2008
Susan Tweit
Thursday, June 5 - Does the Earth need People, No-unless . . . we learn to live more generously.
Friday, June 7 - Does the Earth need People, Getting to Yes.
Susan J. Tweit is an award-winning author who began her career as a plant ecologist studying grizzly bear habitat and wildfires. She turned to writing when she realized she loved the stories in the data more than collecting the data. Her passionate articulation of humans' relationship with the "community of the land" - nature and the landscapes we love - has earned her accolades including a Silver Eddie, the Oscar of magazine awards, for "The Last Refuge" in National Parks magazine and a spot on the Denver Post's "Colorado Voices" panel - twice. Her ten books include Colorado Less Traveled, a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards, and The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes, hailed as "a joy to read" by High Country News. Her hundreds of articles and commentaries have been published in media as diverse as Audubon, Popular Mechanics, and the Los Angeles Times, and heard on the Martha Stewart Living Radio Network.
Dr. Peter Vitousek
Monday, August 11 - Global Environmental Change: Certainties and Uncertainties.
Dr. Peter Vitousek is Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resource Studies in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1984. His research interests include understanding the cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, on scales from local to global; analyzing human-land interactions; and evaluating biological invasions by exotic species. Much of his work is based in the Hawaiian Islands. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While climate change – global warming – is the most discussed and debated of these changes, human influences on the composition of the atmosphere, the land surface, the dynamics of marine populations, and the distributions of species may be equally important.
Dr. Walid Phares
Thursday, August 28 - Future Jihad and The War of Ideas.
Friday, August 29 - Jihad in America.
Professor Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow and the director for Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington (2001-2007). He is also a Visiting Fellow with the European Foundation for Democracies in Brussels (2006-2007). He has been a Professor of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Religious Conflict at the Department of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) from 1993 to 2006.
2007
Craig Hamilton
Friday, June 8 - Can evolutionary science and religious faith can ultimately find common ground.
Saturday, June 9 - How brain science is giving us a window into the nature of our minds-and ourselves.
Best known as the former Senior Editor of What is Enlightenment? magazine, founding member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute and regularly heard on New Dimensions Radio. Craig Hamilton is an independent researcher, writer, broadcaster, and lecturer with a passion for the evolution of consciousness. He is best known for his work as Senior Editor of the award- winning What Is Enlightenment? magazine. His articles have examined the landscape of an emerging evolutionary spirituality and have contributed significantly to the forging of a new, scientifically informed spiritual worldview bridging the great wisdom traditions of both the East and the West.
Dr. Roger Pielke
Friday August 31 - Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide.
Dr. Pielke is currently a Senior Research Scientist in CIRES and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (PAOS) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (November 2005 -present). He is also an Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.
Dr. Pielke has studied terrain-induced mesoscale systems, including the development of a three-dimensional mesoscale model of the sea breeze, for which he received the NOAA Distinguished Authorship Award for 1974. Dr. Pielke has worked for NOAA's Experimental Meteorology Lab, The University of Virginia, and Colorado State University. He served as Colorado State Climatologist from 1999-2006.
2006
Richard D. Lamm
Friday, June 9 - The Brave New World of Public Policy.
Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado (1975-1987). Lamm has appeared on virtually every national news program, including Buchanan & Press (MSNBC), Larry King Live and Inside Politics (CNN), Today (NBC), Meet the Press (NBC), ABC's Good Morning America, Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and CBS's Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-wrote six books: A California Conspiracy, Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000, The Immigration. Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, Pioneers & Politicians and The Angry West. His two latest books are: The Brave New World of Healthcare and Two Wands, One Nation: an Essay on Race and Community in America. Lamm was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and The Environment.
Dr. Jeremy Adams
Friday, August 11 - Cicero's intention to synthesize the best Greek philosophies of his day, and to provide his native Latin a philosophical vocabulary it had never developed.
Saturday, August 12 - Ciceronisms of the Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and even Modern eras: politics, ethics, and literary culture - even maybe chivalry?
Jeremy Adams was educated at Jesuit High School, New Orleans; Georgetown College, Washington, D.C.; Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass. (A.B. magna cum laude in history, 1955); Harvard University (A.M., 1961; Ph.D. in history, 1967). He was a Professor of History, Southern Methodist University, from 1974 - 2004. Since 2004 he has been an Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor.
