Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang had a revelation in a soccer stadium: being in a crowd was both sociable and lonely. The fruit of that thought is crowd out, a piece that combines lyrics generated via search engine, the human voice spoken, sung, and shouted, and the dynamic movement of people in a public space. In collaboration with Illinois Humanities, which is reaching into all 50 of Chicago’s wards to gather participants, CHF will produce the American premiere of Lang’s gargantuan work. Be sure to be at Cloud Gate for this unique event.

Reservations not required. Visit crowdoutchicago.org for more information

“The moral compass of American diplomacy.” – Forbes

When Barack Obama appointed activist, author, and academic Samantha Power as the United States' ambassador to the United Nations, she became the youngest person ever to hold that post. Known for her commitment to democracy and an interventionist approach to foreign policy, Power's tenure included responding to pressing human rights issues ranging from the persistence of gender discrimination around the world to the plight of refugees from the rise of the Islamic State. Now that she has left government service, Power comes to CHF to discuss what she believes is the right way forward on human rights, in conversation with foreign affairs journalist and author Robin Wright.

This annual lecture honors the late Joanne H. Alter's pioneering work on behalf of women interested in social action and public service.

Charter Humanists must RSVP for complimentary entry to this program by calling (312) 605-8444.

This program is a special Festival fundraiser. Following her public event, Samantha Power will join the Chicago Humanities Festival Gala. Click here for more information.

If you would like to request an accessibility accommodation, please email us at [email protected] or call the CHF Box Office at (312) 605-8444.

Presenters:

Ambassador Samantha Power has been called the “conscience” of U.S. foreign policy. A leading voice internationally for principled American engagement in the world, global cooperation, and human rights, she has a unique perspective – spending half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and Harvard professor, and the last eight years helping to shape them. The youngest-ever U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, she was also a member of President Obama’s Cabinet and a senior adviser at the White House.

Robin Wright has reported from more than a 140 countries on six continents for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, and others. Her foreign tours include the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Wright has been a fellow at Yale, Duke, Stanford, Brookings Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Among many awards, she won the U.N. Correspondents Gold Medal, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative." The American Academy of Diplomacy selected her as the journalist of the year in 2004.

“Her intelligence is like a salve for all thinking people who have felt wounded or marginalized by The God Wars.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it's Ta-Nehisi Coates.” – Toni Morrison

In her Peabody-award winning public radio show and podcast, On Being, Krista Tippett provides a space for deep and meaningful conversations with profound thinkers of our time. In a live taping of her show at CHF she will interview Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the acclaimed Between the World and Me, on the occasion of his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, a work that examines the eight years of the Obama presidency, a dramatic era in politics, activism, and culture that has reshaped this country and its public discourse. As part of On Being's Civil Conversations Project, they will explore issues ranging from the idea of a “post-racial” world to Coates' meticulously constructed case for reparations for slavery.

This program is presented in partnership with The Institute of Politics at The University of Chicago.

Presenters:

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times bestselling author. She created and hosts the public radio program and podcast On Being and curates the Civil Conversations Project, an emergent approach to the differences of our age. She received the 2013 National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” Krista was a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin and holds a Masters of Divinity from Yale University.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between The World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Ta-Nehisi is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

From Housekeeping to her powerful trio of Iowa novels—Gilead, Home, and Lila—Marilynne Robinson has created profoundly literary works, consistently recognized by prize committees, that are meditative and soul-searching books. Robinson is also an essayist of great range and power, most recently demonstrated in The Givenness of Things, which trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. Come hear the woman who was awarded a National Humanities Medal and interviewed by President Obama in the New York Review of Books. Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens joins Robinson in conversation.

Preorder your copy of The Givenness of Things through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Tribune.

Presenters:

Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Iowa City.

Heidi Stevens writes the “Balancing Act” column for the Chicago Tribune, where she has worked since 1998. Before covering lifestyles, she was an editor in the Tribune’s entertainment department.

