Dr. Reza Aslan
Dr. Reza Aslan Religious scholar Dr. Reza Aslan visited campus as the Class of 1952 Endowed Speaker for Religious Understanding. Dr. Aslan is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and serves on the board of trustees for the Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of bestselling Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He is also the founder of AslanMedia — a social media network for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world — and co-founder and chief creative...
read morePatricia Smith
Patricia Smith Award-winning poet Patricia Smith read to students from her work as the spring’s Bingham Visiting Writer. Ms. Smith has written six books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina, which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the...
read moreListening for Understanding — Easier when interpreting the past, than the present
by Brittney Lewer, Fellow in the History Department In high school, I thought of history as a detective game. Piecing together clues from the past, historians would deduce what really happened. Relatively late in my college career, I realized that “what really happened” is, in some ways, a moving target. History is not a fixed set of events, but a narrative that changes based in part on who is telling the story and who the audience is. Perspective taking — the skill of being able to engage with more than one person’s ideas...
read moreI Am Radar, by Reif Larsen ’98
I Am Radar by Reif Larsen ’98 Penguin Press, February 2015 In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists — who stage experimental art for people suffering under wartime sieges — Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. Acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen...
read moreThe Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving, by Lisa Miller ’84
The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving by Lisa Miller ’84 St. Martin’s Press, May 2015 In The Spiritual Child, psychologist Lisa Miller presents the next big idea in psychology: the science and the power of spirituality. She explains the clear, scientific link between spirituality and health, and shows that children who have a positive, active relationship to spirituality are healthier and happier into adulthood. Combining cutting-edge research with broad anecdotal evidence from her work as a...
read moreIrrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham, by Emily Bingham ’83
Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham ’83 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2015 Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families of the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, selfish and shameless, seductive and brilliant, endearing and often terribly troubled. In Louisville, New York and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her...
read moreDigging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity, by Adam Rosenblatt ’96
Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity by Adam Rosenblatt ’96 Stanford University Press, March 2015 The mass graves from a long history of genocide, massacres and violent conflict form an underground map of atrocity that stretches across our planet’s surface. In the past few decades, due to rapidly developing technologies and a powerful global human rights movement, the scientific study of those graves has become a standard facet of post-conflict international assistance. Digging for the Disappeared provides readers a...
read moreMarried Sex, by Jesse Kornbluth ’64
Married Sex by Jesse Kornbluth ’64 Open Road Media, August 2015 When a husband convinces his wife to join him in a tryst with another woman, there are unintended consequences, in this sharply observed, erotic tale about the challenges of modern marriage. As a divorce lawyer for Manhattan’s elite, David Greenfield is privy to the intimate, dirty details of failed marriages. He knows he’s lucky to be married to Blair. A Barnard dean and the mother of their college-age daughter, she is a woman he loves more today than he did when they tied...
read moreCreating a College That Works, by Grace G. Roosevelt ’59
Creating a College That Works by Grace G. Roosevelt ’59 State University of New York Press, March 2015 In 1964, education activist Audrey Cohen and her colleagues developed a unique curricular structure that enables urban college students to integrate their academic studies with meaningful work in the community. Creating a College That Works chronicles Cohen’s efforts to create an innovative educational model that began with the Women’s Talent Corps, evolved into the College for Human Services, and finally became, in 2002, what is now...
read moreBeyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman ’89
Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman ’89 Harvard University Press, February 2015 Born into slavery in rural Louisiana, Rose Herera was bought and sold several times before being purchased by the De Hart family of New Orleans. Still a slave, she married and had children, who also became the property of the De Harts. But after Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862 during the American Civil War, Herera’s owners fled to Havana, taking three of her small children with them. Beyond Freedom’s...
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