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Future of Islam and For Immediate Release: RICHMOND, Ind. — Presenters as diverse as an assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), an award-winning children's author and self-described "wandering poet," one of the nation's most respected scholars of Islam and the Middle East and a widely acclaimed choreographer and dance artist populate the schedule of academic convocations at Earlham College this fall. 
Leading off the regular series of free public lectures — held on alternate Wednesdays at 1 p.m. in Goddard Auditorium of Carpenter Hall on campus — is Maria Rosa Menocal, author of this year's required reading for incoming first-year students, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Dr. Menocal, R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, will reflect on "What Does a Culture of Tolerance Look Like? Images of Medieval Spain" on Aug. 30, during her delivery of the College's annual Charles Lecture in ethics. Especially known for her work revealing the historical relationships between the cultures associated with the three major monotheistic faiths — Christianity, Islam and Judaism — Professor Menocal also is the author of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), as well as Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccacio (1991) and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994). Born in Cuba and raised in Philadelphia, where she eventually earned her Ph.D. in Romance Philology from the University of Pennsylvania before starting her teaching career at Bryn Mawr College, Menocal believes "the medieval period has been, and continues to be, so grossly misrepresented in almost all of our histories" and that "Europe has never been as enlightened since as it was then." Central to her lecture at Earlham will be an examination of how medieval Spanish religious buildings, including mosques, churches and synagogues, physically demonstrate the culture of tolerance found in many literary works of the age.  Earlham graduate and noted choreographer Bebe Miller '71 returns to her alma mater on Sept. 13 to plumb the ideas of "Thinking Globally, Dancing Locally, Living Artfully." Currently professor of dance at The Ohio State University, Miller has been making dances remarkable for their virtuosity, athletic speed and fundamental humanity for more than 20 years. Many have been performed by the artist's own troupe, the Bebe Miller Company, formed in 1985. Although Miller also has received major commissions from dance companies including the Boston Ballet, the Oregon Ballet Theatre, the PACT Dance Company of Johannesburg, South Africa, and the world-renowned Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble of New York. "Bebe Miller surveys the terrain of the human heart and reveals its secrets with luminous intelligence," proclaimed the Washington Post following the premiere in 2005 of Miller's Landing/Place, a piece employing digitalized motion-capture imagery, live music, video projection and "exquisite dancing to explore sensory, spatial and cultural dislocation and the yearning toward order in the apprehension of difference." Of the same piece, New York's Village Voice offered, "Bebe Miller's dances are lovely enigmas. Meanings surface in them like silver fish glinting through water and slipping away. She structures her magic … as ongoing journeys, to mapped countries or along the wavering trails that connect one person with another." During her lifelong pursuit of a physical language for expressing the human condition, Miller has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as an American Choreographer Award and three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" awards.  On Sept. 27, noted scholar, author and media consultant Reza Aslan comes to Earlham to consider "The Future of Islam: Toward the Islamic Reformation." Born in Iran, Aslan is a research associate at the University of California's Center on Public Diplomacy and the author of the internationally acclaimed No god but God: the Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, hailed by The New York Times as a "grippingly narrated and thoughtfully examined … literate, accessible introduction to Islam." Through additional writings for the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, the Nation, Slate and other publications, Aslan has established a reputation for masterfully exploring the intricate interplay between faith and politics in the Muslim world, presenting Islam as an ever-evolving faith and culture that is currently in the midst of a cataclysmic internal battle for reform and modernization. "For me, the word 'reform' is defined by its inevitability," says Aslan, who believes "we are living in the twilight of [Islamic] reformation" and that "we'll see the same process we saw in the Christian reformation … toward a truly indigenous Islamic enlightenment." "It's up to us as Muslims in the U.S. to give voice to that for our brothers and sisters who don't have the voice or the same ability to speak out as we do." The Santa Clara University (B.A., Religion) and Harvard University (M. Theo. Studies) graduate also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Iowa, has served as a legislative assistant for the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) in Washington, D.C., and was elected president of Harvard's chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, a United Nations organization committed to solving religious conflicts throughout the world. At various times a guest on NBC's Meet the Press and MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Aslan also has appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart, Real Time with Bill Maher, and ABC's Nightline. He is a frequent commentator on the Middle East for National Public Radio's Marketplace and currently is Muslim affairs analyst for CBS News.  "Science, Technology and the Fourth Amendment" will be the focus of Assistant FBI Director Vahid Majidi when he speaks on campus on Oct. 11. Appointed earlier this summer by FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as assistant director of the bureau's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Directorate, Dr. Majidi is formerly head of the chemistry division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2003, he left the country's leading weapons development laboratory to join the U.S. Justice Department as its chief science adviser, responsible for coordinating science and technology policy among the Department's many component agencies and with state and local law enforcement entities. In a previous academic career as tenured associate professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky, Majidi conducted research involving analytical spectroscopy and gas-phase chemistry. His areas of expertise extend, as well, to biosecurity, pathogen forensics, DNA technologies and biometrics. An adviser to the Homeland Security Council, as well as the National Security Council and White House Office of Science and Technology, Majidi also serves on a number of scientific editorial boards and is currently a member of the board of directors of the International Forensic Research Institute.  When, in late 2004, he co-authored a paper heralding "The Death of Environmentalism," Earlham Class of '93 alumnus Michael Shellenberger sparked a furor within the environmental movement that reverberated from the coastal fisheries of the eastern seaboard to the high mountain passes of California's Sierra Nevada. He also received front-page coverage from The New York Times. Little more than a year after asserting that environmentalism had become "just another special interest," Shellenberger and colleague Ted Nordhaus have expanded their original 37-page essay into book form, publishing The Death of Environmentalism and the Birth of a New Aspirational Politics (Houghton Mifflin; 2006) to no less fury among their environmentalist critics. Shellenberger, co-director of the Breakthrough Institute and co-founder of American Environics and the Apollo Alliance, will share his controversial views — including a renewed call for the end of environmentalism in favor of a new politics capable of dealing with ecological and other human crises, from global warming to the destruction of the Amazon — on Oct. 25. "What needs to die is a particular conception of what environmentalism is and how environmental advocacy and campaigns are organized and run," says Shellenberger. "We're faced with a set of massive ecological challenges — global warming, global habitat destruction, global species destruction, deterioration of the world's oceans, the ozone hole — that are fundamentally different from the kinds of problems the environmental movement was constructed 30 years ago to address. On every one of these emerging issues, our national environmental movement has been strikingly ineffectual."  Concluding the fall series of convocation lectures on Nov. 8 will be poet, essayist and teacher Naomi Shihab Nye. She will reveal "Words Along the Peace Trail — How Poems Help Us Find Our Way." The daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother who grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio, Nye not surprisingly describes herself as a "wandering poet." She is the creator of more than 20 volumes, including19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Words Under the Words and You & Yours — all books of poetry — as well as Never in a Hurry (essays), Habibi (a novel for young readers) and Sitti's Secret (a picture book). Throughout her work, Nye draws upon her own multicultural heritage, the diversity of her home in Texas and her experiences traveling in many parts of the world, from North America to Asia to the Middle East, to attest to our shared humanity. Among other honors, Nye has received four prestigious Pushcart Prizes, awarded each year to the writers of the nation's best short stories, poetry and essays published by small presses. She also is the recipient of a Lavan Award for young poets from the Academy of American Poets and two Jane Addams Children's Book Awards. Her work has been presented by NPR on such programs as A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer's Almanac, and she has been featured on two Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) poetry specials: The Language of Life with Bill Moyers and The United States of Poetry. "In the current literary scene, one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye," wrote the late American poet William Stafford, former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, in assessing Nye's writing. "Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life." — EC — Contact: Kevin Burke, director of media relations
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Earlham
College · 801 National Road West · Richmond,
Indiana 47374-4095 |