Fascinated by our cultural terror of dead bodies, mortician and best-selling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty set out with her characteristic curiosity and razor sharp wit to discover how others care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls) and Japanese mourners who use chopsticks to pluck bones from their loved ones' cremation ashes. Doughty is joined by illustrator and fellow Order of the Good Death member Landis Blair for a conversation on what it means to treat the dead with “dignity.”

Preorder your copy of From Here to Eternity through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Mortician Caitlin Doughty—host and creator of “Ask a Mortician” and the New York Times best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes—founded The Order of the Good Death. She lives in Los Angeles, where she runs her non-profit funeral home, Undertaking LA.

Landis Blair is a pen and ink illustrator known for his whimsically dark picture books and for his work on the graphic novel The Hunting Accident: a True Story of Crime and Poetry. Most recently he illustrated Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. He lives in Chicago

Garry Wills has been a leading commentator on political and religious life in America for decades, winner of a Pulitzer for Lincoln at Gettysburg, and two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. In his new book, What the Qur’an Meant, he offers a timely reconsideration of the sacred text. Reading with sympathy and rigor, Wills takes us back to the words themselves to discover how they have guided people down through the centuries and what other non–Muslims—such as Pope Francis—have found so inspiring.

Preorder your copy of What the Qur'an Meant through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Presenters:

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. He has written Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote What Jesus Meant and other books about his Catholic faith.

Tanya Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist, focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra, California, and Chicago. When God Talks Back was the result of four years fieldwork, and concluded that the ability to hear God speaking to one was enabled in part by mental training.

This program is presented in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center.

Presenters:

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She worked with people who hear the voices of psychosis and also with those who are not psychotic, but hear the voice of God. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. When God Talks Back was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year.

Chicago artist Emil Ferris grabbed the attention of literary and art circles with her debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Ferris crafts a compelling tale that combines a coming-of-age narrative in 1960s Chicago, Holocaust history, a murder mystery, and socio-political critique, told by a 10-year-old protagonist who imagines she is a wolf-girl. In her distinctive cross-hatch style, Ferris reproduces classic comic book covers and classic paintings. Damon Locks joins Ferris for a discussion of this daring, original, and very dark work.

Preorder your copy of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Emil Ferris grew up in Chicago during the turbulent 1960s, where she still lives, and is consequently a devotee of all things monstrous and horrific. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and DJ. He attended the School of the Art Institute where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. He is a recent recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts.

In recent years, policymakers in Europe and North America have rallied around the notion that religious freedom, interfaith dialogue, religious tolerance, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to combating persecution and discrimination. Northwestern University's Elizabeth Shakman Hurd doesn’t think so. A recipient of a Buffett “Big Ideas” grant, Hurd argues in Beyond Religious Freedom that the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion create the very social tensions and divisions they mean to overcome.

Preorder your copy of Beyond Religious Freedom through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Presenters:

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor of Politics and Religion at Northwestern. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, and co-editor of Politics of Religious Freedom and Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. She co-directs the “Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad” and “Talking Religion: Publics, Politics, and the Media” research projects, and directs the Buffett Research Group on Global Politics & Religion. Hurd is a regular contributor to public debates on US foreign policy and the politics of religion, appearing in Boston Review, Public Culture, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post.

Why has the work of William Blake remained such a vital resource for dissenters, activists, and utopians? Michael Ferber, an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and a defendant in the “Spock Trial,” is a leading expert on Blake. Coinciding with the Block Museum’s exhibition “William Blake in the Age of Aquarius,” Ferber will discuss and explore how the work of the Romantic poet and printmaker reveals the connections between imagination, belief, and action. Audience members will be invited to tour the exhibition following the talk.

This program is generously underwritten by Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross and is presented in partnership with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

Presenters:

Michael Ferber has been Professor of English and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire since 1987. He wrote two books about William Blake as well as A Dictionary of Literary Symbolism. While he was a graduate student he helped organize the draft-card-return ceremony in the Arlington Street Church (1967), for which he stood trial in Boston Federal Court with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rev. William Sloane Coffin. He taught English at Yale from 1975 to 1982, then worked for four years as a lobbyist and writer about nuclear disarmament in Washington.

