Biographical

Simone Weil: Reason, faith, and empathy

Jeannine E. Pitas read

Excerpts: “What would Weil think of the world we inhabit today? . . . .”

“Whenever I read Weil’s words, I ask myself the same question. What would she think of the world we inhabit today? The fact that academic interest in her work has skyrocketed in recent years suggests that many people have the same question. What would she say about Brexit, a U.S. president elected on a platform of nativism and xenophobia, and the rise of far-right political parties across Europe? What would be her response to the five-year civil war in Syria and the ongoing reality of global terrorism? What would she say about environmental degradation and the mass extinction of species that human activity has caused? What would she make of artificial intelligence and the increased power that humans are choosing to give machines?”

US Catholic (May 31, 2017)

Jeannine M. Pitas is a writer, teacher, and Spanish-English literary translator currently living in Dubuque, Iowa, where she teaches English and Spanish at the University of Dubuque. She is also a regular contributor to the Catholic blog Vox Nova.

Simone’s Svengalis: A Petainist, a Missionary, and the Making of Simone Weil

Benjamin Braude read

Abstract

Two of the first books published in the name of the brilliant absolutist Simone Weil (1909-43), La Pesanteur el la Grâce (Gravity and Grace) (1947/8) and Attente au Dieu (Waiting on/for God) (1950), were tendentiously fashioned. Consequently, the packaging that her Svengalis—the Petainist Gustave Thibon and the missionary Joseph-Marie Perrin—imposed, so severely distorted her thought that the first is no longer considered by French specialists to be her own work and the second has no stable text. Nevertheless, these two problematic books have defined Simone Weil. This [interview] reveals the origins and purposes of the books that Thibon and Perrin created.

Boisi Center (Feb. 11, 2015).

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Benjamin Braude is an associate professor of history at Boston College. His research focuses on the construction of collective identities in the Middle East and Europe, as well as Jewish and Ottoman history. He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on the controversial legacy of 20th-century philosopher Simone Weil at the Boisi Center.

A Strange Christian: Simone Weil

Florence de Lussy read

This article appears in Katherine Davies & Toby Garfitt, eds., God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century, New York: Fordham University Press (2015), pp. 69-87.

Florence de Lussy is the honorary general curator in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France and has devoted 27 years to editing The Complete Works of Simone Weil.

God’s Mirror presents perspectives on intellectual, cultural, and political questions faced by French and French-Canadian intellectuals who engaged with Catholicism in the period 1930-50, in the diverse but related fields of philosophy, theology, politics, literature, and music. Names include Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Paul Valéry, Simone Weil, and many others.

Simone Weil

Palle Yourgrau read

Simone Weil, legendary French philosopher, mystic and political activist who died in England in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, belongs to a select group of thinkers: as with St Augustine, Pascal and Nietzsche, so with Weil a single phrase can permanently change one’s life. In this book, Palle Yourgrau follows Weil on her life’s journey, from her philosophical studies at the École Normale Supérieure, to her years as a Marxist labour organizer, her explosive encounter with Leon Trotsky, her abortive attempt to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, her mystical experience in the town of Assisi. We see how Weil’s struggle to make sense of a world consumed by despotism and war culminated in her monumental attempt, following St Augustine, to re-imagine Christianity along Platonistic lines, to find a bridge between human suffering and divine perfection.

How seriously, however, should Weil’s ideas be taken? They were admired by Albert Camus and T. S. Eliot, yet Susan Sontag wrote famously that ‘I can’t imagine more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won . . . really share her ideas.’ If this is really true, Palle Yourgrau must count as one of the handful. Though he brings to life the pathos of Weil’s tragic-comic journey, Yourgrau devotes equal attention to the question of truth. He shines a bright light on the paradox of Simone Weil: at once a kind of modern saint, and a bête noire, a Jew accused of having abandoned her own people in their hour of greatest need. The result is a critical biography that is in places as disturbing as Weil’s own writings, an account that confronts head-on her controversial critique of the Hebrew Bible, as well as her radical rejection of the received wisdom that the Resurrection lies at the heart of Christianity.

Reaktion Books, 2013

Stephen Plant on Simone Weil: Parts I & II

Stephen Plant watch

Dr. Plant is Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall and lectures on Christian theology and on ethics in the Faculty of Divinity. He has written and edited several books including Bonhoeffer (Continuum, 2004), Simone Weil: A Brief Introduction (Orbis Books 2008), Letters to London (SPCK, 2013), and Taking Stock of Bonhoeffer ( Ashgate, 2014). From 2007-13 he edited the influential journal Theology for SPCK/SAGE. His current research includes theology and international development, on which he is writing a book for Bloomsbury Press, and the theology and life of Karl Barth. He is willing to consider doctoral students in 20th century Protestant theology, theology and international development, and political theology.

YouTube, April 22, 2012 // Part 1 here  // Part 2 here

“The Relevance of Simone Weil (1909-1943): 100 Years Later”

Jacques Cabaud

in Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca & Stone, Lucian, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York: Continuum, pp. xvii-xx

“Simone Weil and the Ethic of (Im)moderation”

Rozeelle-Stone

A. Rebecca & Stone Lucian, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York: Continuum, pp. pp. 18-37