Ray Suarez
Broadcast journalist Mr. Ray Suarez wove together evidence, from quotes and video clips, that demonstrates the complex relationship between religion and politics in this country. Mr. Suarez is senior correspondent on the “PBS NewsHour” and author of The Holy Vote. He visited with students and faculty in November as the Class of 1952 Endowment for Religious Understanding Speaker. “We have come to a crazy place in our national life. Politicians are using religion as a marker or a quick reference meant to signal to voters, ‘I am like you. Vote for me!’ It’s identity politics, pure...
Read More5 Friendly Reads
Searching for books about friendship, it turns out, is unfriendly business. Looking past the standbys of young adult fiction (think of A Separate Peace), we find ourselves staring out at a stark landscape: the last two centuries of fiction favored exploring the loneliness of individual consciousness, not the pleasures of the BFF. Alas, the genre that yields my personal favorites, American literature, turns a cold shoulder, too: tales of rugged individualism do not accommodate bosom buddies. From Douglass to Thoreau to Hemingway, American fiction broadly asks if one can render selfhood in a...
Read MoreRick Moody
American novelist and short-story writer Rick Moody was this fall’s Bingham Visiting Reader. Best known for his highly acclaimed novels, The Ice Storm and Garden State, Mr. Moody read to students his short story “Boys,” from his 2001 collection, Demonology, and answered questions about his approach to the writing process. “Boys enter the house. Boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible) enter the house.” —opening line from Rick Moody’s “Boys”
Read MoreAmy Louis Wood
Professor Amy Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940, delivered the eighth Henry R. Heyburn Lecture in History in January. With students, she examined visual representations of lynching and the construction of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. She specializes in American cultural history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the history of the U.S. South. Professor Wood teaches at Illinois State University. “This history of lynching and racial violence has had an enormous effect on our criminal justice system today, where we...
Read MoreBen Vereen
Tony Award–winning performer and humanitarian, Mr. Ben Vereen, joined Milton students this fall in class and in performance. He has acted in film, in television and onstage in shows including Roots, Pippin, Wicked, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Muppets and Grey’s Anatomy. For his humanitarian contributions, he has received Israel’s Cultural and Humanitarian Awards, three NAACP Image Awards, and an Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award. “If you define your gravity, you can’t be held down. You are about excellence, and the only person holding you back is you. Stay hungry. Stay...
Read More“From a place of joy and not fear”
by Annie Moyer ’97 I recently married my partner of five years, Renée Coronado Martinez, at a courthouse in Brooklyn, New York. Four months earlier we held a formal ceremony in Renée’s home state of Califor-nia. Our one witness at the courthouse was Emily Brooks, a friend since my freshman year at Milton. It was only fitting that Emily would stand there with us in the courthouse, and that so many of my Milton friends would celebrate with us at the wedding this past summer. I cherish the experience I had at Milton; however, my memories of the school are complex. For me, Milton...
Read MoreInSight, Spring 2012
Elizabeth Stanfield ’12 played the over-achieving Marcy Park in Milton’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
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