalist Papers and selected Anti-Federalist Papers
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Free Onsite Community Seminar Series
The Glory of Art
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
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What is Art? Why does it hold such a central position in humanity’s self-understanding? Art seems to have subjective, contingent, and relative aspects, while also evoking the eternal, essential, and radical. Art represents, communicates, explores, inspires, challenges, creates, and questions. This semi-monthly series, taking place the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month at the Ojai Library, will explore the work of artists and thinkers through history.
Aristotle - “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”.
O’Keeffe - “To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.”
da Vinci - “Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all generations of the world.”
O’Connor - “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
Picasso - “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
Klee - “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
Brecht - “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”
de Beauvoir - “Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom.”
Dostoevsky - “Art is as much a need for humanity as eating and drinking. The need for beauty and for creations that embody it is inseparable from humanity and without it man perhaps might not want to live on earth.”
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Works discussed will include selections from:
– On Beauty by Plotinus

– Books on Architecture by Vitruvius

– Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci 

– The Arts and Crafts of Today by William Morris

– The Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinski 

– Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier

– Some Memories of Drawings by Georgia O’Keefe 

– Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

– The Search for the Real by Hans Hoffman

– Man the Musician by Victor Zuckerkandl

– Image-making and the Freedom of Man by Hans Jonas

– I Shock Myself by Beatrice Wood

– Remote Control by Barbara Kruger
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The December 10 reading is:
Walter Benjamin - Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Artwork will also be shown.
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Schedule:
12:00 - 1:00PM PST
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Location:
111 East Ojai Avenue
Ojai, California 93023
Free Onsite Community Seminar Series
Modern Heroine Autobiographies
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
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The genre of autobiography necessarily invokes difficulties of subjectivity, omission, and distortion. At the same time, what one chooses to write about oneself can also be highly illuminating. Nowhere will this tension, and treasure, better reveal itself than in the autobiography of the modern heroine. In addition to the fruitful knowledge any reader would gain from a male writer of historic note, the modern heroine is also a witness, and an inspiration, of the dramatic evolution of technology, equality, and gender politics of the 20th century. We invite you to join this onsite series, reading autobiographies about one month apart.
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January 28 Reading:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
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Readings in the Series:
The Story of my Life by Helen Keller - ISBN 978-0451531568
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - PDF online
Art and Writing of Georgia O'Keeffe
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - ISBN 978-0345514400
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir - ISBN 978-0060825195
The Fun of It by Amelia Earhart - ISBN 978-0915864553
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt - ISBN 978-0062355911
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Schedule:
12:00-1:30PM PST
Tutor:
Andy Gilman
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Location:
111 East Ojai Avenue
Ojai, California 93023
Upcoming Regular Events
Online Seminar Series
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
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Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.
Having done the longest day in literature with Ulysses (1922), Joyce set himself an even greater challenge for his next book - the night. "A nocturnal state... That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream." Published in 1939, the book would take Joyce two decades to complete.
A story with no real beginning or end, the work has come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page". Harold Bloom has called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, Finnegans Wake would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante".
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Join us as we read this text a few pages at a time, every other Wednesday afternoon. Click here to visit the Finnegans Wake Online Seminar page, with links to media and the Discussion Forum.
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November 20 Reading:
Book Two - Chapter Two of Finnegans Wake by Joyce (page 302, Line 29), Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (December 1999). ISBN 9780141181264. Also, Chapter Ten of A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake by William Tindall. Syracuse University Press; Reprint edition (May 1996), ISBN 0815603851
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Schedule:
12:30-2:00PM PST
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Tutor:
Barry Rabe
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
What About Democracy is Worth Saving? -
Selections from Alexis de Tocqueville
Sunday, December 8, 2024
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Alexis de Tocqueville's seminal work, Democracy in America, remains highly relevant for understanding ourselves and our institutions in the context of modern-day politics. As a result of his travels through the United States in the 1830’s, Tocqueville astutely analyzed the complexities of democracy, exploring themes such as individualism, egalitarianism, and the tension between majority rule and minority rights. Our discussion of this timeless classic should lead us to a clearer view of how the preservation of liberal democracy depends upon the spirited and enlightened engagement of its citizens. We invite you to join this six-part online series, taking place about one-month apart.
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Sessions in the Series:
September 8
October 13
November 10
December 8
January 12
February 9
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December 8 Reading:
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville -
Volume 2: Part 2
Chapter 10 - On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America
Chapter 11 - On the Particular Effects that the Love of Material Enjoyments Produces in Democratic Countries
