Lecture Series

In keeping with the Ethics/Religion and Society Focus' purpose of encouraging the ethical and religious analysis of socially significant issues, Xavier University has established a lecture series to bring to campus prominent intellectuals and public leaders having diverse perspectives on a specific issue. The speakers present a public lecture or presentation, followed by discussion and a reception. A discussion with Xavier faculty, staff, and students is usually held on the following day.

View prior Lecture Series events »

Announcing a new Ethics/Religion and Society Lecture Series

Xavier University

2011-2014

“Justice, Tolerance, and Diversity”

The purpose of the lecture series is to debate the meanings of justice, tolerance and diversity as well as their relationship to each other.  How do different definitions of or approaches to justice affect the understandings of tolerance and diversity?  Likewise, how does one’s understanding of diversity affect one’s view of justice?  Which differences are most significant and which must be tolerated? 

Please visit the Ethics/Religion and Society website as more speakers are added and dates are confirmed: http://www.xavier.edu/ers/  To become part of the Ethics/Religion lecture series email updates, write: frickman@xavier.edu

In addition to the outside speakers’ series, there will be a Xavier University faculty series in the fall semester and a student series in the spring.  The public is welcome at all lectures, and all lectures are free.

Outside Speakers’ Series

2011-12

Remi Brague: Thursday, September 22, 2011; James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at the Cintas Center, 7:00 pm.  Prof. Brague teaches Arabic and religious philosophy at the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He is one of the foremost authorities on the diversity of influences in Western civilization, particularly with regard to the relation of Islamic, Jewish and Latin sources of European culture.  Among his works translated into English are: The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (University Of Chicago Press, 2011); Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (St. Augustine Press, 2009); The Law of God: The Philosophical History of An Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2008); The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 

Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres: Sunday, September 25, 2011; James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at the Cintas Center, 7:00 pm.  Prof. Guinier became the first woman of color tenured professor at the Harvard Law School.  When she was nominated by President Clinton to head the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, her writings on race, representative democracy and affirmative action became the subject of a fierce debate, and her writings continue to be at the forefront of political and legal discussions of justice and minority rights.  Among her many publications are The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (The Free Press, 1994) and, with Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002).   Prof. Torres teaches law at the University of Texas.  He has written extensively on critical race theory and environmental ethics.  He has been president of the Association of American Law Schools, he has served in the Justice Department, and he has been recognized for his work on behalf of Latino legal rights.  The title of the lecture is: “Just Diversity: Why We Need a New Grammar of Race, Class and Power.”

Russell Hittinger: Sunday, October 30, 2011; James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at the Cintas Center, 7:00 pm.  Prof. Hittinger teaches at the Center for Law and Religion in the University of Tulsa.  He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Vatican City and he is on the editorial boards of The Review of Politics and The American Journal of Jurisprudence.  He writes on the relation between law and revelation, and his publications include Paper Wars: Catholic Social Doctrine and the Modern State (Yale University Press, forthcoming); The First Grace; Rediscovering Natural Law in a Post Christian Age (ISI, 2007); A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).  The title of Prof. Hittinger’s lecture is “Pope John XXIII's Vision of Moral Order:  Pacem in Terris Fifty Years Later.”

David Solomon: Tuesday, November 29, 2011; James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at the Cintas Center, 7:00 pm.  Prof. Solomon teaches at the University of Notre Dame and is the founder and director of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.  He has been a National Endowment of Humanities Research Fellow at Oxford University, a Milbank Research Fellow at Boston University, and a University Research Fellow at Oxford University; he has lectured at more than 100 American and European colleges and universities.  He writes on ethics, and he is currently writing a monograph on the recent revival of virtue ethics and two volumes of collected materials from the annual Notre Dame Conference on Medical Ethics. 

Jorge Garcia: January 26, 2012 at 7:00 pm in The Conaton Board Room on Xavier University Campus. Jorge Garcia is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and a fellow of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He writes on ethics, medical ethics and race.  He is the author of The Heart of Racism: Essays on Diversity, Race, and Relativism (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming) and more than 80 articles.

