THE ANNUAL GOOD LIFE LECTURE
Each year we invite an esteemed thinker to give a lecture inspired by one simple prompt: “Tell me, how do I go about living the good life?” The lecture is attended by students and alums of Seguinland Institute, members of the local community and invited guests. We hope that meaningful conversations about wide-angle questions are inspired by these lectures across generations.
FALL 2024 Speaker: S.B. Rodriguez-Plate
S.B. Rodriguez-Plate is a Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College and leading scholar of religion and material culture. They have authored or edited 15 books on religion and aesthetics, film, philosophy and the senses. They are also the executive director of the Association for Public Religion & Intellectual Life, the editor of the journal CrossCurrents, and board member of the Interfaith Coalition.
Fall 2023 Speaker: Tamsin Jones, PhD
Tamsin Jones is the Ellsworth Mortin Tracy Lecturer and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Trinity College. Her scholarship bridges the disciplines of philosophy, religion and gender studies. She has published and lectured widely on topics ranging from political theology, phenomenology and trauma theory. Her favorite drink is Chartreuse, a beverage made by Carthusian monks since 1737, using 130 herbs and plant extracts.
Fall 2022 Speaker: Kristen Case, PhD
Kristen Case is an award-winning poet, widely published scholar and professor of English at UMaine Farmington. She has published works on Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William James. She is the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), the 2018 Gatewood Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. She is the Director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau.
“One of the most common pieces of advice to young people in our culture is “ find yourself”... but I wonder if better advice might be “lose yourself”— not forever and not completely and not in the sense of self-abandonment—lose yourself lightly, temporarily, because the enormity and beauty of the sky or the interest of the problem or the depth of the suffering is so totally absorbing that you put yourself down for a minute and wander into a bigger life, a life where different kinds of work and different kinds of being and different kinds of perception are possible for you because you aren’t really you, you are bigger than you. You are part of the world. Part of life. Turn towards the kind of experience that pull us into collaborative action with something beyond ourselves…” - Kristen Case, PhD, Seguinland Institute Good Life Lecture 2022