What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

All Speakers

  • Renee Montagne is host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard broadcast news program in the United States. Since 2004, she has been broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California, with cohost Steve Inskeep in Washington. Over the years, Montagne has done thousands of interviews on a wide range of topics: Kurt Vonnegut on how he transformed surviving the WWII firebombing of Dresden into the novel Slaughterhouse Five; National Guardsmen on how they handle the holidays in Iraq; Paul McCartney on singing the old songs; a Hollywood historian on how the famous hillside sign came to be; Toni Morrison on the dreams and memories she turned into novels; and Bud Montagne, Renee's father, remembering the attack on Pearl Harbor. In addition to the duPont Columbia Award, Montagne has been honored by the Overseas Press Club for her coverage of Afghanistan, and by the National Association of Black Journalists for a series on Black musicians going to war. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Her career includes serving as a fellow at the University of Southern California with the National Arts Journalism Program (currently based at Columbia University), and teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism.
  • *Marketplace* host David Brown is a motorcycle-loving, history-reading, Southern-born gentleman who believes that Alexis de Tocquevilles "Democracy in America" should be required reading for all citizens. An enigmatic and multifaceted individual, he would love to have had the opportunity to interview T.E. Lawrence, and believes that journalists have the honor and heavy responsibility of writing the first draft of history. Brown is also one of public radio's most highly respected and broadly experienced hosts and producers. He joined *Marketplace* in the fall of 2000 as senior producer before being named host in September, 2003. Brown has worked extensively in broadcasting over the last 20 years. He anchored the live hour-long daily international news program Monitor Radio for PRI from 1993-1997. Prior to that, he served as Washington bureau chief and chief national correspondent for Monitor Radio and Monitor Television, as Monitor Radio's London correspondent, and as program producer of Monitor Radio's Daily Edition. In 1989, he served as executive producer of CalNet, the California Public Radio News Network.
  • Harvey Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has been teaching since 1965, both at HDS and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting (particularly Pentecostalism). He has been a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Seminario Bautista de Mexico, the Naropa Institute, and the University of Michigan. He is a prolific author. His most recent book is *When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today*. His *Secular City*, published in 1965, became an international bestseller and was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century. His other books include *The Feast of Fools*; *The Seduction of the Spirit*; *Religion in the Secular City*; *The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: Liberation Theology and the Future of World Christianity*; *Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounters With Other Faiths*; *Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality*; *The Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century; and Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year*.
  • A towering figure in the fields of Global Mission, African Christianity and Global Pentecostalism, Dr. Kalu began a distinguished teaching career at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1974, leading to a number of teaching and lecturing engagements at Harvard University, Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary, South Korea, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, University of Toronto and several other colleges and universities. A prolific writer on a wide range of subjects, Kalu has authored or edited 16 published books including *Power, Poverty and Prayer: The Challenges of Poverty and Pluralism in African Christianity, 1960-1996*, *African Christianity: An African Story, and African Pentecostalism: An Introduction*, already regarded by many as the seminal work of its kind. Dr. Kalu was not only a world-class scholar but also a man of deep Christian faith and conviction. For many years he served as an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church in his home country of Nigeria and held various national leadership positions in the denomination including membership on the General Assembly Board of Faith and Order. As a resident of Chicago, Dr. Kalu was a member of Progressive Community Center, The Peoples Church, where he worshiped regularly and taught adult education classes.
  • Daniel Ramirez obtained his PhD in American Religious History from Duke University in 2005. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. His areas of research and teaching include religions of the Southwest borderlands and migration, with a special interest in the history of religious contact, conflict, and conversion in the Americas and in the transnational and cultural dimensions of religious practice.
  • Hardy specializes in American religious culture and contemporary Christian thought with a special emphasis on black religious culture and thought. Hardy is the author of James Baldwin's *God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture*. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled: *We Grappled for the Mysteries: Black God-Talk in Modern America* which will span the 1920s through the civil rights period and consider how black descriptions of the divine have evolved in the modern period.
  • Shayne Lee is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston. He earned a PhD in sociology (Northwestern University, 2002), two master's degrees, in religion and in biblical studies, a BA in theology, and an AA in social science. Lee's forthcoming book, *American Phenomenon: Bishop T. D. Jakes*, offers the ministry of a popular preacher and cultural icon as a prism through which we can learn more about contemporary religion and America. Lee's work also studies the striking interplay of politics and religion in black churches. His recent publications include the articles "The Structure of a Spiritual Revolution: Black Baptists and Women in Ministry," published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (33:154-177), and "The Church of Faith and Freedom: African American Baptists and Social Change," published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (42:31-42). Lee teaches various courses, including African American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, Postmodern Society, and Sociology of Mass Communication.
  • Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon is the author of the New York Times bestseller *Brothers and Sisters* as well as *Your Blues Ain't Like Mine*, for which she won an NAACP Image Award for Literature. She is a commentator for National Public Radio and a contributing editor for Essence magazine, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. Campbell was born and raised in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in elementary education. She taught elementary and middle school for five years.
  • Robert Peterkin has been the director of the Urban Superintendents Program for 18 years. Prior to HGSE, Peterkin held school superintendencies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and had a long career in educational leadership, from special education teacher to deputy superintendent, mainly in the Boston Public School system. Current work focuses on the restructuring of urban public schools for educational equity and higher student achievement, most recently as a court-appointed monitor in a federal case settlement agreement involving an urban school district and plaintiffs of color.