Grace
Resources: Simone Weil on Plant Life, Chlorophyll & Related Topics
Education and the ethics of attention: The work of Simone Weil
This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil’s ethical theory is considered against the backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil’s philosophy – gravity, decreation, and grace – are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil’s thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty, and love.
British Journal of Educational Studies (Aug. 22, 2022)
- Professor Peter Roberts, University of Cambridge, School of Educational Studies & Leadership. His many works include “Simone Weil: Education, Spirituality and Political Commitment,” in Kirylo JD (ed.), A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance: 34 Pedagogues We Need to Know (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013), pp. 129-132.
Unfinished: On Venice Saved – a Q&A with Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson
The Paradox of Will and Grace: A Review of Simone Kotva’s Effort and Grace
70 Years Later – Still Waiting for God: A Few Thoughts on a New Edition of a Weil Classic
An Interview with Lenora Champagne
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century
This in-depth study examines the social, religious, and philosophical thought of Simone Weil.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century presents a comprehensive analysis of Weil’s interdisciplinary thought, focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that Weil’s thought is more significant than ever in showing how the world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries. Springsted brings into focus the challenges of Weil’s original (and sometimes surprising) starting points, such as an Augustinian priority of goodness and love over being and intellect, and the importance of the Crucifixion. Springsted demonstrates how the mystical and spiritual aspects of Weil’s writings influence her social thought. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter of life in God―and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the world.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is not simply a guide or introduction to Simone Weil. Rather, it is above all an argument for the importance of Weil’s thought in the contemporary world, showing how she helps us to understand the nature of our belonging to God (sometimes in very strange and unexpected ways), the importance of attention and love as the root of both the love of God and neighbor, the importance of being rooted in culture (and culture’s service to the soul in rooting it in the universe), and the need for human beings to understand themselves as communal beings, not as isolated thinkers or willers. It will be essential reading for scholars of Weil, and will also be of interest to philosophers and theologians.
Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).
University of Notre Dame Press, 2021
Cinema as Metaxu
In this article, Simone Weil’s notion of the material world as “metaxu,” an in-between or bridge between this world (gravity) and the absolute (grace), is positioned within the tradition of cinematic realism to consider how the natural world in film functions as a bridge to the supernatural. In this way, the cinema intertwines ecology and theology in ways that are particularly resonant now, at a time of large scale environmental collapse and the search for new values to support human and other lives.
The Jugaad Project
Prophetic Voices: Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor
This study juxtaposes Simone Weil’s exposition of God’s invitation to know and love the good through the divine signature of beauty stamped on the order of the world and Flannery O’Connor’s depiction of a society whose oppressive order allows some characters to oppose outright a divine order or to live under the illusion that the divine invitation is irrelevant because they, in their egoism and materialist values, are the centre of the universe. An examination of O’Connor’s and Weil’s ideas on order and beauty, grace and decreation, within the disorders of their contexts, reveals both writers’ skills in pointing prophetically through disorder to divine order, thus, disclosing bridges of revelation.
PhilosophicalInvestigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 101-114