“Matt Taibbi is [Hunter S.] Thompson's heir.” — Seattle Post-Intelligence

Millions watched the video of the death of Eric Garner after a police officer put him in a “chokehold” during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes, galvanizing a wave of Black Lives Matter organizing and protests. Best-selling polemic journalist Matt Taibbi comes to CHF to explore the compelling story of the roots of Garner’s death, the grand jury, the media circus, the subsequent murder of two police officers, and the protests from every side. Join us for a riveting conversation on urban America, the perversion of its policing, and the racial tensions that threaten to tear it apart.

Preorder your copy of I Can't Breathe through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program

Presenters:

Matt Taibbi, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement, is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2007 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.

When Netflix debuted Making a Murderer in 2015, audiences were both riveted and frustrated by this story of wrongful conviction partly based on eyewitness testimony from Penny Beerntsen, the victim of a brutal attack. In her forthcoming documentary, True Memories and Other Falsehoods, Northwestern University filmmaker Debra Tolchinsky hones in on Beerntsen’s account as part of a larger exploration of how memories are formed, implanted, and/or contaminated, especially in the context of the criminal justice system. Founder and artistic director of Facets Multimedia Milos Stehlik joins Tolchinskly in conversation.

This program is presented in partnership with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Presenters:

Debra Tolchinsky, Associate Professor and Director of Northwestern University’s MFA in Documentary Media, is a filmmaker and curator. Her work has screened at the Sundance Film Festival, The John F. Kennedy Center, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Supreme Court Institute. Tolchinsky ranked No. 8 on New City's Film 50 and is a 2017–2018 Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She holds an AB from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and an MFA from SAIC. Her current documentary (in production) concerns contaminated memory and the criminal justice system.

Milos Stehlik is founder and artistic director of Facets Multimedia, a leading national media arts center. Since 1975, he's been responsible for Facets' public programs which include screenings of foreign and independent films and video on a daily basis, the Chicago International Children's Film Festival and associated educational programs, as well as Facets Video, a pioneering catalog of over 65,000 foreign, independent, classic American, silent, experimental, fine arts and quality children’s films in digital formats.

Vice President Al Gore comes to CHF to deliver a call to action and to expose, with alarming clarity and conclusiveness, that global climate change is a fact left unchecked, and its consequences for the world we live in will be disastrous. In An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, the follow-up documentary and book to his groundbreaking An Inconvenient Truth, Gore explores the reality of how humankind is aiding in the destruction of our planet. He also tells a story of change in the making and offers real, actionable steps that each of us can take to help reverse the damage. Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director Alison Cuddy joins the Vice President for a program essential for anyone concerned with the future of our world.

Preorder your copy of An Inconvenient Sequel through the CHF box office and save 20%.

This program is generously underwritten by Southwest Airlines.

Theater rental and services have been underwritten through the support of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

Charter Humanists must RSVP for complimentary entry to this program by calling (312) 605-8444.

Presenters:

Al Gore is the cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. He is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors. Gore has served as a representative, senator, and the 45th Vice President of the United States. He is the author of the best sellers Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice, and, most recently, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Gore is the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.” Gore spends the majority of his time as the chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis.

Alison Cuddy is the Chicago Humanities Festival's Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director. Prior to the Festival, she spent more than 10 years at WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago. There she helped launch Odyssey, a nationally syndicated talk show of arts and ideas, hosted the newsmagazine Eight Forty-Eight and reported on arts and culture. She holds a MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BA in Cinema Studies from Concordia University.