Laura Garcia: January 27, 2012 at 3:00 pm in The Conaton Board Room on Xavier University Campus. A scholar in residence at Boston College, has taught at Boston College, Calvin College, the University of Notre Dame, the University of St. Thomas, The Catholic University of America, Georgetown University and Rutgers.   She writes on natural theology, ethics and feminism.  The title of her lecture is “A Feminist Defense of Male/Female Complementarity." 

William Wagner: Tuesday, February 28, 2012; two lectures.  "The Devolution of Tolerance: Stages in American Constitutional Law," 3:00 pm in CLC 412. "Diversity: Justice's Root, Branch, or Flower?" at 7:00 pm in the James and Caroline Duff Banquet Center at the Cintas Center.  Professor Wagner teaches law at The Catholic University of America and directs the Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion. He has been a Fulbright research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and is the author of The Contractual Reallocation of Procreative Resources and Parental Rights: The Natural Endowment Critique (Dartmouth Press, 1995).  
 

Waheed Hussain: Monday, March 12, 2012; The Schiff Family Conference Room in the Cintas Center, 7:00 pm.  Professor Hussain teaches legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of Business.  He writes on the intersection of morality and public life.  He will lecture on Islam and modernity. 

Peter Huff, Ethics/Religion & Society Besl Chair, Monday, March 19, 2012: 3:00 pm in 412 CLC.  Professor Huff will speak on "Atheism and the Unfinished Business of Vatican II."


Student Award Winners
Congratulations to Alexis Bardonner, "Meditation: The Heart of Buddhist Ceremony," and Corey Zielinski, "Just Diversity: The Destruction of the American Dream" who will each receive a prize of $250.

2012-2013

Sr. Shawn Copeland: September, 2012.  Prof. Copeland is a professor of theology at Boston College.  She has been president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and holds honorary degrees from the Catholic Theological Union and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; she has received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Black Religious Scholars Group.   She writes on theological anthropology and race and gender in the Catholic Church, and among her publications are: Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Fortress Press, 2010); Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience (Orbis Books, 2009); The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille (Paulist Press, 2009).  

Camille Paglia: October, 2012.   Prof. Paglia teaches at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.   She is a well known writer on sex, art and religion.  A co-founding contributor to Salon, she is also on the editorial board of Arion.  Her books include Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990); Sex, Art, and American Culture (Vintage Books, 1992); Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (Vintage Books, 1994); Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems (Pantheon, 2005).

Pierre Manent: date to be determined.  Prof. Manent teaches political science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at Boston College.  He is a central figure in European political thought and founder of the journal, Commentaire.  He is the author of many books, including Democracy Without Nations: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe (2007); A World beyond Politics? (Princeton University Press, 2006); Modern Liberty and its Discontents (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); The City of Man (Princeton University Press, 1998); An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1994).

Terence Marshall: September, 2012.  Prof. Marshall has taught at the University of Pennsylvania,  North Carolina State University , the University of Paris I (Sorbonne -Panthéon), l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the University of Paris X - Nanterre.  He is the author of A la recherche de l'humanite. Science, poesie ou raison pratique dans la philosophie politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss et James Madison (Press Universitaires de France, 2009), and he is one of the translators of the Collected Writings of Rousseau (Dartmouth, 1993).  Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, he is currently writing a commentary on Rousseau’s Emile.

Fouad Ajami: September, 2012.   Prof. Ajami is director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University.  A leading authority on the Middle East, international relations and Islam, Prof. Ajami is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the editorial boards of Foreign Affairs and Middle East Quarterly; he is a founding member of The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.  He has been awarded The National Humanities Medal and a MacArthur Prize.  His publications include: Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia (Hoover Institute Press, forthcoming); The Foreigner’s Gift: the Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007); Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (Vintage, 1999).   

Susannah Heschel: Spring, 2013.  Prof. Heschel teaches Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and has held visiting professorships at Princeton, Tufts, the University of Frankfurt, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Cape Town.  She writes on Jewish-Christian relations, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism.  Her award-winning publications include: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2010), and Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago, 1998).

