Between four and five hundred years ago, astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo proposed that Earth is a planet—a “wandering star”—thus liberating it and its inhabitants from being located in what Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandolla only a few years earlier had called the “excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world.” Since then, we have also increasingly grasped our smallness relative to a still-expanding Universe. What does that smallness imply for our and Earth’s “place” and meaning within the cosmic scheme? For centuries, there has been a tendency among scientists to read earthly smallness as entailing triviality or insignificance.  Dr. Dennis Danielson’s lecture will illustrate the persistence of this glib tendency and offer tools for reimagining Earth’s and humankind’s significance despite their cosmic smallness.

The event will take place at Regent College’s Chapel from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM. As on previous occasions, we will host a pre-lecture reception with appetisers, charcuterie, and pastries from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. RSVP is recommended by emailing houstoncentre@regent-college.edu.

Paid parking is available at different locations near UBC.

In addition, the lecture will be recorded and subsequently posted on our YouTube channel and on the Recorded Lectures section of our website.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Dennis Danielson, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia, is an intellectual historian who seeks to fuse the insights of science and the humanities, especially as illustrated in the enduring legacy of Copernicus’s attempt to reimagine Earth amid the Universe. Danielson received the 2011 Konrad Adenauer Research Prize from Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was named 2023 Honored Scholar by the Milton Society of America.

His articles have appeared in an array of journals from Mind to Milton Studies and from American Journal of Physics to Sky&Telescope. His books include Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (1982), The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution (2006), Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution (2014), The Tao of Right and Wrong: Rediscovering Humanity’s Moral Foundations (2018), and most recently the coauthored volume A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA, published earlier this year.

Additional information about Prof. Danielson can be found at

https://english.ubc.ca/profile/dennis-danielson-frsc/