Michael Lisanti Receives Award for Excellence in Collegiate Seminar
Members of the Saint Mary’s community enjoyed a rare afternoon at the Hearst Art Gallery this past Wednesday, Nov. 28, at the reception for Michael Lisanti—who received the Brother O. DeSales Perez Award for Excellence in Collegiate Seminar. A Gael alum and veteran Seminar instructor with 20 sections under his belt, Lisanti has shown an impassioned commitment to the Great Books and the Great Conversation program. He has served on the program’s governing board as well as on text revision committees. Lisanti also brims with a humility that encapsulates the spirit of Seminar.
After accepting the award, Lisanti recounted his journey of intellectual inquiry. Invoking the trials of Odysseus, he alluded to both the epic history and challenges of the Seminar program. The “danger was neither singular in nature—we must watch for both Scylla and Charybdis [the mythical sea monsters]—nor singular in occasion, as Odysseus faced the threat of Scylla and Charybdis twice.” Speaking about the often-laborious process of re-evaluating Collegiate Seminar texts, themes, and models, Lisanti warned us against “the despair Charybdis invokes.”
Alluding to heroic Aeneas, Lisanti encouraged us to hold true to the course of intellectual enquiry undergone with friendship, trust, and love—love for one another and love for our great textual traditions—and to resist peril and despair, “for here we can find a wiser path because it is ‘better to be slow / to take the longer way’ round to safety, avoiding the perils of Scylla and Charybdis altogether [Virgil Bk III ln 560–562].” In the rush to emphasize concerns over Seminar, we mustn’t lose sight of the true purpose at the core of our shared intellectual pursuit, that is love, “whereas the longer and slower process of creating a space for the shared inquiry of Great Books, based on love, is the slower and safer path that allows us to avoid Scylla and Charybdis.”
Lisanti thanked his peers, mentors, and Seminar leaders, and concluded his remarks with the admonishment, “Let us remember that we are in the holy presence of God.”
Julie Park, curator and editor of The Great Conversation 1942–2017: A Symposium on Collegiate Seminar at 75, greeted each guest and made complimentary copies of her book available. Guests mingled with colleagues over a fine selection of beverages and refreshments. The crowd consisted of some of the stars of the Collegiate Seminar family, including Seminar Director Brother Kenneth, Brother Charles from the History Dept., Joe Zeccardi from the Center for Writing Across the Curriculum, Professor of Classical Languages Rali Christo, and Colin Redemer from the School of Liberal Arts, among many others.