2013-2014

Gayatri Spivak: September, 2013.  Prof. Spivak is director of the Center for Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  She writes on postmodernism, feminism and Marxism, and her scholarship has been honored around the world.  Among her many publications are: Translation of and introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins Press, 1976); In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Methuen, 1987); Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press, 1988); Outside In the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993); The Spivak Reader (Routledge, 1996); A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999); Death of a Discipline (Columbia University Press, 2003).

Kwame Anthony Appiah: October 3, 2013.   Prof. Appiah teaches philosophy and African-American studies at Princeton.  He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he is a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund and Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies . Among his writings are: In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1992); Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton University Press,1996); Bu Me Bé: The Proverbs of the Akan with Peggy Appiah and Ivor Agyeman-Duah (The Center for Intellectual Renewal, 2002); Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2003); The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005); Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2006); Experiments in Ethics. (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).  His lecture is titled, "Respecting Gay People: Justice and the Interpretation of Scriptures."

Robert George: October 17, 2013.  Prof. George teaches law at Princeton University.  He founded and directs the James Madison program at Princeton University.  He writes on law, politics and ethics.  He has been a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the President’s Council on Bioethics, the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court.  He has received the Presidential Citizens Medal and a Bradley Award for Civic and Intellectual Achievement.  His many publications include: Making Men Moral (Clarendon, 1995); Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton University Press, 2000);  In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2001); Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis (ISI, 2002); The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals (Spence, 2006); Body-Self Dualism (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008).  

Mark Jordan: November 11, 2013.  The Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Divinity in the Harvard School of Divinity, Prof. Jordan writes on sexual ethics. His publications include: The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (University of Chicago Press, 1997); The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 200); The Ethics of Sex (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Beacon, 2004); Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); and Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Fr. Virgilio Elizondo: January 29, 2014.  Prof. Elizondo teaches pastoral and Hispanic theology at University of Notre Dame.  A leading authority on Latino religion in the United States, Fr. Elizondo is a recipient of the Quasten Medal, the Laetare Medal and the Pro Eccleisa et Pontifice Medal; he was named in 2000 by Time magazine as one of the leading spiritual innovators of the new century.  He has produced many television programs, and his publications include the following: The Treasure of Guadalupe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2005); A God of Incredible Surprises, Jesus of Galilee (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); San Fernando Cathedral: Soul of the City (Orbis, 1999); Mestizo Worship (Collegeville, 1998); Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Orbis, 1997).

Stanley Hauerwas: date to be determined.  Prof. Hauerwas teaches theological ethics at Duke University; he has a joint appointment in the Duke law school.  Time magazine called him in 2001 America’s “best theologian,” and his A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic" was selected as one of the 100 most important books on religion of the 20th century.”   Among his voluminous publications are: A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching (Brazos, 2009); Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (IVP, 2008); Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Wipf and Stock, 2007); Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words (Brazos, 2005); Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Brazos, 2004); With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology (Brazos, 2001).

Thomas Hibbs: date to be determined.  Prof. Hibbs taught at Boston College for 13 years and is currently Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, where he also directs the Great Texts Program and the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core.  His writings include: Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld (Spence Publications, 2000) Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good (Fordham University Press, 2001); Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2007); Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption (Spence, 2008); and, in addition to scholarly articles, numerous popular book and film reviews.

Xavier University Faculty Series: 2011

Tyrone Williams, “Tolerance, Translation and Ecstasy: A Future”: Wednesday, September 14 at 4:00 pm in CLC 412; the respondent is Gabriel Gottlieb.

Jose-Maria Mantero, “Latin American Testimonio: Utopia and Liberation Discourse”: Wednesday, October 5 at 4:00 pm in CLC 412; the respondent is Julia O’hara.

George Gordon, “The Civil Rights Movement in the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and Questioning Community: Social Justice? Tolerance? Acceptance?”: Wednesday, November 9 at 4:00 pm in CLC 412; the respondent is Patrick McNearney.