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The theme of this years’s Books and Coffee program will revolve around a series of classic texts—books that everyone knows about, read in high school or college, or always thought they should have read, even if they haven’t yet. In a format aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, we discuss the continued relevance of some of these works. This year, we have selected texts that resonate to our theme of "Reconciliation."
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Reconciling Politics and Religion:
Reinhold Niebuhr's "Moral Man and Immoral Society"
Discussion led by Michael Kalmes, Associate Professor of Social Science
Tuesday, October 14 • 4:00 p.m. • Earhart Manor Living Room
This event is free and open to the public.
Directions / Campus Map / CUA2RTS Calendar
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The 2008 presidential campaign raises again the potential paradoxes inherent in the relationship between religious beliefs and political action. Can we be political and religious? Are overtly moral ends for government even practical, much less desirable? Are some religious identities particularly suited to public affairs? Or do public concerns effectively undermine religious witness and moral values? In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, pastor, social activist, and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr attempts to reconcile the moral imperatives of religious commitment expressed in the drive to make society righteous with the practical realities of politics as an exercise of force. Niebuhr’s framing of the questions and his deep understanding of both faith and governing are helpful to a discussion today that is often more heated than enlightening.
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Dickens' "Great Expectations"...and Ours
Discussion led by Mark Looker, Professor of English
Tuesday, November 18 • 4:00 p.m. • Earhart Manor Living Room
This event is free and open to the public.
Directions / Campus Map / CUA2RTS Calendar / Top of the page
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Samuel Johnson once wrote about what he called “the hunger of the imagination,” which keeps us restlessly longing to be something we’re not. How can we reconcile the self we imagine with the one looking back at us from the mirror? Is Dickens’ famous novel just a tome with which to plague generations of high schoolers, or does it speak to our own “great expectations”? Does it portray delusion finally understood and overcome, or does it rather, under the guise of honest self-appraisal, actually encourage the kind of fantasy life that on the surface it condemns? Part fairy tale, part love letter, part confession, Great Expectations haunts the imagination by trying to exorcise ghosts that we may wish would stick around.
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