Dr. Sean Hannan

A new issue of Religious Studies & Theology is now available! Vol. 42, no. 2 is a special issue on “War & Peace in the Late Middle Ages,” edited by my friend Chris Bellitto (Kean) & inspired by the 2023 American Cusanus Society conference in Gettysburg.

In addition to the introduction penned by Chris, the issue features articles by Markus Riedenauer, Matteo Esu, Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Thomas Woelki, Marco Brösch, & (once again!) Christopher Bellitto. Topics covered range from Islam to the Hussites & beyond. This was an incredible example of how fruitful international collaboration can be.

You can check the issue out for yourself here: https://journal.equinoxpub.com/RST/issue/view/2435

This week I’m in Denmark to assist as an external reviewer in a PhD dissertation defense at Aarhus University. I’m pleased to report that Eva Elisabeth Houth Vrangbaek defended her research with aplomb & will soon be awarded the title of “Dr.”

EEHV’s dissertation debuted a unique “marriage of methods” between advanced computational analysis of a textual corpus and traditional close reading skills. By combining these approaches, she was able to shed fresh light on the vexing relationship between three Latin terms frequently used by Augustine of Hippo and often translated as “love:” amor, caritas, and dilectio. This was an example of Digital Humanities at its finest.

The day after the defense, I delivered my own talk on another hotly debated term in the Augustinian corpus: peregrinatio, which can be translated as pilgrimage, but which I argue is better rendered as something like “migrancy.” One of the benefits of doing so is that we can build bridges between Augustine’s call for the adoption of a welcoming attitude towards ancient migrants and the need for a similar attitude today, in a world that continues to be marked by the plight of migrants. It was an honour to get to deliver this lecture immediately following a visually engaging talk given by Dr. Anthony Dupont (Leuven), in which he explored pictorial representations of Augustine’s conversion scene across more than six centuries. I’ll be heading back to Canada soon, but I feel like I’ve deepened my research connections in Europe on this trip, and I’ll be looking forward to my next journey across the pond.

The skilful curators over at Villanova’s Augustine Blog have published my reflections on the intersection between pluralism and Augustinian accounts of temporality. These reflections were occasioned by some writing I’ve been doing in order to produce a chapter for inclusion in Bolek Kabala’s upcoming volume Augustine: Frontiers of Pluralism (Routledge). You can read the blog entry for yourself here: https://augustineblog.com/augustine-africa-and-a-plurality-of-times-conf-book-11/

After not being able to access this site for a year or so, I’ve finally become able to get it going again thanks to the fine help-desk folks at Humanities Commons. While I’ll aim to post regular updates from here on out, I’ll use this post to highlight a couple of book publishing milestones from 2023.

In October 2023, our edited volume in honour of Donald Duclow was published with Brill. The festschrift, entitled Mystical Theology & Platonism in the Time of Cusanus (and edited by me, Jason Aleksander, Joshua Hollmann, & Michael E. Moore), gathers together a range of scholars working on Nicholas of Cusa & related figures. The release of the volume was almost timed perfectly to coincide with our biennial American Cusanus Society conference in Gettysburg. Check out the volume here:

Then, in December 2023, a long-awaited volume called Augustine & Ethics (co-edited by me & Kim Paffenroth) was released by Lexington, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. This represented years and years of work. Our contributors showed infinite patience and, in the end, were rewarded with a volume that takes the study of Augustinian ethics in exciting new directions. You can learn more about this particular volume here:

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Preston & Katie over at the Holy Watermelon podcast. Our wide-ranging conversation covered everything from the finer points of Augustine on temporality to the vagaries of growing up in a religion-infused small town on the prairies of Alberta.

Check out the resulting podcast episode, “An August Assembly: an Interview with Dr. Sean Hannan,” here: https://holywatermelonpod.wixsite.com/homepage/episodes/episode/21cd99ca/an-august-assembly-an-interview-with-dr-sean-hannan

In early 2023, I was interviewed by my old University of Chicago compatriot Adrian Guiu for the New Books Network podcast. The topic of the interview was my book On Time, Change, History, and Conversion (Bloomsbury, 2020), part of Bloomsbury’s Reading Augustine series.

Our conversation touches upon the genesis of the project, dating back to my undergraduate days spent reading the works of authors like Paul Ricoeur & Hayden White. We then discuss my interpretation of Augustine on temporality & related issues of realism/idealism, Big-Bang cosmology, notions of progress, the problem of undecidability, and the risks of political quietism. Like the book itself, our podcast conversation links up with modern thinkers such as the physicist Georges Lemaître, the public intellectual Steven Pinker, and the philosopher of history Karl Löwith, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Toni Morrison.

Check out the episode here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/on-time-change-history-and-conversion

And if the episode makes you more interested in the book itself, consider picking up a copy here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/on-time-change-history-and-conversion-9781501356476/

When I returned to campus after a quick Christmas break, I was pleasantly surprised to find waiting for me in my office mailbox a copy of The Unique, The Singular, and The Individual (Mohr Siebeck, 2022). This volume represents the fruits of a Philosophy of Religion conference held by Ingolf Dalferth (et al.) at Claremont Graduate University several years ago. My chapter represents an attempt to connect my own interpretation of Augustine’s philosophy of time (viz., as a critique of the present moment) to a broader circuit of arguments about instantaneity, individuation, and atomism across various schools of ancient philosophy.

