“Time and World” By Hartmut Rosa: Reading Group Invitation

I want to invite you to join a new online reading group I’m co-hosting with my friend Tripp Fuller. We’re going to be working through Hartmut Rosa’s Time and World. The group will happen over Zoom in a seminar style with plenty of time for dialogue. If you’re a paid subscriber to either my Substack or Tripp’s, you’ll have access to the Reading Group page, where you’ll find Zoom links for the live sessions and the recordings. 

We will meet live for the first time on February 2, followed by three consecutive Fridays, February 13, 20, and 27 at 10am Pacific for about 90 minutes. 

Rosa is one of the few contemporary thinkers trying to give a genuinely big-picture account of the contradictions of modern life. Why are we so exhausted by conveniences, why does everything feel accelerated even as we fall further behind, why do we celebrate freedom but feel increasingly constrained? 

We’re hoping this group serves as a chance to pause, think with other human beings, and feel into how Rosa’s idea of “resonance” speaks to process-relational philosophy, theology, and the wider social, cultural, political, and ecological polycrisis we’re all living through. We’ll explore how to cultivate moments of genuine responsiveness and mutual transformation in a world that pushes us toward speed, control, and burnout.

If you want to be part of those conversations, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. All of my content on Substack has been freely available up until now, and aside from this and future reading groups, I plan to keep it that way. This group will be a bit of an experiment in how to manage a higher touch form of community participation. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to Footnotes2Plato, here’s a 20% discount code. (For those not already subscribed to Tripp Fuller’s Substack, here’s his 20% off link — subscribing to either of us will get you in). This feels like the right kind of space to create right now: not an escape from the whirlpool of modern life, but an invitation to swim together away from the edge to the still point at the center in the hopes of responding freshly to the torrent. 

Here’s my dialogue with Tripp from last week introducing Rosa’s thought, its resonances with Whitehead, and the plan for the reading group: