Chicago Humanities Festival at International House

Sunday, November 5, 2017
12:00PM-5:00PM
Assembly Hall

Sunday, November 5, 2017

12:00PM-5:00PM

Assembly Hall

Since 1989, the Chicago Humanities Festival has presented hundreds of programs that aim to expose individuals to important ideas in Humanities-related disciplines. 

For the 27th annual Fallfest, the Chicago Humanities Festival will explore the theme of Belief, digging deeper into the question of what is “belief,” faith in the divine, commitment to a cause, conviction about the truth, and trust in our institutions. Through thought-provoking programs, prominent speakers will explore the idea of belief in its many forms.

 

Conspiracies and Common Sense: From Founding to the Trump Era with Sophia Rosenfeld

Baskes Lecture in History

12:00PM-1:00PM

Sophia Rosenfeld studies the history of civic beliefs—the convictions that ground our political lives. A specialist in European and American intellectual history, particularly Enlightenment thought’s legacy in modern democracy, Rosenfeld is best known for Common Sense, an exploration of the history of that concept as a political ideal. Currently studying how “choice” became central to our political lives, Rosenfeld will discuss the powerful modern enigma of our readiness to believe in “conspiracy theories.”

 

Moral Combat with R. Marie Griffith

2:00PM-3:00PM

Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control: sex is at the heart of some of the most divisive political issues of our age. R. Marie Griffith has been writing about modern American religion and its impact on our political life since God’s Daughters, which explored how gender plays out in evangelical Christian communities. Her upcoming book, Moral Combat, starts when liberal Protestants began sparring with fundamentalists and Catholics on issues from obscenity to sex education in the 1920s and takes us to today’s ferocious and intractable culture wars.

 

Bleak Liberalism with Amanda Anderson

4:00PM-5:00PM

Basic political beliefs guide our way of being in the world. For a long time, liberalism was one of the most powerful of these orienting ideas. But liberalism has been attacked from both the left and the right as inadequate to our time. In Bleak Liberalism, a deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Brown University’s Amanda Anderson ranges from Charles Dickens to Doris Lessing to take a new look at the robustness and subtlety of liberal thinking and the fate of those ideas in the past century.

 

Open to the public. Tickets in advance here or at the door 

Co-sponsored by the International House Global Voices Program and the Chicago Humanities Festival. 

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