Chapter 15 - How Religious Beliefs at Times Turn the Souls of Americans toward Immaterial Enjoyments
Chapter 17 - How in Times of Equality and Doubt It Is Important to Move Back the Object of Human Actions
University of Chicago Press (April 2002)
ISBN 978-0226805368
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Schedule:
2:00-4:00PM PST
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Tutor:
Karl Haigler
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
Transcendentalism
Monday, December 9, 2024
"Humankind is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature."
Transcendentalism was a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the early 19th century in the northeastern United States. Deep beliefs in the goodness of nature, and of humanity as a part of that nature, were central expressions of the movement’s thinkers and writers. Self reliance, individualism, and divine encounter with everyday experience also characterized the transcendental spirit. A strong feature of American societal development, the approach generally embraced intuition over empiricism, and was cautious of progress that insulated the individual from dynamic, authentic experience. We invite you to join us for monthly Monday evening sessions (generally taking place the first Monday evening of each month), exploring the early, middle, and late thinking of the approach. Attendees need not participate in all of the sessions to benefit, as each reading will stand on its own. Authors in the series will include:
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Jonathan Edwards
William Ellery Channing
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Margaret Fuller
Emily Dickinson
Frederick Douglas
Nathanial Hawthorne
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December 9 Reading:
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Chapters 6-14 - Visitors... Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
Pages 59-113
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Schedule:
5:30-7:00PM PST
Tutors:
Roxana Zirakzadeh and Andy Gilman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
The Romantic I/Eye
Saturday, December 14, 2024
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A pan-European and American phenomenon, Romanticism influenced Western notions about the individual as well as humans' relationship to nature. This series of online seminars addresses both themes through a variety of genres and nationalities, most of which texts are written in the first person. How did the Romantic Era shape the notion of what a subject is? Does first-person writing, in seeming to explore the subject or the self, reveal it or make it more obscure? To what extent does the choice an author makes to portray an experience through the use of the first person affect that experience, and do these authors' texts coalesce into a coherent portrait of the Romantic period? Finally, how do these singular voices engage with nature, particularly under the looming shadow of the Industrial Revolution?
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Readings in the Series:
Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther
Rousseau — Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Holderlin — Hyperion
Wordsworth — The Prelude (Two-Part 1799 version)
Chateaubriand — Rene, and Atala
Foscolo — The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Byron — Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto One
Hazlitt — On the Love of the Country, On Living to One's Self, and On Thought and Action
Müller/Schubert — Die Winterreise
Pushkin — Eugene Onegin
Emerson — Experience
Poe — The Landscape Garden, William Wilson, and The Fall of the House of Usher
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Join us as we read explore these readings, with sessions about one month apart. Click here to visit The Romantic I/Eye Online Seminar page, with links to media and the Discussion Forum.
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December 14 Reading:
Emerson - Experience
For December's seminar on Emerson, we will read "Experience." Emerson's essays are thorny, and the choice of this essay should provide plenty of fodder for discussion; however, a number of our participants in Romantic I/Eye happen to also be in the Transcendentalism seminar series, which has covered "Self-Reliance" and "Nature." For this reason, we are encouraging everyone to read those two works as well for a contextual background shared by the group. This said, our focus will be on "Experience."
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PDT
Tutors:
Jordan Hoffman and Eric Stull
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
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Online Seminar Series
Shakespeare in Britain and Greece: Comic, Tragic, Both
Sunday, December 15, 2024
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In the geography of his poetic imagination, Shakespeare seems to find world enough in time -- a stage in every age -- from the worlds of mythical Greece and the mother of epic, the Trojan War (The Two Noble Kinsmen and Troilus and Cressida) to Britain before Merlin (King Lear) to the “pale fire” of Roman Greece (Timon of Athens) to the warped world of pagan Roman Britain (Cymbeline) to the zany (and not-so-) world of Mediterranean sea change (The Comedy of Errors and Pericles) to the “fog and filthy air” of medieval Scotland (Macbeth) to a world of Elizabethan goodwives that somehow includes Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor). In these plays, the poet’s constant themes are love, betrayal, identity, disguise, given in about as many combinations and permutations as one could wish, romantic, comic, tragic, and blends thereof.
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December 15 Reading:
Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare
Pelican – or any standard edition with line numbers will work well
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutors:
Eric Stull and Jordan Hoffman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
George Berkeley -
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
Thursday, December 19, 2024
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What can we say we know with certainty? What does it mean to say that we know something? How does knowledge differ from belief? Can an exploration of basic philosophical questions, such as How do we know what we know? and What are the limits of our understanding? inform our thinking not just on intellectual issues, but on broader cultural challenges as well?
George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called immaterialism (later referred to as subjective idealism by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects are ideas perceived by the mind and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism. Over four Thursday afternoon online seminars the series will cover:
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December 19 - Preface and start of first dialogue (pp. 2-23)
January 2 - End of first dialogue (pp. 24-42)
