Conference Day in Seoul

Michael here! I am at a three day conference in Seoul and today was the first day of papers. I gave my paper called "The Cult of the Dead and the Ever Sanative Conscience". The best thing about the paper is clearly the title. Anyway, it went over well.

I am at Sogang University, which is a Jesuit University just like the one I teach at in Buffalo, so it was a familiar feeling. Here is a mediocre shot of the students filing out and some sense of all the cherry trees in bloom all over campus. Lovely.


Here is ye-olde-large-and-functional-building that I gave my paper in. The conference has two English days - Monday and Wednesday, and a Korean day on Tuesday. So I give papers on the English days, and tomorrow the wife of the school's Islamicist is taking three of us invited lecturers on a tour of Seoul while the Koreans get to speak their native language.

After the long conference day, we went to a local restaurant and had some fairly traditional Korean food. These are the two poor Koreans who had to sit with me and converse in English. The guy wrote his dissertation for my friend, Chae Young Kim, who invited me back to Korea. He writes a lot on William James and religious experience - both of them, that is.

And here I am with assorted westerners and Koreans. Some invited lecturers, some western faculty at Sogang University, some Korean faculty including a Korean Jesuit who commented on my paper [Father Kim is in the left rear corner]. Next to him is another Professor Kim [note the common points?] who is a "Chinese Korean". That means he grew up in Korean village that is actually inside the nation of China. There are several of them in northern China.

They served two kinds of alcohol - both made from rice. One was a poor man's drink [the brown jug on the table], one was the rich man's drink [the bottle with clear yellow liquid].

I liked them both!

Cheers from Seoul!