Standing at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, Leonardo da Vinci might have been history’s most creative genius. Best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson comes to CHF to discuss his magisterial new biography, which shows a wide-ranging da Vinci—he painted the “Mona Lisa” and explored the math of optics—at ease with being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, easily distracted, and, at times, heretical. Isaacson shows how da Vinci’s creativity was based on skills we can improve in ourselves: passionate curiosity, a willingness to question, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

Ticket purchase includes a copy of Leonardo da Vinci.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program recognizes John McCarter who received our Humanist of the Year Award in 2016, and is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Presenters:

Walter Isaacson, University Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.

Poet, feminist, and a cheerleader for young women everywhere, Erika L. Sanchez comes to CHF to discuss self-determined identity, cultural expectations, and grief through her stunning, often laugh-out-loud funny young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Set in Chicago, the story centers on Julia as she attempts to understand her sister's life after her death. In a web of insecurity and complicated connections between those we love and those we are trying to impress, it's how we put together the fragments that reveals who we actually are.

Preorder your copy of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Presenters:

Erika L. Sánchez is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago. Erika was a Fulbright Scholar, CantoMundo Fellowship recipient, and Bread Loaf Scholar. Most recently, she was a columnist for Cosmopolitan for Latinas, and has written for Salon, Rolling Stone, Jezebel, The Guardian and BuzzFeed. As a daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Erika has always been determined to defy borders of any kind.

Every week, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone reaches the listeners of over 450 public radio stations through WNYC’s On the Media. With her front-row perch on the day’s events and genius for making insightful, rapid-fire connections, Gladstone comes to CHF to explain The Trouble with Reality. She demonstrates that reality was never what one might think—there is and always has been a bubble. People are subjective and prey to stereotypes, which makes reality more vulnerable than ever imagined. Drawing from writers as wide-ranging as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy straight out of the authoritarian playbook and shows how the Trump team mastered it. Finally, she offers hope—the inevitable reckoning (history tells us we can count on it), and a way to recover reality. Gladstone is joined by CHF Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director Alison Cuddy for this timely conversation.

Preorder your copy of The Trouble with Reality through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with Leadership Greater Chicago.

Presenters:

Brooke Gladstone is a Peabody Award–winning journalist and media analyst. She is the co-host and managing editor of the public radio newsmagazine radio show and podcast On the Media, and has written for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Slate. She is also the author of The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. She lives with her husband, the journalist Fred Kaplan, in Brooklyn.

Alison Cuddy is the Chicago Humanities Festival's Marilynn Thoma Artistic Director. Prior to the Festival, she spent more than 10 years at WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago. There she helped launch Odyssey, a nationally syndicated talk show of arts and ideas, hosted the newsmagazine Eight Forty-Eight and reported on arts and culture. She holds a Masters of Arts in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BA in Cinema Studies from Concordia University.

In thirty years of fieldwork, ornithologist Richard Prum has seen quite a bit of ostentatious sexual display. To explain it all, he dusts off Darwin’s long-neglected theory of sexual selection, which posits that the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. His The Evolution of Beauty is a fascinating mixture of biology, philosophy, sociology, and the rich story of human sexuality.

Preorder your copy of The Evolution of Beauty through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by Owen Deutsch and Rona Talcott.

Presenters:

Richard Prum is an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in avian behavior, phylogeny, feather coloration, feather development, and breeding biology. Prum is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and the Curator of Ornithology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He has received the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He has studied birds on continents, and has worked on fossil dinosaurs in China.

“Fearless in his reporting, generous in his spirit, and brilliant in his prose. I would follow him anywhere.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Is there a connection between mental health, disease, and belief? In Geography of Madness, journalist Frank Bures offers a resounding yes. In tracking the delusion that one's genitals can be stolen—a relatively common complaint in countries ranging from Nigeria to Singapore—Bures sought to uncover the roots of a whole range of “culture–bound syndromes,” and how people’s beliefs about their health shape their physical experiences of health. Join Bures for a conversation about penis theft, placebos, and the intersection of Western and Chinese medicine.

