Boston College Front Row

Claudia Baracchi is an associate professor of philosophy at the New School University in New York, who specializes in the ancient philosophers.

The social, economic, and cultural disparities between North America and Europe, on one hand, and the “global south”—Africa, south Asia, and Latin America—help explain different approaches to scripture and ritual, according to Philip Jenkins,

Joseph Tucci, chairman, president, and CEO of EMC Corporation says it’s easy to run an organization if you do three things right: hire good people, get them to work together as a team, and have a clear goal so everyone is “driving to the same place.”

“Can we move from mere toleration to mutual acceptance?” asked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) at a 1994 conference attended by Bar Ilan University Jewish philosopher Raphael Jospe.

Robert Bernasconi, the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, explores continental philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories

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 womens 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 Montesquieus Persian Letters (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).