Philip Zaeder

Thursdays, March 4 - March 25, April 1   10:00 am - 12:00 noon   5 sessions
King’s Chapel Parish House, 64 Beacon Street

Jonathan Edwards, in his life-long journal, wrote about ‘images or shadows of divine things.” He was striving, said historian Perry Miller, “to express a new vision of the world in which the conflict of the spirit and the flesh, of the divine and
the rational, could be resolved into a single perception of beauty.” Against such a landscape, still powerful in our modern world, we are invited into a journey where images abound, where shadows can hide or then reveal profound human patterns. Artistic imagination will figure strongly in the narratives, pressed against compelling counter-forces, for loss and love are “woven fine.” We will attend to the way these “authors” reckon with their story, with the way they render their vision. In journal form we, too, will express, where possible, the images and shadows that most draw us, most move us.

1. Eudora Welty One Writer’s Beginnings; Harriet Doerr Stones for Ibarra
2. Stones for Ibarra; John Singer Sargent The Daughters of Edward Boit
3. Primo Levi The Periodic Table; John Donne Holy Sonnets (selections)
4. Elie Wiesel Night; August St. Gaudens Robert Gould Shaw Memorial
5. Dostoievsky ‘Death of Father Zossima’; Margaret Craven I heard the owl call my name; Psalm 139

(NB: we will listen to the MFA’s Erica Hirshler on Sargent’s Daughters; in visiting the Shaw Memorial, we will carry with us Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”).

Philip Zaeder an English teacher and chaplain, worked at the Taft School, Yale University, in the l970s, and at Phillips Academy in Andover until 2000. Living in Milton, NH with his wife Sylvia Thayer, he is Advisor to nearby Shortridge Academy and a builder of stone walls. For BHS he has taught Chaucer, the early poetry of Eliot and Frost, The Odyssey, King Lear, Five Biblical Narratives, and An Adventure in Poetry.