His bibliography of published writings includes 6 books and more than 40 scholarly articles. He has also lectured throughout the world. He was Resident Professor, S.M.U. in Spain (Madrid & Toledo), Oxford, and Paris and director in Spain (Madrid and Toledo) and Paris. Dr. Adams is currently rewriting his cultural history book, "Multicultural New Orleans," from a post- Katrina perspective. Dr. Adams will discuss Cicero's intention to synthesize the best Greek philosophies of his day, and to provide his native Latin a philosophical vocabulary it had never developed. Most of this ambitious project was done in periods of Cicero's retirement from political life, but these periods were too brief for him to achieve that goal. Success would come over the next two millennia.
2005
Father David Burrell, Ph.D.
The possibility of peace between religions, including Christianity and Islam.
Hesburgh Professor in Philosophy and Religion University of Notre Dame and Author of Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. Father Burrell has worked in comparative issues in philosophical theology in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam since 1982. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965 and has been on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame since 1964. Father Burrell's publications include Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, and Aquinas; Faith of Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence (Notre Dame, 1986), Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, 1993), and two translations of al-Ghazali. He has published eight books and over one hundred articles on all areas of the philosophy of religion.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Nickel-And-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Barbara Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander in Butte, Montana in 1941. Ehrenreich attended Reed College, studying chemistry and physics; she then earned a doctorate in cell biology from Rockefeller University. The Vietnam War put an end to Ehrenreich's budding career in science. One day in 1966, in a lab at Rockefeller, a fellow grad student lamented, "Damn, Barbara, they're going to draft me! Let's write a letter to the president." Barbara's vocation as a writer and social activist was born. Her most recent book, "Nickel and Dimed," was Ehrenreich's account of her undercover foray into low- paying jobs.
Previously, she spent ten years researching history, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology for the book "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."
2004
Dr. Lynn Orr
May 15 - Energy, CO2 and Global Change: The Challenge Ahead.
Director-Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University. His research activities focus on the interactions of fluid phase behavior with multiphase flow in porous media, the design of gas injection processes for enhanced oil recovery, and C02 sequestration in subsurface porous media. He earned a Stanford B.Sc. in chemical engineering in 1969, and his Ph.D., also in chemical engineering, from the University of Minnesota in 1976. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1985.
Dr. Carroll Saussy
August 20 - The Art of Growing Old.
August 21 - Aging: Challenges and Hopeful Signs.
Dr. Carroll Saussy is Wesley Theological Seminary, Howard Chandler Robbins Emerita Professor of Pastoral Theology and Care. Dr. Saussy left a counseling and teaching ministry at San Francisco Theological Seminary to join the faculty at Wesley where she taught for fourteen years. She is the author of, “God Images and Self-Esteem: Empowering Women in a Patriarchal Society”, "The Gift of Anger: A Call to Faithful Action”, and “The Art of Growing Old: A Guide to Faithful Aging.”
Dr. Lynn Japinga
Thursday, July 31 - How Christian tradition has been used to deny women positions of power and authority in both church and society.
Friday, August 1 - Explores the lives of several women who were rooted in the Christian tradition and exercised significant leadership in both church and society.
Dr. Japinga is an Associate Professor of religion at Hope College, where she has taught since 1992. Dr. Lynn Japinga specializes in the history of American religion and feminist theology. She has written over 70 published works. She has been honored with numerous awards such as Van Raalte Institute Fellow, General Grant, Louisville Institute of American Protestantism, and Samuel Robinson Prize, Princeton Seminary awards. Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidential nomination has kept bloggers and journalists busy analyzing her clothes, her laugh, her eyes, and her family. It has also raised questions about whether women should be leaders. These lectures will examine the mixed messages from the Christian tradition about women in leadership.
Dr. Pamela Matson
Tuesday, August 12 - A Transition to Sustainability: Reconciling the Needs of People and the Planet in the 21st Century.
Dr. Matson is a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Science, she is the founding co-chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, a past president of the Ecological Society of America, and serves on Board of the World Wildlife Fund. At Stanford, she co-leads the Initiative on Environment and Sustainability, an effort that brings together faculty from around the university to help solve critical resource and environment challenges of the century. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1997 following positions as professor at UC Berkeley and research scientist at NASA. She earned her B.S. at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, M.S. at Indiana University, and Ph.D. at Oregon State University.
