Eventful Week

By Amanda Holmes

This week is quite a busy one with a lot of interesting things going on around campus. Here is a list of all of the events I will be attending, which means that they are going to be awesome. Not only because I will be there but because I only do interesting and awesome things. So they will probably be of interest to some of you, too.

Wednesday, March 17: Talk on Haiti

So, I’ve tried to find out more about this event but I can’t find a lot about it on the SXU website. This is what I know: At 6pm in the Butler room in the Ward Academic Center there will be a lecture titled “Haiti: Before and After the Earthquake.” This will be a talk with William L. Balan-Gaubert, a Haitian-born activist and scholar. He'll discuss Haitian history, social thought, and culture.

Thursday, March 18:

The annual Philosophy Department's Ziegler Memorial Lecture with Professor Adriaan Peperzak will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in McGuire Hall and a student discussion with Professor Peperzak will take place from 3:30 to 4:30, in L206. The first meeting will be an informal discussion with Professor Peperzak in which students are encouraged to ask questions about the topic of his lecture, which is on Faith and Education. Initially, I was not as interested in this topic but I went to a prep discussion with some members of the philosophy department and I am now looking forward to this talk. My initial reaction was due to my aversion to lectures on faith but after a brief conversation about Peperzak’s approach, I think he will probably have some interesting things to say. Here is a summary of the topic he will be lecturing on:

“Education is a complicated form of life. It requires an ethos—a common language, similar customs, and certain shared ideological and ethical presuppositions. But if education is more than merely the transmission of tradition, if it is committed to a search for better ways, manners, customs and ideas, then it needs critique. Do we have standards or criteria for determining what are good or bad manners of living, acting, feeling, and speaking? Can we guard against the self aggrandizing tendency of critique through self-critique? And does or should faith play a role in the exercise of teaching and learning? An answer to this question presupposes that we distinguish a narrow meaning of faith, as adherence to an explicit religious conviction and practice, from a broader meaning, in which faith is still related to the basic stance that permeates each individual’s manner of realizing meaning.”

Friday, March 19:

There will be a showing of The Agronomist (2004) in McGuire Hall, 7 p.m. This is a documentary that provides insight into crucial developments in recent Haitian history. Jonathan Demme’s documentary covers the life and work of Jean Dominique, a social activist who was murdered in April 2000.

Cool. I hope to see you at some of these!

Amanda Holmes is a senior philosophy major from Atlanta, GA. She is vice president of the Philosophy Club. Consideration for the student bloggers is provided by Saint Xavier University.