Preorder your copy of The Geography of Madness through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes. His work has been included in the Best American Travel Writing, selected as “Notable” in the Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing, and has appeared in Harper’s, Aeon, Lapham’s Quarterly, Scientific American, The Washington Post Magazine and other publications.

Empathy bridges divides, binds together community, helps us overcome cultural difference, and feels ever more important in our current rancorous and partisan moment. But is it religion that best fosters empathy? And how does media coverage shape the perception—and possibilities—of religion in public life? In this exclusive CHF/New York Times event, Times Chicago Bureau Chief Monica Davey leads a discussion between her Times colleagues Frank Bruni and Laurie Goodstein, along with Eboo Patel, leader of Chicago’s Interfaith YouthCore, about religious solutions to political and social divides.

This program recognizes the many contributions made to our community by the Chicago Community Trust and is presented in partnership with The New York Times.

In bestsellers like Ghost, All American Boys, and the new Marvel novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man, award-winning author Jason Reynolds writes young adult narratives that explore the pressures and promise of young people. His freshly pressed Long Way Down is a story, in verse, of a one-minute elevator ride filled with revenge, troubled emotions, friendship, and family where, one floor at a time, a teenage boy faces himself and contemplates the murder of his brother. His entire world is caught between those sliding doors. Seems we are caught too.

Preorder your copy of Long Way Down through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by the Lohengrin Foundation and is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Presenters:

Jason Reynolds was tricked into being a writer. For years his aunt would only give him books for Christmas. Year after year she’d disappoint him with a gift-wrapped book. Now, after having published four critically acclaimed books and co-authored another two, Jason was proclaimed "easily one of the most promising of Young Adult novelists in the market today" by NBC. Jason has been reviewed and profiled in The Washington Post, NPR, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly. Reynolds is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing For Young People MFA Program, and currently resides in Washington, DC.

Shepsu Aakhu is a playwright, director, musician, scenographic designer, photographer, and the Executive Producer for the Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre (MPAACT). In 2012 he was awarded the Joseph Jefferson citation for outstanding new work for his play Speaking in Tongues The Chronicles of Babel.

“The finest Wagnerian soprano in the world” — Robert Levine

Christine Goerke, one of the greatest operatic voices of her generation, is performing the title role of Brünnhilde in Lyric Opera’s new production of Die Walküre, the second opera of Wagner’s great Ring Cycle. Known for her sparkling wit as well as her powerful and subtle interpretations of the repertoire, Goerke will sit down with Colin Ure and Lyric’s Roger Pines to discuss her life in music and Wagner’s enduring significance.

This program is generously underwritten as part of the Stanek Endowed Music Program series and is presented in partnership with Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Presenters:

Christine Goerke has sung much of the great soprano repertoire, beginning with the Mozart and Handel heroines and now moving into dramatic Strauss and Wagner roles in the most important opera houses of the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Royal Opera House, Paris Opera, and the Teatro alla Seala. She has also appeared with a number of leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BB Proms, and Sydney Symphony. Her many awards include the 2001 Richard Tucker Award, the 2015 Musical American Vocalist of the Year Award, and the 2017 Opera News Award.

Roger Pines is Lyric Opera of Chicago’s dramaturg, broadcast co-host and co-producer, and program editor, as well as special lecturer/consultant for the company’s young-artist program and a frequent public speaker for Lyric events. Pines previously held positions at San Diego Opera, The Dallas Opera, and The Glimmerglass Festival. A contributor to many important American and European publications, as well as to programs of major opera companies, Pines has written for CDs on seven major labels. He has been a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts’ “Opera Quiz” annually since 2006.

Colin Ure was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and studied music, majoring in voice, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Following graduation he performed as a professional classical singer throughout the UK and further afield. In 2005 he was appointed as Dramaturg for Houston Grand Opera, where he lectured, wrote articles about opera, and prepared supertitle translations. Colin now lives in Chicago, working as a freelance dramaturg. Currently, he is writing and presenting The Ryan Opera Center Recital Series for 98.7 WFMT.

