You are warmly invited to a symposium on the theme of Retrieving Enchantment on Monday 13 June.

Please aim to arrive by 9:15am. There will be two morning sessions of structured discussion (9:30am to 11am and 11:30am to 1pm) followed by a final session in the afternoon (2:30pm to 4pm). The symposium will conclude at 4pm.

The focus of the symposium will be Iain McGilchrist’s long-awaited The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, the recent publication of which was a major event for anyone interested in religion and theology, mind, meaning, materialism, consciousness, value, and the very nature of ultimate reality.

In this massive work, which ranges in two volumes across 1,600 pages of text and 2500 references, McGilchrist grapples with some of the oldest and hardest questions confronting every human being, ones that, for many and various reasons, have acquired a fresh urgency for us today.

We will explore the following questions from their different perspectives:

What was "enchantment"?

What is "disenchantment"?

How should we understand the task of "retrieving enchantment"?

The springboard for our discussions will be Max Weber’s famous claim—recovered and restated by a wide array of thinkers from Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre to Christopher Lasch and Roger Scruton—that the widespread loss of magic and metaphysics has sundered us from ourselves and uprooted our sense of being at home in the world, even as we seek to establish a totalising technological, ideological, and commercial mastery over it.

We will be joined for the day by a number of distinguished and emerging scholars and writers, including Patrick Curry, Jonathan Gaisman, Fitzroy Morrissey, Rupert Shortt, and Brendan Wolfe.

Spaces are limited for both the symposium and the lecture, so please do sign up as soon as you can.

Retrieving Enchantment - A Symposium on "The Matter With Things"