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John Suarez
- The Radical Religious Right and
Public Education |
 John Suarez The Radical Religious Right and Public Education Sunday, April 4, 2010 Jerry Falwell was right on target more than 30 years ago when he announced that public education would have to be rendered impotent for our society to follow a theocratic path. He subsequently toned down his rhetoric, but the religious right's efforts continued. According to John M. Suarez, MD, their many stratagems continue to pose a significant threat to the viability of our secular democracy. Vouchers, religious schools, home schooling, classes on religion, overt proselytization, historical revisionism, suppression of science and critical thinking, and direct efforts to reduce funding, are all taking their toll. Suarez is a retired Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Section on Law and Psychiatry, UCLA. He serves on the Board of Trustees for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
$8, or free
for Friends of the Center.
Nichols has argued in his books and essays that the radicalism of the American revolution needs to be renewed, along with our understanding of this country as a rebel state founded in opposition to empire and in embrace of the enlightenment. Of Nichols, Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest." Nichols has worked as a daily newspaper journalist and magazine writer for 25 years, reporting from more than 25 countries and interviewing every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter. A pioneering political blogger for The Nation, he is the magazine's Washington correspondent. He is also the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of Free Press, he appears regularly on MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, and other broadcast and cable networks. His current book written with Robert W. McChesney is The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.
Following John Nichols's presentation on Paine in Hollywood and Costa Mesa, he and Robert W. McChesney, who co-wrote a new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again, will give a short presentation about their analysis and solutions for the decline of journalism. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has written or edited 17 books. Their new book will be available for sale at the bookstore. Co-sponsored by the Thomas Paine Society of Pasadena.
Henrietta Lacks, known as HeLa, was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. Award-winning writer Rebecca Skloot discovered this fascinating story and wrote a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, that she will discuss. In its first weeks of publication, it reached #2 on the New York Times nonfiction Best Sellers list. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions - yet Henrietta lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than 20 years after her death and never saw any of the profits. The Story of the Lacks family - past and present - is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Skloot is a science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover, and Columbia Journalism Review. She also is a contributing editor for Popular Science magazine and a correspondent for NPR and PBS. Skloot has an undergraduate degree in biomedical science from Colorado State University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught in several creative writing programs. For more information, visit www.RebeccaSkloot.com.
How do believers reconcile a loving God with a world of evil and flaws? Can evolution emancipate religion from the shackles of the problem of evil? The blame for biological flaws falls squarely on the shoulders of evolutionary processes, thus relegating religion to its rightful realm - not as a secular interpreter of the biological minutiae of our physical existence but rather as a counselor on grander philosophical issues. Avise, who received his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California, Davis, studies animal behavior, ecology and evolution primarily, as well as the relevance of evolutionary and molecular genetics to human affairs, including religion. He has received many academic honors and distinctions, including being elected as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In addition, he has published more than 300 refereed articles in scientific journals and 18 books, including his new one, Inside the Human Genome: The Case for Non-Intelligent Design.
Sunday, June 6, 2010 According to a recently released study from the Yale Project on Climate Change, 40 percent of Americans believe there is major scientific disagreement as to whether global warming is real. Yet, you would be hard-pressed to find any working climate scientist who didn't think global warming is happening and has been for some time, explain science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. But ever since researchers first began examining the evidence that our planet was heating up - and that human activities were probably to blame - people have been questioning the data, doubting the evidence, and attacking the scientists who collect and explain it. In their talk based on their new book, Merchants of Doubt, the authors will explain how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades in several areas. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly; some of the same figures who claimed the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, argued that acid rain and the ozone hole was caused by volcanoes, and charged that the EPA had rigged the science surrounding secondhand smoke. Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, and show how ideology and corporate interest have skewed public understanding and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time.
Oreskes is a professor of history and science studies at the
University of California, San Diego. Her study "Beyond the Ivory
Tower," published in Science, was a milestone in the
fight against global warming denial and was cited by Al Gore in
An Inconvenient Truth. Conway is the resident historian
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech in Pasadena.