In The Cooking Gene, culinary historian and award-winning food blogger Michael W. Twitty seeks to trace ancestry through Southern cuisine. His memoir engages the charged racial politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine, presenting a family portrait over three centuries, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom, and visiting sites from Alabama synagogues to black-owned organic farms. Celebrating the rich customs of ancestral survival, Twitty reveals the power that food has to bring us to the table where we can discover the real America together.

Preorder your copy of The Cooking Gene through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian who recreates the American slave experience through food and its preparation. His blog, Afroculinaria, is the first devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacy, and Twitty was honored by FirstWeFeast.com as one of twenty greatest food bloggers of all time. He has also served as a judge for the James Beard Awards and is a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance. He was recently named one of “Fifty People Changing the South” by Southern Living and one of the “Five Cheftavists to Watch” by TakePart.Com.

“Writing music is not about yourself. If done right, it’s an act of citizenship.” — David Lang

Known for co-founding the musical collective Bang on a Can, his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece The Little Match Girl Passion, and his Academy Award-nominated music for Paolo Sorrentino's film Youth, David Lang’s compositions challenge distinctions between classical, folk, and pop. His recent work has also upended the process of writing lyrics, turning to the Internet search engine for inspiration: The text for crowd out, which CHF brought to Chicago in early October for its North American premiere, is composed of responses to Lang’s query “When I am in a crowd I…” Join him for a discussion of his crowd–sourced creative process and body of work.

This program is generously underwritten by Elizabeth A. Liebman and is presented in partnership with Illinois Humanities and Chicago Architectural Biennial.

Presenters:

David Lang is one of America's most esteemed and performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. Lang has received a Pulitzer prize for music composition, was nominated for both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Original Song, and is a recipient of the Rome Prize.

The Publican, often named one of Chicago’s finest restaurants, conjures a colonial American beer hall with its massive communal tables, high-backed chairs, deep beer list, and James Beard award-winning chef Paul Kahan’s hallmark fare. Cheers to the Publican by Kahan and co-author and executive chef Cosmo Goss is a toast to the food they love to make and share, the characters who produce the ingredients that inspire them, and the cooks they honor. Join us for a conversation celebrating the “food personality” of The Publican.

Preorder your copy of Cheers to the Publican through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Paul Kahan is executive chef and partner of The Publican and One Off Hospitality Group and has become the nationally recognized face of the Chicago food landscape. His businesses—Blackbird, Avec, The Publican (downtown and O'Hare locations), Publican Anker, Big Star, Publican Quality Meats, Nico Osteria, Dove's Luncheonette, and The Violet Hour—are consistently top-rated in Chicago and nationally. In addition to leading food media, Kahan has been covered in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker, among others. Food & Wine named Kahan a Best New Chef and the James Beard Foundation has recognized him as Best Chef Midwest.

Cosmo Goss trained at Gramercy Tavern and is The Publican's executive chef. In 2015, Goss was named to Forbes magazine's “30 Under 30” list.

“A masterwork of psychological fiction.” — Julia Klein, Chicago Tribune

One of our finest novelists, Claire Messud weaves compelling, irresistible fictional worlds while asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What stories do we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Messud's latest novel, The Burning Girl, is a bracing, hypnotic coming–of–age story about the bond of best friends that straddles childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality. Booklist Editor Donna Seaman joins Messud for a conversation on youth, friendship, and female adolescence.

Preorder your copy of The Burning Girl through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The author of five previous works of fiction including her most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, Messud lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Donna Seaman is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. She is Editor, Adult Books, at Booklist, a member of the advisory council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. She lives in Chicago.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of George Washington, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton (the last of which inspired the Broadway musical), Ron Chernow comes to CHF to deliver a dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling presidents. In Grant, Chernow finds the threads that bind together the caricatures of Ulysses S. Grant—the inept businessman, the triumphant but brutal Union general, the hapless president—with his spirit and monumental accomplishments. With lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow sheds new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as “nothing heroic…and yet the greatest hero.” Jeremy McCarter, author of Young Radicals and co-author of Hamilton: The Revolution, joins Chernow for this revealing conversation.

