Knowing God in the Book of Job | Dr David Novak with Ralston College
Release Date: 07/19/2024
The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy with Stephen Blackwood
The Ralston College Podcast
“The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy” is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever. After takinging stock of the “meaning crisis” and our dire need for depth, Dr Blackwood meditates on the first great insight of the Consolation: that the remedies of the self must emerge from the self. The complex and intricate structures and patterns of Boethius’ work are...
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Dr Iain McGilchrist in Conversation with Ralston College’s Students
The Ralston College Podcast
In this intimate question and answer session, conducted in March 2024 with the students enrolled in Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities, the world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist explores topics that animate the collective intellectual life of Ralston’s student body. Answering questions that range from the metaphysical heights of theology, liturgy, and religious life to the tangible depths of scientific inquiry and medical progress, Dr McGhilchrist challenges his interlocutors to think deeper about the relationship between mind and matter,...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 3: Finitude and the Infinite
The Ralston College Podcast
In his final , “Finitude and the Infinite,” Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the aspects of finitude and infinitude. Beginning with the English Romantic poets, McGilchrist shows how these artists resisted the habits of perception that can be associated with the brain’s left hemisphere. This part of the...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: Symmetry and Asymmetry
The Ralston College Podcast
In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world. McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent, and predictable universe. Drawing from disciplines as disparate as physics, mathematics, biology and art, McGilchrist shows that asymmetry is not simply a principle of vitality, harmony, and...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Division and Union
The Ralston College Podcast
This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College’s mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself. Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism. Drawing on analogies from music, nature, and the human brain, McGilchrist reveals the delicate harmony between separation and connection, a truth exemplified most vividly in the brain’s two hemispheres. Here, division and...
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Dr Iain McGilchrist on the Cultivation of Wisdom
The Ralston College Podcast
A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychiatrist, philosopher, and literary critic, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, on the occasion of Dr McGilchrist’s March 2024 visit to Savannah to deliver Ralston College’s annual Sophia Lectures. Dr McGilchrist discusses his experience spending time with Ralston College students, his reasons for accepting the College’s invitation to deliver the Sophia lectures, and the necessity of leisure for deep thought. Applications for Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities program are now open.
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The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part II: Medical School and Beyond
The Ralston College Podcast
The second part of a conversation between the renowned literary scholar and psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist and Ralston College president Dr Stephen Blackwood about Dr McGilchrist’s remarkable educational trajectory. In this episode, Dr Iain McGilchrist explains how he left his successful career as a literary scholar to pursue training as a psychiatrist and how his combined study of literature, philosophy, and neuroscience informed his later academic work, including his books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and...
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The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part I: From Winchester College to All Souls
The Ralston College Podcast
A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, the renowned polymath, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, about Dr McGilchrist’s formative experiences at Winchester College, the prestigious British public school, and his subsequent training as a literary critic at Oxford University and his appointment as a Fellow at All Souls. Drs McGilchrist and Blackwood emphasize the vital role of freedom, friendship, and the expectation of excellence in providing students with an authentic education. This conversation was recorded during Dr McGilchrist’s visit to Ralston College in...
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We Live in the Flicker: T. S. Eliot and Dante on the Spaces Between
The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio on two of T.S. Eliot’s most important works: The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Mr Snook attends, in particular, to how Eliot’s treatment of fragments represents at once both a departure from and a return to medieval understandings of the whole. This medieval understanding is evidenced in the “manifold articulation” of particulars within the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, the literary shape of the Divine Comedy, and the...
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The Other Side of Despair: The Search for Meaning in T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. The lecture explores the personal, historical, and literary contexts of Eliot’s poem. Through an engagement with the Western tradition that is simultaneously rich and fragmented, The Waste Land confronts cultural and personal crises that have atrophied both memory and desire. Snook finds in Eliot’s work a mournful modernism that serves as a serious and searching rejoinder to the more frivolous and enervated...
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Dr David Novak is a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, renowned theologian, and esteemed rabbi. He has authored numerous books, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures, and bridges ancient philosophical traditions with modern ethical issues.
Recorded live at Ralston College in Savannah, GA in November of 2022. Dr David Novak—Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto—offers a lecture on the Book of Job followed by an extended question and answer session with students enrolled in Ralston College’s Master’s in the Humanities Program. In his lecture, Dr Novak explores the complex position of Job in the canon of Jewish scriptures, surveys diverse scholarly accounts of the concluding passages of the book, and offers his own interpretation of Job’s “face-to-face” interaction with God, one that emphasizes direct knowledge over abstract understanding and finds in the book’s conclusion a vision of the resurrection of the body.
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00:00 Introduction
08:20 Dr. David Novak’s Lecture on the Book of Job
53:25:00 Question and Answer Session with Ralston College Students and Dr. Novak
54:45 Question: Does Job’s Vision Occur Before or After Death?
59:40 Question: Why are Job’s Friends Punished for Their Conceptual Understanding?
01:03:00 Question: How Does This Align With the Belief That No One Can See God and Live?
01:09:05 Question: What is the Purpose of the Dialogues Between Job and His Friends?
01:13:05 Question: Did Job’s Friends Hear God’s Voice During the Appearance?
01:14:55 Question: What is the Significance of God Doubling Job’s Possessions?
01:15:30 Question: Is There a Visual Aspect to God’s Response to Job, or Is It Only Auditory?
01:15:30 Question: What Does it Mean for God to Make a Bet with the Adversary?
01:19:10 Question: Is Job’s Refusal to Curse God a Prerequisite for His Later Vision?
01:25:15 Question: What Do You Make of the Relationship Between Satan and God?
01:29:05 Did God Use Job to Prove a Point to Satan, Knowing the Outcome?
01:31:20 Question: Can Man Question God and Express Grievances?
01:35:40 Question: Does Elihu Suggest People Perceive God Through Suffering and Visions?
1:41:30 Question: How Has Your Belief in Providence Impacted Your Life?
01:44:45 Closing Remarks
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Authors, Ideas, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
The Book of Job
The Book of Ezekiel
The Book of Leviticus
The Book of Esther
The Book of Ecclesiastes
Robert Gordis, The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job
mashal (משל)—Hebrew, “parable”
Katagoros (Hebrew—קָטִיגור; Greek—κατήγορος)—”accuser”
Fredrich Nietzsche
Johann von Rist, “O Traurigkeit, o Herzeleid”
G.W.F. Hegel
Richard Rorty
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man
Leo Strauss
Plato, Republic
Yehuda Haleri
Aristotle
Thomas Aquinas
The Book of Isaiah
via negativa
John Rawls
Eric Gregory
Chaim ibn Attar
Tzimtzum (צמצום)
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Additional Resources
Ralston College (including newsletter)
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Thank you for listening!