He is a senior lecturer on the War on Terror at the LLS Program of FAU. Professor Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow and the director for Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington (2001-2007). He is also a Visiting Fellow with the European Foundation for Democracies in Brussels (2006-2007). He has been a Professor of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Religious Conflict at the Department of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) from 1993 to 2006. He is a senior lecturer on the War on Terror at the LLS Program of FAU.
Brigadier General Mal Wakin, Ph.D.
Thursday, August 16 - What are the common sense characteristics of our moral judgments; which popular moral theories are catastrophic?
Friday, August 17 - What kind of ethics is appropriate for the military profession and can there really be moral constraints once the shooting starts?
Malham M. Wakin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He has taught at the Air Force Academy since 1959 and served as Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, Chairman of the Humanities Division, Assistant Dean, and Associate Dean. He served on active duty with the Air Force from 1953 to 1995. He holds a number of military decorations including the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit (three). He has authored or edited five books, the most recent being Integrity First, Reflections of a Military Philosopher. After retiring in the rank of Brigadier General in 1995, General Wakin served the Air Force Academy for another two years as the Lyon Chair Professor of Professional Ethics.
Heinrich von Staden, Ph.D.
Thursday, September 20 - The relations between science, religion, and philosophy from the classical and Hellenistic periods.
Heinrich von Staden, Professor of Classics and History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has written on numerous topics in ancient Greek and Roman science, medicine, philosophy, and literary theory, from the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD. Drawing on a wide range of scientific, philosophical, literary, and religious sources, he has contributed to the transformation of the history of ancient science and medicine, particularly of the Hellenistic period. His book Herophilus: the Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (1989, reprinted 1994) has been acclaimed as a major contribution to our understanding of "the forgotten revolution."
Dr. Robert Mann
Thursday, July 13 - The long-standing goal of physics, which has been to unify all of the phenomena of nature into one complete and coherent picture.
Friday July 14 - The theoretical work on the theory of everything and recent scientific observations in cosmology that suggest a new task: explaining why there is something rather than everything.
Chair of the Physics Department at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Robert Mann is an affiliate member of the newly-established Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and has served on several academic and scientific advisory boards, including two grant selections committees of the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ontario College of Graduate Studies, and the Institute for Quantum Computing. His research interests are in black holes, quantum gravity, particle physics, quantum information, chaotic phenomena, and the relationship between science and religion. He is a Templeton Course Prize winner for his course on "Faith & Science Faith." He has published over 200 articles in scientific journals, and has given over 150 invited talks.
Dr. Michael Shermer
Friday, September 15 - Why Darwin Matters: The Case for Evolution and Against Intelligent Design.
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown.
He is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God.
Dr. John Dominic Crossan
The Historical Jesus.
Author of: The Birth of Christianity, The Historical Jesus, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Who Killed Jesus, The Birth of Christianity Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, and In Search of Paul: How Jesus' Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom.
Dr. John Dominic Crossan is a leading biblical scholar, internationally known lecturer and best-selling author. He was educated in Ireland at Maynooth College, in Rome at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and in Jerusalem at the Ecole Biblique. Crossan was a member of the 13th-century Roman Catholic religious order, the Servites, and an ordained priest from 1957 to 1969. He taught at DePaul University for 25 years. He was chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature from 1992-1998. He has contributed articles and reviews for dozens of journals and has written 18 books over the last 30 years. Crossan's interviews include The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Larry King Live and the ABC special "The Search for Jesus" with Peter Jennings.
Dr. Phil Hefner
The Physicist and The Poet
Dr. Phil Hefner is a Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and the Editor-in-Chief, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. He is also the Senior Fellow, Metanexus Institute and Zygon Center for Religion and Science and a Ordained Minister, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. His bibliography of published writings includes 7 books and more than 150 scholarly articles, about half of which deal with religion and the natural sciences, while the other half deal with traditional historical and theological issues.
Dr. Vine Deloria, Jr., J.D.
June 19 - Native American Philosophy & Religion.
Dr. Deloria has a Master of Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Colorado in 1970. His works promote Native American cultural nationalism and a greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy. He has written numerous books such as God is Red: A Native View of Religion, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact.
2003
Dr. Karl E. Peters
August 22 - Dancing with the Sacred: Weaving Lives in a Changing Independent World.
August 23 - Dancing with the Scared: Living Creatively in Harmony with our Natural Family.
Dr. Peters is co-editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. He teaches at the University of Hartford and Hartford Seminary in his home state of Connecticut.