Conson Wilson Lecture Series
2002-2003 Speakers
Gerda Weissman Klein: September 9, 2002
Bernice Johnson Reagon: September 12, 2002
Morris Dees: September 17, 2002
Lynn Margulis: October 7, 2002
Maxine Kumin: October 8, 2002
Marcus Borg: October 17, 2002
Francis Fukuyama: November 4, 2002
Diane McWhorter: November 18, 2002
Stephen Carter: March 5, 2003
James Cone: March 26 and 27, 2003
Virginia Postrel: April 9, 2003
2002-2003 Schedule of Lectures
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Lecture by Gerda Weissman Klein
Monday, September 9 at 7 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - Author, historian, and speaker, Gerda Weissman Klein has captivated audiences worldwide with her powerful story about surviving the Holocaust. Her uplifting presentations take audiences through one of the darkest eras of our world's history.
In 1939, 15 year-old Gerda Weissman Klein's life would change forever as German troops invaded her home in Beilsko, Poland. She was cruelly separated from her parents and sent to a slave-labor camp. This day would be forever ingrained in Gerda's memory as it was the last time she would ever see her family again. Never losing hope, Klein would spend the next three years in a succession of slave-labor camps, until she was forced to walk in a 350-mile death march in which 2,000 women were subjected to exposure, starvation, and arbitrary execution. Despite such atrocities, Klein never lost the will to survive.
Klein's account of living through the Holocaust is documented in her autobiography, All But My Life, which has attained the status of a classic. The book depicts her view of the dark years of the Holocaust and her eventual liberation from a death march by her future husband, Kurt Klein, an American intelligence officer. Her testimony is so compelling that All But My Life has become required reading in some school districts throughout the U.S. Gerda and her late husband are also the authors of The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath, based on actual correspondence between Gerda and Kurt Klein following the war.
The Klein's story is portrayed in the film 'Testimony', a permanent exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1997, Klein was appointed to the council of the Holocaust Museum by President Clinton. The 1995 HBO documentary, 'One Survivor Remembers', in which Gerda Klein recounts some of her wartime experiences, won a TV Emmy Award, two Cable Ace Awards, and an Oscar.
A recipient of many honors, including six honorary doctorates, the Lion of Judah Award, and the Human Rights Award, given by the National Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, Gerda Klein has been featured on '60 Minutes' and appeared with husband Kurt on 'Nightline' following their inspiring meeting with parents, teachers, and students at Columbine High School after the tragedy there in 1999. She has authored several books, including All But My Life on which the Emmy and Academy Award-winning documentary 'One Survivor Remembers' is based.
Gerda and her husband established the Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation to combat hunger and intolerance. The Gerda and Kurt Klein Foundation partners with Dr. J. Larry Brown's Center on Hunger and Poverty, and with other national organizations to carry out their mutual mission to end hunger and promote tolerance and human rights.
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Lecture by Bernice Johnson Reagon
Thursday, September 12 at 8 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - Bernice Johnson Reagon is professor emeritus of History at American University, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, a founding member of the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and one of the world's leading authorities on African American sacred music. A member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and leader of the SNCC Freedom Singers, she served in the front ranks of the civil rights movement in the South during the 1960s. She will lecture on the critical but often overlooked role of music in the struggle for African American racial uplift.
More infomation about Bernice Johnson Reagon is available here.
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Lecture by Morris Dees
Tuesday, September 17 at 8 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - Morris Dees is co-founder and chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Through his work at the SPLC he has made a career of bringing legal challenges to hate groups throughout America and was responsible for successfully suing and effectively bankrupting the White Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist organization. His books include A Season For Justice, 1991; Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, 1993; and his latest book, Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, published in 1996. He will speak on 'Hope and Tolerance in the New Millennium'.
For more information about Morris Dees, please visit the SPLC website.