Eddie Tabash
The
Assault on the Gay and Lesbian
Community: Eddie
Tabash, the Chair of CFI-L.A. and a board member of
CFI Transnational, also chairs the national legal
committee of Americans United for the Separation of Church and
State. A noted constitutional lawyer, he will explain how the
attack on gay rights demonstrates that the religious right is as
string as ever. Come hear what you can do to stop this horrible
menace from dismantling the modern secular state. Tom Quinn
God Needs Therapy Yahweh is a mess. He wants love but is full of wrath; demands obedience but comes up with humans; and insists that history go his way but keeps starting over with Eden, the Flood, Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Egypt, and Canaan. Emmy-nominated writer/producer Tom Quinn will explore how this god came to be and how he has psychologically evolved over the centuries from a lonely fertility god into the all-powerful and all-knowing, if slightly confused, deity we know today. The stories about God reveal a colorful literary character who changes, grows, learns, and occasionally screws up. He is driven, wise, demanding, rather an egotist, often short-sighted, and forgiving. Maybe it's because the god of the Bible is actually a hybrid of two earlier gods: El and Yahweh. Each had his own personality, priesthood, and agenda, and each can still be found in the pages of the Old Testament, which was written to fuse them into a single, hybrid deity. His personality is a tug of war between these two earlier deities. Quinn has written and produced programs for the Discovery Channel, History Channel, and others, and has traveled the world making programs that explain silly ideas and bizarre beliefs - from urban legends and The Da Vinci Code to religious myths and conspiracy theories. A graduate of the American Film Institute, Quinn worked in development for HBO and Dreamworks and has been a Los Angeles-based film critic and entertainment reporter. Excerpts from his upcoming book, What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus? (An Irreverent History of the New Testament), can be found on his blog site: Choco-Jesus.blogspot.com.
Mel Gordon
Mondo-Judeo: A Special Presentation Professor Mel Gordon will be presenting four lectures over six hours on outsider Jewish culture beginning at 11 a.m. with our “Feed Your Brain” lecture. The series will begin with “Chagallism and the Russian Yiddish Stage,” followed by “The Tragic Origins of Jewish Humor”; “Jews and the Occult, or Why Madonna’s Kabbalah is the True Kabbalah“; and “Hanussen, Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant.” You may join any or all of the lectures for just $10, or $4 for students, or free to Friends of the Center. There will be 15-minute breaks after the first and third lectures and a half-hour lunch break after the second one. Canter’s is providing a lunch truck that will sell food to participants during a lunch break beginning about 1:30 p.m. on the parking lot.
Gordon is
Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of California,
Berkeley. A director and writer, he is the author of 13 books
and 130 articles on popular culture and American, French,
German, Israeli, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish theater. This
summer he co-authored Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The
First Jewish Superhero, From the
Creators of Superman.
Edward J. Larson
Scopes at 85:
An Anniversary Look Back at the History
and Folklore of America's Most Famous
Trial Eighty-five years ago, famed free-thinker Clarence Darrow battled with fundamentalist politician William Jennings Bryan over the teaching of evolution in public schools at the now legendary trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee. Broadcast across the nation and reported on around the world, that trial focused popular attention on the spectacle of a state outlawing the teaching of a scientific theory for religious and alleged social reasons. It gained even more lasting fame through the hit Broadway play and enduring motion picture about it, Inherit the Wind. In his talk, Prof. Edward J. Larson will look back at the trial and its evolving legend to see what Americans have learned from this episode. Larson is the author or co-author of 15 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Controversy Over Science and Religion. He has also authored numerous articles on Clarence Darrow and co-edited the Modern Library edition of Darrow's words and writings. An attorney as well as a historian, Larson is University Professor of History and holds the Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He lectures frequently at universities in the United States and around the world. His next book, An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science, is due out soon from Yale University Press. |
