Dr. Peter Weller
speaker
668 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Peter Weller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Animals. All of it, man. We love St. Francis. How can you go wrong? Look, it's not BS about Francis. The guy was that. The guy preached compassion. Walking the human walk. Okay, this is not... Crazy. But by 1217, when he's given a permit, an order, by Innocent III, he's one of the toughest popes around because he's got a champion where he comes from in Umbria.
it's like a quarter million people following this guy, man.
By the time he dies, man, there's a half a million people in Europe, man. I'm talking about from Egypt to Israel.
That's wild. And so when I was doing a PhD historiography class about art, a guy named Jeffrey Simcox, great guy, Oxford, UCLA, looks like Robert Redford. And he's doing a historiography, which is the history of history, you know, and I bring up Franciscanism and I go, You know, the transformation of imagery. Of imagery. Because it's the first time that Christ is painted in suffering. Dying.
Pietà. Dying on the cross. Not winning. You understand. Private images of devotion. Christ in pain. People in pain. You understand that. You're supposed to understand that. Because it's not necessarily just... you the penitent going, forgive me. But it's you identifying with world suffering so that you might go out and heal it.
This sounds like hoity-toity, touchy-feely nonsense of the 21st century. This is what this guy was preaching. And by the way, you helped the person in front of you with kindness. This is Buddhist, man. Yes, very similar. Handle what's in front of you with kindness. The world will handle itself. So I bring this up with Simcox's class. I say, you know,
the biggest transformation of perhaps spirituality in the Western world, Franciscanism. And this woman down the way is an intellectual historian. She says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The biggest transformation? Are you kidding me? The biggest transformation, Weller? That's a little bit over the top.
And thank God Simcox steps forward because he is an intellectual historian as well as an image historian. And he goes, hang on. He's right. He's right. There has been nothing that has hit the Western world spirituality movement Like Franciscanism. And they all stop and go, what? And you can see it in the imagery. Look, St. Francis brings us the action movie. How so?
Because people are in pain and they're twisted and they're in contortion and there's torsion and they're like, screaming or yelling or whatever. You understand this? Yeah. They're suffering. This changes. Also, there's a place in Pergamum.
In ancient Greece, it does the same thing. Franciscus is the reinvention of it. You know, this ethos in the original classical age of Greece, the perfect Belvedere Apollo is standing with a perfect, the Venus de Milo, the perfect nude. You can divide it into squares and go, right.
Okay, when's the first time you see somebody throwing lightning bolts through the sky or somebody ducking arrows or somebody twisting on a crucifix? That's St. Francis, man. That's all Franciscan art. That's all. So that becomes my jam. And that's what I do at Syracuse. And I must say, I was with five women. Two of them remained friends. But they all resented me. Why?
Because I didn't have an undergrad degree. Oh. Because I was a weirdo. Yeah, you were. I was a total weirdo. Yeah, I didn't go to Rutgers, Harvard, Yale, UPenn, UMichigan, Johns Hopkins, any of these snotty places. I went to North Texas and played jazz, man. That's not art history.
did you have any classes at McGonagall no I didn't but I came in through the back door and essentially thanks to Gary Radke and Alan McGraw and Walter Lee and a lot of other people in the tutorial etc and Rab Hatfield who mentored me there I learned some stuff and went on to get the master's degree and then applied for a PhD at UCLA and NYU got accepted to both and because I had a kid kid kid kid stayed at UCLA and got a PhD and became a real smarty pants so
I get to say doctor yeah that ain't honorary because people meet actors yeah doctor look I got my PhD I was hooded two weeks later I'm on a golf course and there's a guy there he's like an investment broker yeah billionaire dude oh my god he says where'd you get your honorary degree in like it's not honorary and I'm standing there with a golf club I'm about to wrap it around his head and it was like ten years of my life I was about to say it takes at least seven and thank God my friend Brian Wozniak who was my first friend and student was a great guy he intercedes in my place and
He goes, hey, Joe, that's not honorary. He's the real deal. Renaissance Italian art history calls this guy out. He goes, what? Renaissance Italian. Thank God I had a speaker there. Yeah. Because I'm sitting there with my arms crossed like, listen to him. You had your own Cicero at that moment. Yeah, exactly. Cicero. Speaking of Cicero, we could talk about him forever, man. Oh, yeah. All day.
So what do you want to ask me?
Yes. My wife says that, but... But then again, she loves me. I think. Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's the thing about... But everyone, everyone doesn't think they can do it. I mean, you know, if you've got a one-track pony and you've got a 170 IQ like Albert Einstein or something like that, you know, one track, it's what you do and it's what you know.
If you're Mozart, I never forget my friends from improvisational theater, Peter Riegert and David Roshan, some other great actors, when Amadeus came out, right? There's a great article in the New York Times. It says, you know, Leopold would tell Wolfgang Mozart, you know, there's three.
Showing 141–160 of 668 · page 8 of 34
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