January 16 - Second dialogue (pp. 43-60)
January 30 - Third dialogue (pp. 61-94)
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Join us as we discuss this foundational work from Berkeley. This series continues a broader series on epistemology. All are welcome. Please join us even if this will be your first seminar in the series.
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Click here to visit the Epistemology Page.
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December 19 Reading:
Preface and start of first dialogue (pp. 2-23)
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
Hackett edition ( June 1979)
ISBN-13: 978-0915144617
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Schedule:
Thursdays, 12:30-2:00PM PDT
Tutor:
Carol Seferi
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Contemporary Issues Seminar Series
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Saturday, November 23, 2024
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“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”
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Published in 1962 and named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by the editors of Discover magazine, Silent Spring is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson. The book documents the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of DDT. Carson accuses the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting the industry's marketing claims unquestioningly. The book was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, but it swayed public opinion and led to a reversal in U.S. pesticide policy, a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Join us as we read and discuss this foundational book, several chapters at a time, over monthly online seminars.
November 23 Reading:
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
5. Realms of the Soil, 6. Earth's Green Mantle, 7. Needless Havoc
(pages 52-100)
Mariner Books Classics; Anniversary edition (February 2022)
ISBN 978-0618249060
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
Andy Gilman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
The Laws by Plato
Sunday, November 24, 2024
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“...there is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offenses, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing.”
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The Laws (Greek: ΝÏŒμοι, Nómoi; Latin: De Legibus) is Plato's last and longest dialogue. The conversation depicted in the work's twelve books begins with the question of who is given the credit for establishing a civilization's laws. Its musings on the ethics of government and law have established it as a classic of political philosophy alongside Plato's more widely read Republic. Scholars agree that Plato wrote this dialogue as an older person, having failed in his effort to guide the rule of the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, instead having been thrown in prison. These events are alluded to in the Seventh Letter. The text is noteworthy as Plato's only undisputed dialogue not to feature Socrates. We invite you to join us as we read this often overlooked text, one section at a time, in monthly online events.
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November 24 Reading:
The Laws by Plato
Book 7 - Section 12 - Education
(pages 225-274, 788a-824a)
Penguin Classics (June 2005)
ASIN B01FIXK9JK
ISBN 9780140449846
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
David Appleby
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Contemporary Issues Seminar Series
The Imperative of Responsibility by Hans Jonas
Sunday, December 1, 2024
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"Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life."
In this collection of essays, published in 1984, Hans Jonas rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and so on. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. We invite you join this online series, reading each essay about one month apart.
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December 1 Reading:
The Imperative of Responsibility by Hans Jonas
Chapters Two and Three - On Principles and Method, and Concerning Ends and Their Status in Reality (pages 25-78)
University of Chicago Press (October 1985)
ISBN 978-0226405971
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
Andy Gilman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Seminar Series
What is Life by Erwin Schrödinger
Saturday, December 21, 2024
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"The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then."
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a 1944 book written for the lay science reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book is based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, which focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?" We invite you to join this monthly online series as we read this short but difficult book, one chapter at a time.
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December 21 Reading:
What is Life by Schrödinger - Chapter 5 - Delbrück’s Model Discussed and Tested
Entire book: Cambridge University Press;
(March 26, 2012)
ISBN 978-1107604667
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
Andy Gilman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.
Online Contemporary Issues Seminar Series
The Gene - An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2017)
Sunday, December 22, 2024
This revived online series will inquire into contemporary issues of science, politics, culture, and economics, meeting once per month and covering 30-50 pages of a text per session. We kick off the series with a look into the history and current questions of genetics. The Gene: An Intimate History was written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist, published in 2017. The book chronicles the history of the gene and genetic research, all the way from Aristotle to Crick, Watson and Franklin and then the 21st century scientists who mapped the human genome. The book discusses the power of genetics in determining people's well-being and traits. It delves into the personal genetic history of Siddhartha Mukherjee's family, including mental illness. However, it is also a cautionary message toward not letting genetic predispositions define a person or their fate, a mentality that the author says led to the rise of eugenics in history. This series will span over ten monthly sessions on this book, and then turn to other contemporary subjects.
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December 22 Reading:
The Gene - An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Part Five - The Last Mile, The Hunger Winter (pages 370-413)
Scribner; Reprint edition (May 2017)
ISBN 978-1476733524
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Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
Andy Gilman
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Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.