Spring Humanities Symposium
23-27 February 2009
The purpose of this annual Symposium is to provide a collaborative liberal arts contribution to the college community, based on campus-wide inquiry into/reflection on a common theme. This promotes community conversation and provides substantial evidence for the relevance (both inside and outside the classroom) of a liberal education. The vitality of campus intellectual life will be significantly enhanced by widespread participation in the Symposium.
The Executive Committee of the Center for Public Humanities wishes to thank all faculty members and students who sent in theme suggestions for the Spring 2009 Humanities Symposium. After carefully reviewing the many suggestions received from every department in the School, the Executive Committee has settled on the theme listed below.
The theme is designed to be evocative of intersecting issues rather than limiting in scope. So we anticipate that each department and its respective faculty and students can shape an event to contribute to the Symposium as a whole that allows for disciplinary and collaborative exploration of relevant issues.
How do our cherished values find public expression? Should religion be treated as belonging to the domain of public or private? What is the role of religion within a secular polity? While such questions point to the importance of faith in public life, they need not be confined to the domain of religion. We also publicly express our faith in everything from stock markets to abstract ideals like love, justice, equality, and humanity. It is all too clear that human faith, both in its religious and non-religious manifestations, finds public expression with profound implications, touching almost every sphere of human life—politics, culture, society, economics, and even the world of ideas. Such public expressions of faith raise a range of fascinating questions that merit exploration, debate, and dialogue from a variety of perspectives. Faith in the Public Square is good to think and talk about.
The 2009 Spring Humanities Symposium provides an opportunity for the Messiah College community to explore the many aspects of faith in the public square as a driving force in human life. The symposium also welcomes proposals that will stretch these conventional understandings of faith in the public square to include diverse cultural, historical, and disciplinary expressions of this theme. The Center for Public Humanities’ Executive Committee is planning this symposium with the hope that it will provide the campus with a public intellectual conversation that contributes to our common life together and to our understanding of the wider world. The following opportunities to participate are anticipated (in no particular order of preference or importance):
1. A Film Series on the theme.
2. Faculty lectures on aspects of this theme relevant to their disciplinary scholarship and/or teaching.
3. Department- or office-sponsored events that provide an opportunity to explore this theme from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
4. Jointly-sponsored collaborative (multi-departmental or multi-disciplinary) faculty sessions on the theme.
5. Course-related sessions sponsored by individual class cadres (e.g. First-Year Seminar or Senior Seminar classes, IDS or disciplinary-courses).
6. Student honors projects session (for those whose research relates to the theme).
7. Student organization-sponsored colloquia on aspects of the theme. (e.g. Honor Societies, Academic Student Clubs, Boyer Scholars, SGA, etc.)
8. Faculty workshops on teaching aspects of this theme in humanities classes
9. Faculty-Student colloquia (panel discussions) for discussions on aspects of this theme 10. Poetry readings of selections that have a bearing on aspects of the theme
11. A keynote lecture by an individual of national repute.
12. Campus entities could jointly sponsor an event with the Center for the Humanities: Sider Institute, Gender Studies Project, Boyer Center, Cultural Studies Dialogue group, Micah Partnership, La Alianza Latina, Phi Omega Chi, WVMM, Swinging Bridge, Minnemingo Review, SGA, SAB, Student Affairs, Agape Center, External Programs, etc.
13. Guest lecturers invited to campus for a presentation session.
14. Additional suggestions you might have (e.g. brown bag lunch discussion, alternative chapels, exhibitions, etc.)
All faculty members, campus offices, and student organizations in the college are requested to propose activities of this sort to make the Symposium a celebration of common learning that helps the entire campus community think carefully about the year’s chosen theme. Presentations may be held both individually or jointly by departments, faculty groups, student groups, and centers, as well as by individual faculty members. Here are some potential topics for events that include every department and discipline in the college. Needless to say, this list does not claim to be exhaustive. It is merely descriptive and suggestive.
Our keynote speaker for the 2009 Spring Humanities Symposium will be Dr. Alan Wolfe, who will deliver his keynote address on Thursday 26 February, 2009. Dr. Wolfe is a noted public intellectual who well known for his work on American Politics and Religion. He is currently the Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life as well as Professor of Political Science, at Boston College. He has researched, written, taught and lectured extensively on the subject of Politics, Morals, American Religion and Democracy, and the role of the Public Intellectual. With numerous books to his credit, he contributes regularly to a number of journals, newspapers, and magazines. He currently chairs a task force of the American Political Science Association on “Religion and Democracy in America.” He also serves on the advisory boards of Humanity in Action and the Future of American Democracy Foundation, and is on the president’s advisory board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. In the fall of 2004, Professor Wolfe was the George H.W. Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
- Public expressions of Religious life—work on pilgrimages, festivals, liturgies, rituals, missionaries, buildings
- Public expressions of faith and architecture, arts, music
- Churches in the Civil Rights Movement
- Religion and Public Policy
- Religion, Secularism, Pluralism, and Democracy
- Religious freedom and Politics/Nationalism
- Religious Faith in Higher Education/Scholarship
- Clash of Civilizations: The Public manifestations of Faith and Culture
- Debates about religion and citizenship in public education
- Faith in ideals, institutions, and practices and their linkages with the making of public policy
- Public expressions of faith in or debates about Theological & Philosophical ideals, theories, practices
- The state, “charitable choice” and faith based institutions
- Papers engaging the work of, for instance, Robert Audi, Ernest Boyer, Alexis DeTocqueville, E.J. Dionne, Jurgen Habermas, Stanley Hauerwas, Hugh Heclo, Richard Hughes, Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, Alan Wolfe, Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Howard Yoder
- Faith in ideals like Democracy, Justice, Individualism, Progress, Development, Nationalism and their public expressions
- Faith in economic institutions like markets, money, choice and their ramifications for social/public life
- Interrogations of our notions of Public vs. Private in a “post-secular age”
- Faith and Service-Learning
- Christian Ministry, Biblical interpretation, & Higher Education in a “post-secular age”
- Anabaptism & the state
The Executive Committee of the Center for Public Humanities welcomes proposals from all departments, faculty members, campus offices, and student groups about events you would like to sponsor during the Symposium. Given our numbers this should prove to be an enriching event with a minimum of preparation. We do not wish this to be a burdensome matter, so if each individual finds involvement in one event on campus during the Symposium we can certainly spread the effort around and enjoy its fruits throughout the event.
We need to receive your proposals by 20 September 2008 to allow enough time to make arrangements for facilities and equipment in support of your event and to create a combined calendar of events. The Director of the Center for Public Humanities in conjunction with the Dean of Humanities’ office will handle most logistical matters for you. The Executive Committee strongly encourages session proposals that bring together a range of participants (both speakers and audiences) so as to maximize the opportunity for common conversation across disciplines at the sessions. You will find the attached Symposium Session Proposal Form to complete and submit before the deadline. So please give this Symposium serious consideration, talk to colleagues and students about your ideas, and plan to make a proposal. Just as soon as you are ready to submit a proposal we will take it, anytime from this point onward! We look forward to your excellent ideas, which will no doubt make the Symposium a success and useful across campus.
*Finally, we heartily encourage everyone
to consider how you might fit this theme creatively into your coursework (First Year Seminars, Senior Seminars, Honors Projects, General Education or Major classes, etc.) or co-curricluar programming – perhaps by selecting a particular text, video, movie, theme, or integrating attendance at the Symposium into your spring term syllabus – so that we can have more touch points between our in-class and out-of-class conversations and exchanges of ideas.