Ticket purchase includes a copy of Grant. An option for 1 book + 2 tickets is available through the box office at (312) 605-8444.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe.

Presenters:

Ron Chernow is the prize-winning author of six previous books and the recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award, Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton—the inspiration for the Broadway musical—won the American History Book Prize. A past president of PEN America, Chernow has been the recipient of eight honorary doctorates. He resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Jeremy McCarter is the author of Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals and co-author with Lin-Manuel Miranda of the bestseller Hamilton: The Revolution. He has written about culture and politics for New York, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed. He spent five years on the artistic staff of the Public Theater in New York. He studied history at Harvard and lives in Chicago.

In celebration of Chicago's most famous poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, the Chicago Humanities Festival is partnering with poets from The Golden Shovel Anthology, a compendium of inspired poems to celebrate her centennial year. The presentation will include a reading of Brooks' poem “Children of the Poor," along with performed original poetry from Brenda Cárdenas, Reginald Gibbons, and Janice Harrington, speaking on Brooks' influence in their lives and work. Peter Kahn, who launched the anthology, will moderate the conversation.

Preorder your copy of The Golden Shovel Anthology through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with Gallery Guichard and OMB100, an initiative supported by The Chicago Community Trust and Allstate in honor of Miss Brooks’ legacy and her enduring contributions to Chicago all in efforts to inspire a new generation.

This venue is a mixture of seating and standing room. Seating is first-come, first-served.

Atorina Zomaya is on a mission to deepen awareness and understanding of contemporary culture by turning to its storied, 6,000 year-long culinary history. Through her study of the Yale Tablets—the world’s oldest cookbook—Zomaya has discovered a rich and vibrant cuisine, traces of which are found in current dishes, from pickled vegetables to meat pies. Join Zomaya at CHF’s Evening in Bronzeville to prepare dishes and chat with Cliff Rome, chef-proprietor of Peach’s Restaurant.

This program is presented in partnership with Peach's Restaurant.

Presenters:

Atorina Zomaya, the spirited founder of Assyrian Kitchen, is making ancient foods a modern phenomenon. As part of the Chicago-based interactive cooking project, Zomaya hosts popular cooking classes with Assyriologists from the University of Chicago to share 6,000 years of Assyrian culinary tradition and culture with her students. This Chicago native wants the local culinary scene to know that Assyrians, descendants of one of the oldest civilizations in the world, still exist, and their food is both ancient and delicious.

Chef Clifford Rome developed an early interest in food after helping his grandmother prepare meals fresh from the garden of his childhood home in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. In 2002, Chef Rome founded Rome’s Joy Companies which boasts a business portfolio that includes a full-service catering and event planning company, a restaurant, a fine arts gallery and the Parkway Ballroom—a historic banquet facility located in the heart of Chicago’s Bronzeville community.

Reverend angel Kyodo williams, an ordained Zen priest and the founder of the Center for Transformative Change in Berkeley, California, seeks to bridge the racial divides that exist within communities through the power of practice and what she calls “a radical dharma.” Her faith in the transformative ability of the individual grounds her conception of a “presence-centered social justice movement,” where developing greater self-awareness can also awaken a community. In her latest book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, Rev. williams addresses racial injustice and the barriers to a socially just world while pointing to how one individual's commitment can spark healing within a community – just as a single drop can transform an entire body of water. Founding executive director of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab Toni Anderson joins Reverend williams in conversation.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with Blanc Gallery.

