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Past Events: 2011-2012

FALL 2011

August 18-19, 2011
Faculty seminar on Desiderius Erasmus - Readings and discussions of major works by Erasmus, including his pivotal "In Praise of Folly." Organized by EnglshProfessor Lee Oser and sponsored by the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.

September 8, 2011
Thomas More Lecture on Faith, Work and Civic Life - María Eugenia Ferré Rangel '89, president of El Nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico's largest daily newspaper
 
September 22, 2011
Memory, Politics and Forgiveness: A Gandhian Perspective - Rev. George Pattery S.J., an International Visiting Jesuit Scholar for the Fall 2011 semester at Holy Cross

October 5, 2011
Modern Day Slavery across International Borders - E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery and a fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University
 
October 17, 2011
Stuck: Why Israel is in so much trouble and how it can dig out - Nir Eisikovits teaches legal and political philosophy at Suffolk University, where he co-founded and directs the Graduate Program in Ethics and Public Policy. Supported by the Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding and co-sponsored with Peace and Conflict Studies.

October 18, 2011
The Resurgence of Religion in Global Politics - Monica Duffy Toft, associate professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-author of God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics
 
October 27, 2011
Poor Economics: Rethinking anti-poverty policy - Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and author of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

November 8, 2011
Ignatius Loyola and Why It's Not Quite Enough to Do What Jesus Would Do - Philip Endean, S.J., teaches theology at Campion Hall, Oxford University, and is author of Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality

November 9, 2011
Ten Years of War in Afghanistan: The Costs, Consequences and a Way Out - U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Matthew Hoh, a former Foreign Service officer and former Marine Corps captain

November 14, 2011
Literature and the Feeling of Aliveness - Lisa Ruddick, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago 

November 15, 2011
Are We All Hindus Now? - Rev. Francis Britto, S.J., an International Visiting Jesuit Scholar
 
November 16, 2011
Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism — Author Paula Fredriksen is William Goodwin Aurelio Chair Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. Presented with the Worcester JCC and supported by the Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding.

December 9, 2011
The Contours of Catholic Life and Practice Today: Challenges and opportunities in the study of global Catholicism - A colloquium introducing the McFarland's Center global initiative on Catholics and Cultures, featuring talks by Rowena Robinson, professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay; Rev. Thomas Casey, S.J., dean of the faculty of missiology at the Gregorian University; and Robert Orsi, professor of religion and the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University.

SPRING 2012

February 2, 2012
Catholic Social Teaching, Bioethics and Justice - Lisa Cahill, the J. Donald Monan Professor of Theology at Boston College and author of Bioethics and the Common Good and Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change. One of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.

February 17, 2012
Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations - David Montgomery, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. Co-sponsored with CISS.

February 28, 2012
"The Words, Too, Will Nourish": Poetry and Resistance - Alan Rosen, a scholar of Holocaust literature who teaches at Yad Vashem. Supported by the Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding.

March 14, 2012
On the Ethics of Borders: Insights and Media Interventions by Migrant Justice Movements - Tamara Vukov, 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.

March 15, 2012
Annual Vocation of the Writer Lecture - Scott Russell Sanders, author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, A Private History of Awe, A Conservationist Manifesto, and Earth Works: Selected Essays. Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.

March 19, 2012
Atheism from the Enlightenment to Freud - Wesley Wildman, professor of theology and ethics at Boston University, where he directs the doctoral program in religion and science. Co-sponsored by the Divine Cluster of Montserrat and the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.

March 20, 2012
Thomas More Lecture on Faith, Work and Civic Life - Donna Winn '76, a Holy Cross trustee, and president and CEO of OFI Private Investments, Inc., a subsidiary of OppenheimerFunds, Inc. until her retirement last year.

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 and one of Sudan's "Lost Boys" who escaped the Sudanese Civil War in 1987. Co-sponsored by the McFarland Center.

March 22-23, 2012
The Other America Then and Now - Marking the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough analysis on poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington '47. Speakers included Harrington's biographer Maurice Isserman, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, and many others.

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 and author of the forthcoming book, 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.

April 12, 2012
Can Industrial Food be Ethical? A Historical Perspective - Gabriella Petrick '89, associate professor of nutrition, food studies, and history at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book, Industrializing Taste: Food Processing and the Transformation of the American Diet, 1900-1965.

April 19, 2012
Along the Boundary of Faiths: Christianity and Islam on the 10th parallel - Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. One of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.

April 24, 2012
An Oral History of a Holocaust and Schindler's List Survivor - Rena Ferber Finder shares how her family was forced into a ghetto in Kracow, her father and grandparents were taken away, and she survived three weeks in Auschwitz before being ultimately saved by German Industrialist Oskar Schindler.

April 25, 2012
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany - Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University and author of Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945. Sponsored by the Derrick Lecture Fund of the Department of History, with additional support from Peace and Conflict Studies, Philosophy, and the McFarland Center.