Events

Pathways to Flourishing:
A Dialogue of Science, Religion, and
Politics at Middlebury College

FEATURED EVENTS, FALL 2007

Sunday, November 4, 2007
Staged Reading:  "A Number"
by Caryl Churchill
7:30 p.m.
Center for the Arts Room 232



Who are you when you discover one day there are 20 or more of you -- a number -- with the same DNA?  The story of a parent and his children.  A staged reading directed by Professor Cheryl Faraone, with Alex Draper and Alec Strum.

Sponsored by Metanexus, the Department of Theater, the Department of Religion, Ross Commons, The Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life and the Academic Enrichment Fund.  

FEATURED EVENTS, Spring 2008

Lecture: Tower of Babel, Or God's
Partner in Creation? A Jewish
Perspective on Biotechnology"
Elliott Dorff, Ph.D.
Monday, March 17
4:30 p.m.
McCardell Bicentennial Hall,
room 220

Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University, Rabbi Dorff is the author of Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics and Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality: A Reader.  In the spring of 1993, Rabbi Dorff served on the ethics committee of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force, and in March 1997 and May 1999 he testified on behalf of the Jewish tradition on the subjects of human cloning and stem cell research before the president's National Bioethics Advisory Committee.

Sponsored by the Saltz Judaica Fund, the Department of Religion, and the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life at Middlebury College.

Lecture:  "Embryo Research: Why Not?"
Gilbert Meilaender, Ph.D.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
4:30 p.m.
McCardell Bicentennial Hall, room 220


Gilbert Meilaender, Ph.D. is Richard & Phyllis Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. Professor Meilaender is an associate editor for the Journal of Religious Ethics. He has taken a special interest in bioethics and is a Fellow of the Hastings Center. His books include Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (1996, 2005), Body, Soul, and Bioethics (1995). He has recently edited (together with William Werpehowski) The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics.

Sponsored by Metanexus, the Department of Religion, Ross Commons, The Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life and the Academic Enrichment Fund. 

Lecture: "The Stem Cell Debate:
Why the Embryo is Not the
Chief Moral Issue"
Suzanne Holland, Ph.D.
Monday, April 21, 2008
4:30 p.m.
McCardell Bicentennial Hall, room 220

Dr. Holland is chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and is Associate Professor of Ethics.  She teaches in the area of religious ethics and values, including bioethics, science and technology, religion, and gender studies.  Her research interests range from the ethics of human genetics and stem cell research, biotechnology and commodification, to broader issues in religion, culture and public policy.   She is co-editor of The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Science, Ethics & Public Policy (MIT Press, 2001).
A featured event in "Pathways to Flourishing: A Dialogue of Science, Religion and Politics at Middlebury College. " Sponsored by Metanexus, The Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, Ross Commons, the Academic Enrichment Fund, and the Department of Religion.

May 1-3, 2008
Thursday-Saturday 8:00 p.m. each evening
and 2:00 p.m. on Saturday
Wright Theatre

In a comedy that includes the moon landings, a team of gymnastic philosophers, Zeno’s paradox, a detective who might have stepped from the pages of Agatha Christie (not to mention a hare called Thumper and a tortoise called Pat), Stoppard combines effervescent burlesque with moral urgency.

"I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly." — Tom Stoppard from an interview with Mel Gussow in the New York Times , 26 April 1972.

Directed by Cheryl Faraone with Alex Draper as George Moore. Sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Dance with support from Pathways to Flourishing: a Dialogue of Science, Religion and Politics at Middlebury College.

Sponsored by Metanexus, the Department of Theater, the Department of Religion, Ross Commons, The Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life and the Academic Enrichment Fund. 

Featured Events, Spring 2007

Featured Events, Fall 2006

October 5, Thursday
Film Screening: An Inconvenient Truth
7:00 PM     Dana Auditorium

Introduction by Gus Jordan, Director of the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life.
Response by Jon Isham, Luce Professor of International Environmental Economics.

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.

If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change.

October 10, Tuesday
Lecture: Serve God, Save the Planet
7:15 PM    Ross Seminar Room B11
Matthew Sleeth, MD

Synopsis: Drawing on science and religion, Sleeth builds a bridge between environmentalists and mainstream Christians. He and his family are harbingers of the creation care movement, which calls on all those who love God to love our planet. Sleeth shares how material downscaling led his family to healthier lifestyles, stronger relationships, and richer spiritual lives. Serve God, Save the Planet is a prescription for taking personal responsibility for global survival.

Dr. Sleeth is a graduate of George Washington University School of Medicine and has two post doctoral fellowships.  He has been a member of the American Academy of Family Practice, the College of Emergency Physicians, and the College of Executive Physicians.

October 11, Wednesday
Lecture: Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion
7:00 PM    Robert A. Jones House
William Grassie. ‘79, Ph.D.

Synopsis: We live at an extraordinary moment in the natural history of our planet and the cultural evolution of our species. Human population has soared in the last century to over six billion. Every bioregional ecosystem in the world has been significantly altered by humans. We are about to embark upon large-scale genetic engineering of other species and ourselves. Humans are a Lamarckian wild card in the epic of evolution. Increasingly, it is not the material basis that determines civilization, but our culturally transmitted belief systems, for better or worse, that will direct the future evolution of both the planet and our species.

William Grassie is founder and former executive director of the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science.  He is the recipient of a number of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).  Metanexus currently runs some 300 projects at universities in 37 countries. Dr. Grassie graduated from Middlebury College in 1979.