Events at the McFarland Center

Spring 2012

Thursday, February 2, 2012
Catholic Social Teaching, Bioethics and Justice — Lisa Cahill, the J. Donald Monan Professor of Theology at Boston College, will give a talk on global health access as well as debates in U.S. over access to health care. Her recent books include Bioethics and the Common Good and Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change. Learn more. One of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Friday, February 17, 2012
Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations — David Montgomery studies the evolution of topography and the influence of geomorphological processes on ecological systems and human societies. He is professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. Co-sponsored with CISS.
4:30 p.m., O'Neil 112

Tuesday, February 28, 2012
"The Words, Too, Will Nourish": Poetry and Resistance — Alan Rosen, a Holocaust scholar who teaches at Yad Vashem, will question if poetry written during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust is a form of resistance. If so, how and what does it resist? He will draw on, among others, the nourishing words of Avraham Sutzkever. Supported by the Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding.
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Wednesday, March 14, 2012
On the Ethics of Borders: Insights and Media Interventions by Migrant Justice Movements - Tamara Vukov is a visiting research professor and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University. Her talk will present and reflect upon some recent media activist and art practices that have emerged from migrant justice organizing networks in a number of locales in the global North over the past 10 years.
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Thursday, March 15, 2012
Annual Vocation of the Writer Lecture - One of the biggest names in contemporary essay today, Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. His Earth Works: Selected Essays appears in spring 2012. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. The Writers on Vocation series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Monday, March 19, 2012
Atheism from the Enlightenment to Freud — Wesley Wildman is professor of theology and ethics at Boston University, where he directs the doctoral program in religion and science. He co-founded the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, LiberalEvangelical.org, and the Spectrums Project. Co-sponsored by the Divine Cluster of Montserrat and the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture. 
Seelos Theater, 7:00 p.m.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thomas More Lecture on Faith, Work and Civic Life - Donna Winn '76  is a veteran of the financial industry and a Holy Cross trustee. She was president and CEO of OFI Private Investments, Inc., a subsidiary of OppenheimerFunds, Inc. until her retirement last year. Faced with life-or-death obstacles — she was working in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and last year she battled ovarian cancer — Winn has focused on attitude. "You don't get to pick the bad or good things that happen," she said. "You just have to survive them, and hopefully you will."
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What is it all about and why should we care? - Gabriel Bol Deng, founder and executive director of HOPE for Ariang Foundation, is one of Sudan's "Lost Boys" who escaped the Sudanese Civil War in 1987. He will talk about nation building efforts of South Sudan's newly established government, and its efforts to address the immediate and long-term needs of its population, including more than 360,000 refugees who have recently returned to their newly independent nation. Co-sponsored by the McFarland Center.
4:30 pm, Rehm Library

Thursday-Friday, March 22-23, 2012
The Other America: Then and Now — This conference will mark the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough analysis on poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington '47. Speakers including Harrington's biographer Maurice Isserman, Michael Kazin, David O'Brien, Thomas Sugrue, Peter Dreier, and Alan Wolfe will explore the impact of Harrington's book during the 1960s and '70s and its role in the development of Great Society programs. Friday's events will focus on the "other America" of today - including policies to address poverty, mass incarceration, farm workers, and youth and education - featuring a keynote address by Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, and with guest speakers including Annette Lareau, Bruce Western, Zama Coursen-Neff and Timothy Black.
Learn more.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Democratic Regression and Soft-Authoritarianism in Post-Civil War Sri Lanka — Neil DeVotta, associate professor of political science at Wake Forest University, focuses his research on South Asian security and politics, ethnicity and nationalism, ethnic conflict resolution, and democratic transition and consolidation. He is currently at work on a book titled From Civil War to Soft Authoritarianism: Ethnonationalism and Democratic Regression in Sri Lanka. Co-sponsored with Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Montserrat and the Department of History.
Noon, Hogan Room 320

Thursday, April 12, 2012
Can Industrial Food be Ethical? A Historical Perspective - Gabriella Petrick '89 is associate professor of nutrition, food studies, and history at George Mason University. Her forthcoming book, Industrializing Taste: Food Processing and the Transformation of the American Diet, 1900-1965, analyzes how new food processing techniques transformed the foods available to American consumers as well as how housewives incorporated these new industrial foods into their family's diet over the course of the last century.
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Thursday, April 19, 2012 RESCHEDULED FROM JANUARY
Along the Boundary of Faiths: Christianity and Islam on the 10th parallel - Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling regions in Africa and Asia where the highest concentrations of the world's Christians and Muslims live together and reported on it in her book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold is is senior fellow of the New America Foundation. Learn more. Her lecture is one of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library

CANCELLED
Monday, April 23, 2012
A World Cut in Two: Global Justice and the Traffic in Humans for Organs — Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chancellor's Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, is co-founder and director of Organs Watch, a program that researches human organ trafficking around the world. In 2009, her investigation of an international ring of organ sellers based in New York, New Jersey and Israel led to a number of arrests by the FBI.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Schindler's List Survivor Rena Finder will share her memories of the Holocaust. As a Jewish girl in Poland during World War II, she witnessed the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto and spent several weeks in Auschwitz. She and her mother were ultimately spared by German Christian industrialist Oskar Schindler. (A digitally-remastered version of Schindler's List will be shown in the Seelos Theater on Sunday, April 22 at 6:30 p.m.)
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany — Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University, has written extensively on how Jews, and particularly Jewish women, negotiated everyday life and coped with the repression of everyday sociability in Hitler's Germany. Her most recent book, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945, extended the cross-cultural story to encompass Jewish refugees who made their way to the Dominican Republic. This lecture is sponsored by the Derrick Lecture Fund of the Department of History, with additional support from Peace and Conflict Studies, Philosophy, and the McFarland Center.
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

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