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Lecture by Lynn Margulis
Monday, October 7 at 7:30 P.M. in the Krannert Center Ballroom - Lynn Margul is a University of Massachusetts Distinguished Professor (Geoscience), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a 1999 awardee of the President's National Medal of Science. She has authored numerous books and countless journal articles.
Detailed information about Lynn Margulis is available here.
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Lecture by Maxine Kumin
Tuesday, October 8 at 7:30 P.M in the Berry College Chapel - Maxine Kumin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She will be reading from her poetry.
More information about Maxine Kumin is available here.
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Lecture by Marcus Borg
Thursday, October 17 at 7:30 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - Marcus Borg is an internationally known Bible scholar and a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of theologians examining the question of the Historical Jesus behind the Gospel narratives. He speaks at colleges, universities, and churches around the country and internationally. His academic post is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University. He is President of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars.
More information about Marcus Borg is available here.
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Lecture by Francis Fukuyama
Monday, November 4 at 7:30 P.M. in the Krannert Center Ballroom - Francis Fukuyama will be speaking on "Political Consequences of the Biotech Revolution." Dr. Fukuyama is the author of a number of books, including "Our Posthuman Future" (2002), "The Great Disruption" (1999), "Trust" (1995), and "The End of History and the Last Man Standing" (1991).
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Lecture by Diane McWhorter
Monday, November 18 at 8 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - Diane McWhorter is the author of Carry Me Home (published by Simon & Schuster), this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. A major work of history, investigative journalism that breaks new ground, and a personal memoir, Carry Me Home is a dramatic account of the civil rights era's climactic battle in Birmingham, as the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation.
"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was one of the most cataclysmic periods in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, King's child demonstrators faced down Commissioner Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation -- a spectacle that seemed to belong more in the Old Testament than in twentieth-century America.
More information on Diane McWhorter and Carry Me Home can be found here.
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Lecture by Stephen Carter
Wednesday, March 5 at 7:30 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel - The New York Times referred to him as one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, and Time magazine recognized him as one of the fifty leaders of the next century. Author, teacher and public speaker, Stephen Carter has become one of America's leading contemporary intellectuals. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. A prolific writer who has published seven critically acclaimed non-fiction books during the past nine years, he has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in our politics and culture to the role of integrity and civility in our daily lives.
Carter has now turned his formidable talents to the realm of fiction. The Emperor of Ocean Park, currently a New York Times bestseller, is his debut as a novelist, and one of the most highly-anticipated books of the year. The Emperor of Ocean Park is an extraordinary, large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. It is the story of a conservative federal judge who dies under suspicious circumstances, and of the investigation of his death and legacy by the judge's son, an African-American law professor. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard - old families who summer on Martha's Vineyard - and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. It tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime.
Professor Carter's writings have won praise from across the political spectrum. His last recent book, God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics, was published in the fall of 2000 to admiring reviews. His 1993 book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, was lauded by commentators as diverse as Anna Quindlen, William F. Buckley, and former President Bill Clinton. His 1998 book Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, was praised by, among others, Marian Wright Edelman, the late John Cardinal O'Connor, and former Senator Bill Bradley. His other books include The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (1998); Integrity (1996); The Confirmation Mess: Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process (1994); and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (1991).
Professor Carter is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a trustee of the Aspen Institute, where he moderates seminars for executives on values-based leadership. He has received honorary degrees from six schools, among them Notre Dame, Colgate, and the Virginia Theological Seminary. He was the first non-theologian to receive the prestigious Louisville-Grawemeyer Award in religion. He publishes widely in law reviews and the popular press, and has been a frequent guest on such television shows as "Nightline," "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," and "Face the Nation." He is also a columnist for Christianity Today.