The Fall semester of 2022 was an incredibly busy one. In addition to teaching three courses (Humanities 101, my Medieval Europe survey, and a senior-levels seminar on ‘Mysticism & Gender’), I presented research at multiple conferences. I’ll sketch out some brief highlights here:

• In October 2022, I presented a paper entitled “Meister Eckhart, Max Weber, and the Economic Exegesis of Mary and Martha” at Villanova’s Patristic, Medieval, & Renaissance conference. Sharing the session on ‘Overcoming the Active-Contemplative Distinction’ with my fellow American Cusanus Society stalwarts Erin Risch Zoutendam and Sam Dubbelman, I discussed how Eckhart deployed economic rhetoric in his sermons and scriptural interpretations, which in turn helped give rise to Johann Tauler’s more explicitly economic mysticism. I then tried to indicate how we can build upon Weber’s century-old insight that modern economic behaviour is, at least in part, shaped by Christian lines of thinking that date back at least to these German-vernacular-using Dominican theologians of the fourteenth century.
• In early November, I participated in a conference on the history of Neoplatonism organized by Gregory Moss (Chinese University of Hong Kong). My contribution, “The Temporality of Truth and Contradiction in Augustine of Hippo and Nicholas of Cusa,” explored the rather distinct approaches adopted by the late ancient North African and the late medieval German when it comes to associating (or not associating) objective truth with utter timelessness. For Augustine, awakening to atemporal truth played a crucial role in his own Neoplatonic journey to certitude. For Cusanus, however, proper timelessness coincided with the unimaginable simultaneity of contradictory opposites; eternity was, in a sense, beyond the very distinction between truth and contradiction.
• Later that same November, I linked up with networks of scholars at two back-to-back conferences: the annual meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (in New Orleans) and the American Academy of Religion (in Denver). At the ACPA, I delivered a paper with an overly complicated name: “Should a Non-Presentist Philosophy of Time Be Considered a Praeambulum to an Augustinian Sense of the Divine?” That question could arguably be re-phrased as: “In order to adhere to Augustine’s notion of a timeless God, do you also have to agree with Augustine that the present phase of time isn’t really real?” At AAR, I did not present a new paper, but I did meet up with my fellow members on the Steering Committee of the Augustine & Augustinianisms Program Unit. We’re hoping to run some very cool sessions over the years to come, perhaps even including a series of offerings relating to Foucault’s nod to Augustinian confessio in Confessions of the Flesh (the fourth volume in his History of Sexuality).

In 2023, I plan to continue disseminating my research as widely afield as possible, provided that scheduling and funding make this possible. I can say with some certainly that I’ll be giving a paper on Catherine of Siena at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Puerto Rico this March. I am also hoping to share more work on Nicholas of Cusa at the inaugural conference of the Cusanus Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland in Scotland this June. Fingers crossed…

In August 2022, I was interviewed about Meister Eckhart for AJ Langley’s MyFavouriteMystic podcast. You can give the episode a listen by clicking right here.

The episode touches upon the challenging ideas Eckhart put forward so daringly in his vernacular Middle High German sermons, from kenosis and birthing to self-annihilation and the ‘soul-spark.’ We also discuss the tortuous history of the modern German-language reception of Eckhart: his ‘rediscovery’ by the off-kilter mining magnate Franz Xaver von Baader (who saw him as a proto-Böhme and ‘spiritual alchemist’); Baader’s recommendation of Eckhart to Schelling and Hegel (the latter of whom recognized in Eckhart some kind of precursor to his own ‘system’); the professionalism of Eckhart-scholarship via Franz Pfeiffer & Josef Quint; and the threat that Eckhart’s legacy might be swallowed up by a Heideggerian or even more neo-Fascist form of appropriation.

Looming large in the background here is Mysticism and Materialism in the Wake of German Idealism (Routledge, 2022), the book I co-authored with W. Ezekiel Goggin, who was also interviewed by AJ Langley in Episode 41 of MyFavouriteMystic (on Georges Bataille). You can learn more about our book by clicking right here.

Last week, I was very fortunate to get the chance to present at the Mysticism & Lived Experience Network’s annual conference. The theme this year was “Charity and Poverty in the Lives & Works of Medieval Mystics.” While hosted in the UK, the event was conducted via Zoom.

My own talk focused on the figure of ‘Queen Poverty’ & the approach to private property found in the writings of the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic Catherine of Siena. Building on the work of Eloise Davies, I tried to demonstrate that Catherine’s use of key terms like carità involved sharp-edged economic critiques of the society in which she was living. Here I was also trying to expand upon some themes first explored in Ch. 5 of my recent book with W. Ezekiel Goggin, Mysticism and Materialism in the Wake of German Idealism.

The best part of the conference, of course, was learning from all of the other participants, who presented on everything from William of St.-Thierry to Margery Kempe. Sadly, due to the massive time-zone difference, I wasn’t able to attend every talk, though I look forward to digging deeper into each scholar’s research over the coming months.