Events

Ted Jennings will discuss his two latest books, Plato or Paul? & Transforming Atonement, at the Chicago Theological Seminary.

On Plato or Paul?:

Jennings explores the notion that the origin of Western homophobia lies not in the biblical traditions of Judaism and Christianity but instead has its source in the Greek and Hellenistic sources (mainly the platonic philosophies) often assumed to have been accepting of same-sex eroticism.
Jennings is aware this concept goes against the grain of common opinion, and therefore provides ample clarification from official statements of the Vatican and opinions of the United States Supreme Court; texts from Plato and other Hellenistic perspectives; and the writings of Paul.

On Transforming Atonement:

Jennings' truly fresh understanding for Christians of the meaning of Jesus death specifically grounds the cross in the concrete political confrontation within which it occurred, relates the message about the cross to the practice of Jesus (thus keeping in relationship the gospels and the theology of Paul), and shows how the cross bears on overcoming of human division and sin, reconciliation to God, and new forms of social reality in the community of the crucified.

Historians and biographers have traditionally favored stories of the powerful and the trends they set in motion. More recently, they’ve spotlighted the neglected lives of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. “But,” asks Linda H. Matthews, descendant of the pragmatic, adaptable, and lively Hammill family, “who tells the stories of the people in the middle?”

Spanning three centuries and three seas, from the bluffs of Scotland and Ireland to colonial Chesapeake Bay and Virginia, then across the expanding nation into the Pacific Northwest, Middling Folk makes the compelling case that the experiences of the middle classes--those who “quietly, century after century, conducted the business and built the livelihoods that made their societies prosper”--reveal a great deal about the founding of the United States and the ways in which customs and traditions are perpetuated through the generations.

Matthews combines meticulous research and deft storytelling to show how the Scots-Irish Hammills--millers, wagon makers, and blacksmiths--lived out their lives against a backdrop of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and westward expansion. Readers will come away with a newfound respect for the ordinary families who helped shape this country and managed to hold their own through turbulent times.

Wells Tower will discuss his debut collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.

The free, hour-long interview is a partnership between the Chicago Public Library and 98.7WFMT radio, with a taping at 6:00 p.m. in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State Street. The interview will be broadcast at noon on Sunday, February 14th. The Seminary Co-Op Bookstores sells books at the event, which is underwritten by Graver Capital Management LLC. The events are free, no reservations required, with seating on a first-come basis.

Jo LaRouche has lived her 13 years in the California desert with her Aunt Lily, ever since she was dropped on Lily’s doorstep with this note: This is Jo. Please take care of her. But beware. This is a dangerous baby. At Lily’s annual Christmas costume party, a variety of strange events take place that lead Jo and Lily out of California forever—and into the mysterious, strange, fantastical world of Eldritch City. There, Jo learns the scandalous truth about who she is, and she and Lily join the Order of Odd-Fish, a collection of knights who research useless information. Glamorous cockroach butlers, pointless quests, obsolete weapons, and bizarre festivals fill their days, but two villains are controlling their fate. Jo is inching closer and closer to the day when her destiny is fulfilled, and no one in Eldritch City will ever be the same.

The current global financial crisis carries a "made-in-America" label. In this forthright and incisive book, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains how America exported bad economics, bad policies, and bad behavior to the rest of the world, only to cobble together a haphazard and ineffective response when the markets finally seized up. Drawing on his academic expertise, his years spent shaping policy in the Clinton administration and at the World Bank, and his more recent role as head of a UN commission charged with reforming the global financial system, Stiglitz outlines a way forward building on ideas that he has championed his entire career: restoring the balance between markets and government, addressing the inequalities of the global financial system, and demanding more good ideas (and less ideology) from economists. Freefall is an instant classic, combining an enthralling whodunit account of the current crisis with a bracing discussion of the broader economic issues at stake.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites--liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners--as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity"?

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

In From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum aims her considerable intellectual firepower at the bulwark of opposition to gay equality: the politics of disgust.
Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. When confronted with same-sex acts and relationships, she writes, they experience "a deep aversion akin to that inspired by bodily wastes, slimy insects, and spoiled food--and then cite that very reaction to justify a range of legal restrictions, from sodomy laws to bans on same-sex marriage." Leon Kass, former head of President Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, even argues that this repugnance has an inherent "wisdom," steering us away from destructive choices. Nussbaum believes that the politics of disgust must be confronted directly, for it contradicts the basic principle of the equality of all citizens under the law. "It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen." In its place she offers a "politics of humanity," based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an uplifting imaginative engagement with others, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to "public sex." Recent landmark decisions suggest that the views of state and federal courts are shifting toward a humanity-centered vision, and Nussbaum's powerful arguments will undoubtedly advance that cause.

The stories that make up this linked collection showcase ordinary men and women in and around Rugglesville, Virginia, as they struggle to find places and identities in their families and the community. They experience natural disasters, a sun-worshipping cult, Vietnam flashbacks, kidnapping, addiction, and loss. The book's opening story, "Flood, 1978," follows Hank, who comes to understand his father's deep sense of grief over the death of his wife. Later, in "Hand-painted Angel," Hank's sons see the family spinning apart as their father ages and family secrets are disclosed. In "The Clattering of Bones," Walt mourns the collapse of his marriage after the loss of a child, but in the collection's title story he recognizes his emotional need for family. The concluding story, "Red Peony," unifies the collection, as many of the book's characters come together for a tumultuous 4th of July Celebration.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

Although America’s universities have become the envy of the world for their creative energy and their production of transformative knowledge, few understand how and why they have become preeminent. This groundbreaking book traces the origins and the evolution of our great universities. It shows how they grew out of sleepy colleges at the turn of the twentieth century into powerful institutions that continue to generate new industries and advance our standard of living. Far from inevitable, this transformation was enabled by a highly competitive system that invested public tax dollars in university research and students while granting universities substantial autonomy.

