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Philosophy and Religion Events
Visiting Scholars
Each semester the philosophy and religion department invites several scholars to speak to classes, give a departmental talk, and, in conjunction with The Brinson Honors College, deliver a Jerry Jackson Lecture in the Humanities. (Learn more about Jerry Jackson, the WCU faculty member.)
| THE 23-24 Theme is the Campus Theme: Community & Belongingness | ||
| David LaMotte | Workshop: “Worldchanging 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness” and Concert: "A Night of Music and Story" | 9/14/23 |
| Matthew Brake | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "'You Guys Ever Think about Dying?': Pop Culture, Lived Religion, and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death" | 10/4/23 |
| Rebekah Latour | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Martin Luther and the Ethics of Consent" | 11/8/23 |
| Wilson Dickinson | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Rooting Environmentalism in the Commons: Social Visions and Prophetic Memories from North Carolina and Beyond" | 3/18/24 |
| Mathew Foust | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Relationships with the Dead" | 4/25/24 |
| The 22-23 Theme is the Campus Theme: Mental Health & Wellness | ||
| John Sanders | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Polarization in American Christianity" | 10/5/22 |
| Paul Cato | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Reconciling Yourself to Your Situation: James Baldwin’s Moralistic
Psychology and the Pursuit of Mental, Spiritual, and Sociopolitical Wellness.” |
10/26/22 |
| Kim Q. Hall | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Eco-Anxiety: A Queer Crip Approach" | 11/10/22 |
| C. Thi Nguyen & Tim Sundell | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Semantic Self-Determination" (ZOOM) | 1/23/23 |
| Daniel Wyche | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: Spiritual Exercises and Political Liberation" | 4/24/23 |
| Claudia Hogg-Blake | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Non-Human Animals and the Philosophy of Love" | 4/26/23 |
| The Fall 2021 Theme is "Gender & Sexuality" | ||
| Tom Dougherty | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Social Constraints on Consent" (ZOOM) | 9/29/21 |
| Kevin Schilbrack | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Where Does Value Come From? A Talk on the Nature of Perception” | 10/14/21 |
| Sarah Imhoff | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Becoming American, Becoimng Manly: A Brief History of Jewish Masculinity" | 10/25/21 |
| Talia Welsh | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "The Good Health Imperative: the problem of wellness in a time of bad health" (ZOOM) | 11/17/21 |
| Lauren Osborne | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Who Recites the Qur'an: Gender, Nation, and Authority in American Islam" (ZOOM) | 11/30/21 |
| The Spring 2022 Theme is "Envirionmental Ethics" | ||
| Adrienne Krone | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Jewish Community Farming and the Climate Crisis" (ZOOM) | 2/2/22 |
| Anthony Neal | Black History Month Keynote Lecture: "Freedom, Hope, and Love: Three Virtues Lifted from the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle" | 2/17/22 |
| Emma Maris | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Wild Souls: the ethics of human interaction with wild animals" with Roundtable Discussion (David Henderson, Katharine Mershon, Vicki Szabo, and Laura Wright) | 2/21/22 |
| Chris Diehm |
Jerry Jackson Lectures: Lecture 1 “Deep Ecology and Connection to Nature: Moving Past the Anthropocentric Critique”; Lecture 2 “Outdoor Experience and Connection to Nature: Exploring Pathways to Environmental Advocacy” ; Lecture 3 “American Chestnut Restoration: Accommodating Others or Scaling Up?” |
Week of March 24, 2022 |
| Allison Gray | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Miracles, Magic, and Power in the Ancient Mediterranean” | 9/3/20 |
| Luis Oliveira | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “If God Exists, then Everything is Permitted” | 2/22/21 |
| Stephanie Yep | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “The Proximate Other: Islam in the American Imagination” | 4/13/21 |
| Sol Neeley | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Indigenous Phenomenology in Times of Disaster” | 11/13/19 |
| Daryl Hale | Professor Talks, Department of Philosophy & Religion: “Profits, Power or Persons?: Kant’s Dignifying of Labor” | 2/19/20 |
| Todd May | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Our Stories and Our Values” | 9/27/18 |
| Marcus Harvey | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “’The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat:’ Malidoma Somé and the Future of Africana Religious Studies” | 11/8/18 |
| Claire Katz | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Children’s Concept of Friendship: Notes from Philosophy Summer Camp” | 11/29/18 |
| Lee McBride | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Insurrectionist Ethics: Boldly Confronting Oppression" | 2/21/19 |
| Gus Skorburg | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Will Artificial Intelligence Improve Mental Health Services for Under Served Populations?” | 4/10/19 |
| J. Edward Hackett | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Philosophical Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Idea of Love in Several Sermons” | 4/26/19 |
| Lisa Guenther | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "The Living Death of Solitary Confinement" | 10/11/17 |
| Michael Shaw | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "From Cosmogony to Cosmology: Birth and Death in Early Greek Thought" | 10/24/17 |
| John Penniman | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Ritual Remedies: Drugs & Medicine in Early Christianity" | 3/12/18 |
| Zeki Saritoprak | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Islam's Jesus" | 4/30/18 |
| Shannon Sullivan | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Good White People" | 11/13/16 |
| Sander Goodhart | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Death and 'Afterdeath': The Primacy of the Ethical in a Time of Disaster" | 03/16/17 |
| Kate E. Temoney | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "When Killers Become Victims: The 1994 Rwandan Genocide and Mythology" | 4/17/17 |
| Albert "Randy" Spencer | "Loyalty to the Earth: Nietzsche, Royce, and The Appalachian Trail" | 10/6/15 |
| Nolan Hatley | "Nietzsche, Religion, and the Environment" | 11/11/15 |
| Fred Bahnson | "Tree of Life: Christianity in a Time of Climate Change" | 1/28/16 |
| Duncan Richter | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "The Significance of Religious Experience" | 10/2/14 |
| Teijo Munnich | "Tradition and Spirituality: Reflections from a Buddhist Abbess" |
10/6/14 |
| Bill Duncan | Alumni Vocational Talk: "Applied Ontology - Metaphysics meet Informatics" | 11/7/14 |
| Ali Eshraghi | WCU International Education Week Keynote Speech (PAR Co-Sponsor) |
11/20/14 |
| Rachel Kelly & Brad Kelly | Alumni Vocational Talk: Colorworld, a Series" | 3/18/15 |
| Peter Warden | "Eternal Memories" | 3/20/15 |
| Jackie Grant (moderator) |
"An Evening with North Carolina's Supreme Court Justices" Cheri Beasley, Robin Hudson, Barbara Jackson (PAR Co-Sponsor) Read about the WCU campus panel with North Carolina's Women Supreme Court Justices in The Western Carolina Journalist. The link includes video clips and photos from the event. |
3/28/15 |
| Richard Cohen | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Judaism, Philosophy, and Ethics" | 3/30/15 |
| Adam Powell | "Hans Mol: Religion as Process" | 4/6/15 |
| Stephanie Cobb | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Virtue, Violence, and Death: Gender, and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts" | 4/23/15 |
| Stephanie Cobb | "Martyred Bodies: Discourses of Pain in Early Christian Martyr Texts" | 4/24/15 |
| Buddhist Monks | "The Symbolism of the Sand Mandala" (Tibetan Buddhism) | 9/10/13 |
| David Pena-Guzman | "Never Worry Boys, for a Feminist does not Eat Beetroot! Feminism's 'Fourth Wave' and the Possibility of Social Critique" | 10/23/13 |
| J. Aaron Simmons | "If God is Dead, then what are philosophers of religion talking about?" | 11/18/13 |
| Carol Adams | Jerry Jackson Lecture (with English Dept): "How Does A Person Become a Piece of Meat?" | 11/7/13 |
| Kristi Sweet | "Beauty and Goodness Reconfigured: Kant's Ideal of Beauty" | 11/21/13 |
| Theodore George | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Gadamer and the Promise of World Literature" | 11/21/13 |
| Eddy Souffrant | Jerry Jackson Lecture: "An Approach to Development Ethics" | 3/19/14 |
| Diane Perpich | "Alone in a Crowd: Sartre and Young on Social Groups" | 3/21/14 |
| Film & Discussion | Film: "Girl Rising" (PAR Co-Sponsor) | 4/1/14 |
| Rebekah Spera | "The Question Concerning Ideology: A Reconsideration of 'The Culture Industry' in the 21st Century" | 4/11/14 |
| Kevin Schilbrack | PAR Faculty-authored book panel: Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto" | 4/21/14 |
| Michael Hodges | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “The God that Does Not Exist” | 10/4/12 |
| Kevin Schilbrack | PAR Faculty paper: "Anti-Metaphysics" | 9/26/12 |
| David Henderson | PAR Faculty paper: "Wilderness in Henry Bugbee: The Metaphyisical and the Montanan" | 11/14/12 |
| James McLachlan |
PAR Faculty paper: "Hell Is Not Other People: Ideas of Hell and Relational Theologies" |
11/28/12 |
|
John Sanders |
Jerry Jackson Lecture: "How the Human Mind Thinks of God: A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of Anthropomorphic God Concepts" | 3/18/13 |
|
Christian Miller |
Jerry Jackson Lecture: "Are Most of Us Honest People? Or Dishonest? Or Neither?" | 4/19/13 |
| Greg Hoskins | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Gettysburg at Ground Zero, and Other Conundrums in the Philosophy and Politics of History” | 10/10/11 |
| Kevin Gustafson | Jerry Jackson Lecture: “Discovering Sodom and Gomorrah in the Medieval West” | 11/1/11 |
| Marin Smillov | “How Many Bad Actions Make Me A Bad Person?” | 11/4/11 |
| Mary Caldwell | “The Hospital’s Obligations to the Uninsured and the Undocumented” | 11/9/11 |
| Aaron Simmons | “Continental Philosophy of Religion: A Future” | 11/11/11 |
| Emily Ball | "Understanding Homelessness" (Homeward Bound organization) | 11/17/11 |
| Diane Perpich | "Feminism and Multiculturalism Revisited: French Feminism and the Ni Putes Ni Soumises Movement (Neither Whores Nor Doormats)" | 12/2/11 |
| Rob Bass | “Understanding Animal Minds” | 2/8/12 |
| James Keller | "Process Theism and Some Problems of Evil" | 2/16/12 |
| Katharine Schweitzer | "Being Open to Change: The Paradox of Provisionality" | 3/8/12 |
| Aaron Simmons | "A Goldilocks God?: A Comment on Contemporary Philosophy of Religion” | 4/19/12 |
