Boston College Front Row

Three experts on law and issues of religious expression present their views at a panel presentation sponsored by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life.

Tony Judt, the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, asserts that tenured university academics have a social obligation to “speak the truth in the public place.”

Rhonda Frederick, assistant professor of English, teaches courses in Caribbean and African American literature, with emphases on political and cultural themes, and women's writing. She is the author of "Colon Man a Come": Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). In her lecture she develops materials from her course on culture and the impact of globalization in Jamaica. She describes how the expansion of commerce has had led to "unanticipated flows of people, goods, and capital."

Dario Del Puppo is associate professor of modern languages and director of Italian programs at Trinity College. He discusses "Purgatorio XVII" of the Divine Comedy in English and then reads in Italian. This program is part of an ongoing public reading of the Divine Comedy organized by the Boston College Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Center for Italian Culture in Newton, Massachusetts.

The U.S. Constitution is silent on bioethical issues such as stem cell research and cloning, according to Diana Schaub, chair of the Department of Political Science at Loyola College of Maryland. This fact "should be taken as an invitation to practice self-government as the founding fathers intended," she asserts, before describing the efforts of the executive and legislative branches of government to cope with the legal and ethical questions that new medical technologies force us to confront. Schaub is author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).

A New England public school teacher until 1983, Janet Robinson worked in advertising at the New York Times and held a number of progressively responsible positions before becoming president in 2004. She spoke at the University's CEO Club in January, telling local business leaders and scholars that her company has made more changes in the last two years than at any time in its 156-year history. To achieve the goal of becoming a "leading media company in the 21st century," the Times has had to revamp its business model, reinvent the craft of journalism, develop interactive relationships with its audience, and re-engineer operations and procedures. "It has not been easy," Robinson declared. "How could it be?"

"Is the term 'urban ecology' an oxymoron?" asks Eric Strauss, director of the Environmental Studies Program and science director of the Urban Ecology Institute, in his lecture at the Weston Observatory. With 75 percent of the U.S. population and half of the world's population living in urban areas, the sustainability of urban ecological systems is of paramount importance, says Strauss, who suggests we must stop thinking of the city as a problem but as "a solution with respect to environmental and social challenges."

Monster.com founder Jeffrey Taylor left the company in 2005 to found a new Internet site, Eons.com-an online community for people over age 50. There are 88 million Americans over age 50, with 12,000 more each day. "This is a market that's been largely ignored," Taylor asserts. He believes the boomer generation will not retire, but "graduate," and devotes his talk to this insight's implications for his new enterprise. Prior to his talk, Linda Natansohn, Senior VP of Strategic Development at Eons.com, speaks about the growing market of seniors.

In this Lowell Humanities Series lecture, author Jennifer Haigh reads from her second novel, Baker Towers (William Morrow, 2005), which she characterizes as "a family story set in a coal mining town in western Pennsylvania." She describes the circumstances that led her to write the book, which won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award, and responds to audience questions. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Haigh is currently a faculty member of the Boston University Creative Writing Program.

It's been nearly 20 years since Prozac was introduced. Are we happy yet? A roundtable on psychotropic drugs-the good they do, and the concerns their expanding use raises

Keith Pecklers, SJ, Gasson Chair, describes 50 years of historical background, including discussions within the Vatican, that culminated in major liturgical changes approved in 1963. Fr. Pecklers is a professor of liturgy at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of Rome and author of several books including The Unread Vision: The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926-1955 (The Liturgical Press, 1998) and Liturgy in a Postmodern World (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006).

As part of the New Directions Lecture Series, Michelle Stephens, associate professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College, explores the expression of black masculinity in performance through analysis of vaudeville performer Bert Williams, opera singer Paul Robeson, and author Frantz Fanon. She is currently working on a book about black transnational intellectuals, including Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay.

John Padberg, SJ, director of the Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis University, discusses future challenges and responsibilities of Jesuits as they relate to the secular world and work with other Jesuits. This is the third of three lectures in the Center for Ignatian Spirituality's Triple Anniversary Talks, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the births of St. Fancis Xavier and Blessed Peter Faber, and the 450th anniversary of the passing of St. Ignatius Loyola. Each program focuses on a theme pertinent to the legacy of one of these Jesuit saints.

Richard Notebaert became chairman and CEO of Qwest Communications International in 2002 after 30 years of experience at the Ameritech Corporation. He tells the Boston College Chief Executives' Club what changes he made at Qwest after joining the firm when it was near insolvency. (Denver reporters had a betting pool on when the company would declare bankruptcy.) Notebaert describes refocusing the company's culture by emphasizing a "Spirit of Service" theme.

Emilio Mazzola, world language teacher at Newton North High School, presents an analysis and reading of the 15th canto of Dante's Purgatorio. Mazzola's commentary is in English; the reading from the Divine Comedy is in Italian. This program is part of an ongoing public reading of the Divine Comedy organized by the Boston College Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Center for Italian Culture in Newton, Massachusetts.

David Karp, professor of sociology at Boston College, reads from and discusses his recent book, Is It Me or My Meds? Living with Antidepressants (Harvard University Press, 2006). In the book, Karp tells the stories of 50 teenagers and adults-himself included-who describe their ambivalent relationships and experiences with psychiatric drugs. Karp is the coauthor or author of six previous books, including Speaking of Sadness (1997) and The Burden of Sympathy (2002), both from Oxford University Press.

Richard Cobb-Stevens, professor of philosophy at Boston College, has been the director of BC's Core Curriculum since 1992. Speaking from this position, Cobb-Stevens introduces the long history of Jesuit core programs and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of BC's current program, inaugurated in 1992 after two years of deliberation by the University's Core Development Committee.

Tommie Shelby, Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, speaks on how class differences between African Americans make it difficult to build black solidarity and a progressive politics. He is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundation of Black Solidarity (Harvard, 2005).

In the 13th Boisi Lecture, the Lynch School of Education welcomes Henry Braun as the Boisi Professor of Education and Public Policy. In his lecture, Braun argues that if accountability is to play a more constructive role in school improvement, then school management must accept that testing is only one component of a complex, dynamic system. Braun joins BC after 27 years at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Braun is introduced by Joseph O'Keefe, SJ, dean of the Lynch School. The lecture is given in honor of Albert E. Beaton, Augustus Long Professor Emeritus at the Lynch School.

Diarmaid Ferriter, historian and professor at St. Patrick's College in Dublin City University, analyzes the career of John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin from 1940 to 1972. Ferriter dips into the 1960s archives of McQuaid-who is something of a historian's dream due to his incisive opinions and legible handwriting-to look at McQuaid's authoritarian archdiocese as it wrangled with the social upheaval of the time. Ferriter's books include The Transformation of Ireland (Overlook, 2005), What If? Alternative Views of Twentieth-Century Ireland (Gill & MacMillan, 2006), and, with Colm Toibin, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (Thomas Dunne, 2002).