Thomas Moore to speak about violence in April

Thomas Moore is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the second annual academic conference of The Foundation for Mythological Studies, to be held April 4-6, 2008 in Santa Barbara, California. The 2008 conference theme is Nature and Human Nature: The Mythology of Violence. This event is co-sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute and Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture. The conference description says,

"With the roots of violence clearly so deeply imbedded in our biology and psychology, the crisis of violence has in our time issued in an ecological and psychological disaster, one that requires personal and cultural transformation, a shift of paradigms in how we understand violence, power, authority, force. Do we need a new world-view, a more comprehensive mythology?

This conference will discuss the possibility that violence may have a necessary function psychologically, socially or even biologically, that we may not know what violence is, and that we may not know (yet) its relation to myth."

Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture will publish selected conference papers in its Spring 2009 issue: Psychology of Violence. The initial conference announcement will be updated as the program is confirmed.