Today, America’s universities face considerable threats. Even greater than foreign competition are the threats from within the United States. Under the Bush administration, government increasingly imposed ideological constraints on the freedom of academic inquiry. Restrictive visa policies instituted after 9/11 continue to discourage talented foreign graduate students from training in the United States. The international financial crisis, which has depleted university endowments and state investments in higher education, threatens the vitality of some of our greatest institutions of higher learning. In order to sustain and enhance the American tradition of excellence, we must nurture this powerful—yet underappreciated—national resource.

 For more information on this event, please click here.

Kenzaburō Ōe, recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, will return to the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies to deliver this year’s Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture. Ōe will speak in Japanese, with English translation provided by Norma Field, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies.

Ōe previously visited the University of Chicago as a visiting scholar in the 1980s and the 1990s. During that time, he became acquainted with Tetsuo Najita, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Ōe has written recently about the impact of Najita’s writings on his work. In his lecture, Ōe will discuss the contemporary relevance of Najita’s approach to intellectual history, including Najita’s Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka, a landmark study of the rise of an independent school of economic and moral philosophy in 18th–century Japan.

Born in 1935 in rural Shikoku, Ōe is one of modern Japan’s most respected novelists and public intellectuals. He began publishing fiction while a university student, and in 1958 was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. He since has published many celebrated novels and stories, including A Personal Matter,  The Silent Cry, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, The Pinch Runner Memorandum and Somersault. His most recent novel, Suishi (Death by Drowning), was published in Japan to great acclaim in late 2009. His works have been translated into many languages, and in 1994 he became the second Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to his fiction, Ōe has throughout his career provided a model for the engaged intellectual. He has written widely on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, on Japan’s history of military aggression and in defense of Article 9, the peace clause of Japan’s postwar constitution. Ōe recently successfully defended himself in a highly publicized libel case brought against him by the families of two Japanese wartime military officers who claimed that Ōe’s 1970 book Okinawa Notes had exaggerated the role of the military in mass civilian suicides in Okinawa during the closing months of World War II, with the judges in the case declaring that his book had accurately depicted the events in question.

The University of Chicago Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies launched the Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture series in 2007 to honor the legacy of Najita’s contribution to the University during his long career.

Ōe’s lecture is free and open to the public. For additional information, please contact Sarah Arehart at the Center for East Asian Studies at sarehart@uchicago.edu or 773–702–8647.

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Irving Kane Pond (1858-1939) was a partner with his brother Allen in Pond & Pond, an important architectural firm in Chicago from 1890 through 1929. Their buildings are among the best Chicago examples of the Arts and Crafts style. Among their best known structures are the Hull House dining halls, the American School of Correspondence Building (850 E 58th), the Lillie House (5801 S Kenwood) and several other buildings near the University of Chicago campus. Irving Pond was a distinguished Chicago architect, author, gifted storyteller, and national president of the American Institute of Architects. His richly anecdotal autobiography, published for the first time in 2009, gives us an irreverent account of Chicago architecture and its architects at the turn of the last century. It should be read alongside the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright to remind us that seminal developments in architecture, like those of the Italian Renaissance, emerge from a collaborative environment, and are not the product of an individual genius working alone.

Irving Pond wrote his autobiography between 1937 and 1939. The handwritten manuscript was given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1939 where it has been kept since. The lecture is presented by Chicago architect David Swan, who along with Terry Tatum (Supervising Historian and Director of Research for the Landmarks Division, City of Chicago) edited the text of the autobiography and gathered the several hundred photos and line drawings that accompany it. David Swan is a Chicago architect who studied architecture and city planning at IIT. In 2008, David edited and published the facsimile edition of The Book of the Fine Arts Building. His own architecture is listed in the 2004 edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago.

The lecture will be followed by Pond & Pond Walking Tour at 2.00pm. On the tour, Mr. Swan will be accompanied by Tim Samuelson, Sam Guard and Jack Spicer.

Having traveled and researched in Afghanistan since 1988, Gilles Dorronsoro has developed a rich and nuanced understanding of the country's history and people. In Revolution Unending he draws on his extensive firsthand experience to consider the political, historical, economic, and ethnic factors that will influence Afghanistan's future. He argues that U.S. optimism about Afghanistan following Western intervention and recent elections fails to appreciate the divisions that continue to define the country.

While not underestimating the oft-cited "ethnic factor" in Afghan politics, especially Pashtun dominance, Dorronsoro argues that class and the competition for employment and education are key factors in explaining the country's recent past. The 1990s saw the triumph of religious authorities (the ulema) and the marginalization of the traditional elites. With coalition intervention in 2001 and the subsequent deposition of the ulema-dominated Taliban, the educated elites are back in power. However, as Dorronsoro argues, patching up the country by means of short-term ethnic alliances and a new division of the spoils will only perpetuate the schisms in society. The Afghan civil war, Dorronsoro suggests, is set to continue and perhaps worsen over time.

Lionel Shriver will discuss her latest book, So Much for That.

The free, hour-long interview is a partnership between the Chicago Public Library and 98.7WFMT radio, with a taping at 6:00 p.m. in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State Street. The interview will be broadcast at noon on Sunday, March 14th. The Seminary Co-Op Bookstores sells books at the event, which is underwritten by Graver Capital Management LLC. The events are free, no reservations required, with seating on a first-come basis.

With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.

June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.

As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another. Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmeriz­ing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.