Distinguished Lectures - 2010 Overview

Seth Shostak is a Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. He has an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies and has published approximately sixty papers in professional journals. More than a decade, he worked at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, in Groningen, The Netherlands, using the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope. He also founded and ran a company producing computer animation for TV.

Frequently interviewed for radio and TV, Seth has recently been seen and/or heard on Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, History Channel, the BBC, “Nightline,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Good Morning America,” “Larry King Live,” “Coast to Coast AM,” NPR, CNN News, and National Geographic Television. He is the host of a one-hour weekly radio program on astrobiology entitled “Are We Alone?”

The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is now into its fifth decade, and we still haven't uncovered a confirmed peep from any cosmic company. Could this mean that finding aliens, even if they exist, is a project for the ages – one that might take centuries or longer? New technologies for use in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) suggest that, despite the continued dearth of signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off – that we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations within a few decades. What would contact tell us, and what would it mean to us and to our descendants?

Dr. William Everett is a Herbert Gezork Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Emeritus, at Andover Newton Theological School. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he was educated at Wesleyan University (B.A.), Yale Divinity School (B.D.), and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Ph.D.). After completing his graduate studies, he taught for fifteen years at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee and then for ten years in Atlanta at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, where he also directed Candler's professional doctoral programs. His subsequent tenure at Andover Newton focused on issues of symbolism and ethics, ecology, and restorative justice. He has exercised lay leadership in Baptist and Methodist churches and has been a consultant to Lutheran, Roman Catholic and various ecumenical bodies. In the 80s Everett and his wife Sylvia developed the OIKOS Project on Work, Family, and Faith - a program of research and adult education.

In Thursday’s lecture Dr. Everett will lift up the role of re-creating common memory in American and South African struggles for justice and reconciliation, with particular attention to memories of slavery and expropriation of the land of indigenous peoples.

Friday, Everett will explore our ecological crises which requires that we re-position ourselves in relation to the rest of the natural world. The challenge of recovering common memory leads us to the task of re-establishing our communication – our empathy – with that world. To do this he will introduce people to the way earth communicates with the characters in his “eco-historical” novel, Red Clay, Blood River.

The Sagstetters have been exploring the backcountry of the American West and Southwest as a researcher, writer and photographer team. They were a correspondent team for the Denver Post for two years. The Sagstetter by-line has appeared on hundreds of magazine articles to date.

They have authored The Mining Camps Speak, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Telluride Blanket, and The Cliff Dwellings Speak. They produced four prime-time documentary films for television. Their film, The Mystery of Huajatolla (Wah-ha-TOY-ah), went on to win an award at the Aspen Arts Film Festival.

Matt Mikulich has developed a show combining his interest in mining and the history of Colorado with his background in the acoustic guitar. This show is entitled "The History of Leadville: Stories and Songs.”

Scott Adams plays back-up guitar for the performances. Scott is an accomplished finger-style guitarist. All shows include some narration and a number of songs. Both Scott and Matt are also acoustic guitar builders.

Dr. Yaron Brook is a prominent advocate for Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand. As president of the Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization based in Irvine, California, he is interviewed frequently in the media and has appeared regularly on the Fox Business Network to debate and discuss current economic and financial news from the Objectivist viewpoint.

Dr. Brook is a frequent guest on a variety of radio and TV shows, having appeared on Fox Business News, Fox News, Glenn Beck, The O'Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, At Large with Geraldo Rivera, CNN (Talkback Live), CNBC (CNBC Reports, Closing Bell and On the Money), and C-SPAN.

In Thursday’s lecture, Brook focuses on capitalism’s undisputed record of wealth generation, noting that it has always functioned under a cloud of moral suspicion. In a culture that venerates Mother Teresa as a paragon of virtue, businessmen sit in stoic silence while their pursuit of profits is denounced as selfish greed.

Society tells businessmen to sacrifice, to serve others, to “give back”— counting on their acceptance of self-interest as a moral crime, with chronic guilt its penance. It is time America heard the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism. In Friday’s lecture, Brook will discuss how, in 1969, Ayn Rand examined the cultural significance of two high-profile, but very different events: Woodstock and the Apollo 11 launch. In her lecture, "Apollo and Dionysus," Rand showed how philosophical ideas play out in a culture. She showed why these two events were a product of a long-standing philosophical dichotomy, reason versus emotion.

In this talk, Yaron Brook considers how these two opposing forces, reason and emotionalism, have manifested themselves in American culture in the ensuing decades.

DR. Kent Ira Groff, a spiritual companion for journeyers and leaders and a writer in Denver, leads seminars and retreats at campuses and conference centers in the U.S. and abroad. As founding mentor of Oasis Ministries and former adjunct professor at Lancaster Theological Seminary (Pa.), he has a passion to transform shopworn religious language into lived experience.

Thursday’s lecture will explore how barriers to believing, like religious violence or shopworn God-talk, become bridges to a new level faith. Groff will look at faith “from below” (rather than doctrines “from above”), showing how bits of grace in the grit of ordinary experience embody the deepest spiritual reality of Christianity and other faiths.

In Friday’s discussion Dr. Groff will review how you can put together sacred and secular, success and suffering. He will also examine the difference between a job and a vocation. Seekers and leaders, students and teachers, workers and corporate leaders long to find meaning in our work and relationships in each stage of life. Groff will explore how sexuality relates to our deepest desires for spiritual intimacy and vocational generativity.

In each lecture Groff will draw from his award-winning book What Would I Believe if I Didn’t Believe Anything?: A Handbook for Spiritual Orphans and from Facing East, Praying West with his experience in India and other cultures.

Charles Armstrong
Science - Philosophy
	Thursday, September 23 - 7:00 pm "The Future of Human Spaceflight" Saturday, September 25 - 10:00 am "The Space Exploration Mission" Held in Buena Vista

Charles Armstrong is a member of NASA’s Human Spaceflight community. He is currently the Systems Engineering and Integration Manager for Processes and Plans for Project Orion, NASA’s upcoming replacement for the Space Shuttle and the vehicle destined to take humans back to the Moon. Charlie is indeed what you might call a Rocket Scientist! During his 30 year career at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Charlie has worked on a variety of major NASA projects or programs including the Space Shuttle, Shuttle-Mir, International Space Station, Assured Crew Return Vehicle, Orbital Space Plane and Project Orion.

With the completion of the International Space Station and imminent retirement of the Space Shuttle, the future of human spaceflight is at a crossroads. In 2004 President Bush announced the National Vision for Space Exploration for taking humans back to the Moon and onto Mars. Six years later the Constellation Program is in full swing. In 2009 President Obama commissioned a review of U.S. human spaceflight plans. The review to assessed the progress of the Constellation Program and its ability to be successful based on its budget at that time.

In October 2009 the commission delivered its report to the President. As of January 2010, NASA awaits a decision from the President and Congress as to its future and its mission. In Friday’s talk Mr. Armstrong will discuss the current thinking with regard to the future of human spaceflight and discuss the topics of the goals of human spaceflight, the implementation of those goals, and the role of commercial space transportation in the accomplishment of those goals.

Why explore space? What has been accomplished? These two questions will be the basis for Mr. Armstrong’s wide-ranging presentation as he discusses the political and economic reasons for space exploration as well as the history of space exploration from its earliest days through the present including the exploration of the planets and beyond. Along the way the challenges of continued robotic and human exploration of our solar system and beyond will be discussed.

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