Bernard Lafayette, president of the American Baptist College and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, will speak Sunday (Jan. 17) as part of the Program on Studies in Religion’s free, public Visiting Professor of Religious Thought Series.
Lafayette, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Nashville, is scheduled to speak at 5:45 p.m. in Auditorium 3, Modern Languages Building, in conjunction with the University’s commemoration of Martin Luther King. Lafayette, who worked with King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and coordinated the nationwide Poor People’s Campaign in 1963, will speak on “The Movement for Human Rights: Yesterday’s Struggles, Tomorrow’s Challenges.”
Sociology Prof. Max Heirich will open the lecture series titled “Visions, Disillusionments, and Revisionings” with a lecture today. All of the lectures, except for Lafayette’s, are scheduled 7:30–9 p.m. Mondays in the Natural Science Auditorium. Heirich’s topic is “Vision, Disillusionment and Revisioning: Recurring Themes of the 20th Century.”
Also scheduled:
Jan. 25, Jane Burbank, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, “Russian Visions of the Past and the Future: Perestroika to the Present”;
Feb. 1, English Prof. Ralph Williams, “Ongoing Time and the End of Apocalypse”;
Feb. 8, Philosophy Prof. Frithjof Bergmann, “New Work: Utopia for the Disillusioned”;
Feb. 15, James S. Gordon, psychiatrist with Georgetown University Medical School and author of The Golden Guru, “Pilgrim’s Progress: The Contemporary Search for Spirituality”;
March 1, Martha Ice, professor at Concordia College, Moorehead, Minn., “Women, Religious Revisioning, and Radical Re-Living of Tradition: How the Message and the Calling Changes”;
March 8, Frances Fitzgerald, writer from New York City, “Theology and Foreign Policy: Star Wars and the American Jeremiah”;
March 15, Elizabeth Sewell, poet and literary critic from Greensboro, N.C., “What Has Happened to the Imagination? Descartes, William Blake, Lewis Carroll”;
March 22, Ron Engel, professor of social ethics, Meadville-Lombard Unitarian-Universalist Seminary, Chicago, Ill., and chair of UNESCO’s Program on Religion and the Environment, “The Religious Re-Envisioning of the Environment”;
March 29, Susan Harding, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Imagining the Last Days”;
April 5, Debra Patnaik, writer and contemplative, “Maya, Karuna, and Dharma: Indian Understandings of Illusion, Compassion and Justice”;
April 12, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of the Archdiocese of Detroit, “The Contemporary Spiritual Message of the Catholic Church: Vatican II and Beyond”;
Heirich will conclude the series on April 19 with a lecture titled “The Nature of Contemporary Revisioning: Underlying Themes and Current Challenges.”