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Lecture and Discussion by James Cone
Lecture on Wednesday, March 26 at 8 P.M. in the Berry College Chapel
Discussion on Thursday, March 27 at 11 A.M. in the Science Auditorium - James Hall Cone, the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at the Union Theological Seminary, is the preeminent Black theologian in the United States and the leading exponent for what is termed Black theology. The first major attempt to integrate Black Power with theology was Cone's book Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Here Cone developed the thesis that Black Power is "Christ's central message to twentieth century America," that Black Power means "complete emancipation of Black people from white oppression by whatever means Black people deem necessary," and that "Whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is Black, baby, with all the features which are so detestable to white society." Such rhetoric was not likely to win friends among white people, so consequently Cone became the target of a barrage of white criticism. What his critics failed to do was to read Cone's book from cover to cover, for in the final paragraph of his book he explains: "Being black in America has very little to do with skin color. To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.... Being reconciled to God does not mean that one's skin is physically black. It essentially depends on the color of your heart, soul, and mind." For Cone, then, blackness is a symbol for the oppressed and whiteness is a symbol for the oppressor. In his subsequent writings Cone consistently maintained the use of these symbols.
James Cone's influence continued to grow after the publication of his first book in 1969. He played a major role as catalyst in the emergence of liberation theologies throughout the Third World in their concern to free the oppressed from political, social, and economic misery. He was an effective spokesperson at the meetings of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, which beginning in 1976 brought together theologians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. One of the most remarkable qualities about James Cone was his ability and willingness to grow and change with the times as he confronted new challenges. As early as 1977 he had come to see that Christian theology must develop a world-embracing vision that extends far beyond the immediate concerns of Black America and the particularities of the Christian faith. He wrote in Cross Currents in 1977: "I think that the time has come for black theologians and church people to move beyond a mere reaction to white racism in America and begin to extend our vision of a new socially constructed humanity in the whole inhabited world.... For humanity is whole, and cannot be isolated into racial and national groups." Cone readily admitted that in his earlier years as a theologian he failed to appreciate that he was guilty of male chauvinism and sexist language, especially with respect to Black women. In the introduction to the revised edition of Black Theology and Black Power he wondered aloud, "With black women playing such a dominant role in the African-American liberation struggle, past and present, how could I have been so blind?"
Dr. Cone will deliver a public lecture on black theology on Wednesday, March 26. He will also lead a discussion for interested students and faculty on Thursday, March 27. This discussion will focus on black theology and the theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
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Lectures by Virginia Postrel
Wednesday, April 9 at 7:30 PM [Location TBA]
and as part of Business Week on
Thursday April 10 at 11 AM in Green 306 - Virginia Postrel, the author of The Future and Its Enemies, writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times business section every fourth Thursday. She also writes a column on the built environment for D Magazine, the Dallas city magazine. Her ongoing web commentary on Dynamist.com.
Postrel is the founder of the Franklin Society, a network of individuals who support the American tradition of free scientific inquiry and technological innovation in the pursuit of knowledge and the betterment of human life. Franklin Society member use the 21st-century version of Benjamin Franklin's printing press, the Internet, to engage in pamphleteering, petitioning, and other forms of activism in defense of freedom of inquiry and innovation.
From July 1989 to January 2000, Postrel was editor of Reason magazine. Under her leadership, Reason was selected as a finalist for the National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest honor, for essays in 1993 and public interest journalism in 1996 and 1998. She founded Reason Online, the magazine's website, in 1995. During 2000 and 2001, she served as Reason's editor-at-large.
Postrel has been a columnist for Forbes and its companion technology magazine Forbes ASAP. Her work also appears in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. She is widely recognized as, in Camille Paglia's words, "one of the smartest women in America."
She serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Center on Governance at UCLA. She has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Postrel has twice been a finalist in the commentary category of the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for her columns in Reason. In 1995, she received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award for Commentary.
Prior to becoming editor of the magazine in 1989, Postrel served as associate editor of Reason and, before that, as a reporter for Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.
She will present her Conson Wilson lecture on the night of April 9. She will also offer a lunchtime presentation on April 10 as part of Business Week.
More information about Virginia Postrel can be found here.