Presenters:

Called “the most intriguing African-American Buddhist” by Library Journal, angel Kyodo williams has been bridging the worlds of spirit and justice since her critically acclaimed book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace. The work was hailed as “an act of love” by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and “a classic” by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. Fiercely grounded, she is known for her willingness to both sit with and speak to uncomfortable truths. angel notes, “Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”

Toni Anderson is a Southside Chicago native dedicated to healing and bringing equity to the people, spaces and systems supporting and threatening climate & culture. Ms. Anderson is an urban ecologist, spiritualist and founder of Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab and Mindful Rant, organizations that serve as vehicles for providing youth and communities with the tools they need to be agents of mindful social, environmental change and proactive, imaginal community engagement.

“Danez Smith is an original.…If you have ever lost faith, if you want to believe in life, then you must read this book—it will humble and uplift you, leave you understanding that in the face of it all, there is only awe.” — Chris Abani

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is celebrated for deft lines, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police—suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten, replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith writes about desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and an HIV-positive diagnosis. Smith confronts, praises, and rebukes America, where every day is too often a funeral and too rarely a miracle. University of Chicago sociologist, poet, artist, and educator Eve L. Ewing joins Danez in conversation.

Preorder your copy of Don't Call Us Dead through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with Gallery Guichard and the Poetry Foundation.

This venue is a mixture of seating and standing room. Seating is first-come, first-served.

Presenters:

Recipient of a 2017 NEA Award, Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer, and performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Don’t Call Us Dead. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, 3-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion, and a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective.

Eve L. Ewing is a poet, essayist, visual artist, educator, and a sociologist at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her research is focused on racism, social inequality, and urban policy, and the impact of these forces on American public schools and the lives of young people. Dr. Ewing’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic.

“We measure the value of our work by the quiet pleasure of the lives lived in our buildings.” — Tod Williams and Billie Tsien

Locals perked up when the New York-based firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners was announced as designers for Obama’s Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side. Williams and Tsien, partners in work and life for the past three decades, are known for their elegant designs like the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at The University of Chicago. Their work is focused on signature values and their buildings stand as powerful expressions of the place, the activities, and the people that inhabit them. Together they practice architecture “as an act of profound optimism.” Join them for a discussion about this approach and their architectural ambitions.

This program is generously underwritten by Paula Kahn and Herman Miller.

Presenters:

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien began working together in 1977 and founded their architectural practice in 1986. Located in New York, their studio focuses on work for institutions, including schools, museums, and not-for-profits. A sense of rootedness, light, texture, detail, and most of all, experience, are at the heart of what they design. Over the past three decades, they have received more than two dozen AIA Awards as well as numerous national and international citations. Most recently, a 2017 AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture for their Logan Center for the Arts, located at the University of Chicago. Last year, they were selected to design the Obama Presidential Center. Outside the studio, Tod and Billie are active participants in a broad cultural community and maintain long-standing associations with many organizations devoted to the arts. As both educators and practitioners, they are dedicated to creating a better world through architecture.

“A master storyteller with a rock and roll heart” — NPR

For a compelling primer on the political, cultural, and imaginative realities of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, read Luis Alberto Urrea. In richly detailed poetry, novels, short stories, and non-fiction, including The Devil’s Highway, Into the Beautiful North, and The Water Museum, Urrea has brought to life the landscape and people of the American and Mexican West, a world lined with borders physical and metaphorical, where, he says, “everybody is in transition.” Join him for a conversation about the current state of Mexico-U.S. relations.

Preorder your copy of The Water Museum through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Hailed by NPR as a "literary badass" and a "master storyteller with a rock and roll heart," Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, Urrea is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 16 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“Finally, after so many works focusing on this fight or that, the whole man, the whole life, is presented here. And what a revelation it is…Bravo!” — Ken Burns

Muhammad Ali was “The Greatest”—and the fastest, the loudest, the rashest. Join best-selling author Jonathan Eig for a conversation on the most important athlete in American history. In Ali: A Life, Eig uses FBI records, newly discovered interviews, and unprecedented access to Ali’s associates to reveal how the three-time heavyweight champion used his fame, his mouth, and his mind to mark American culture. In a career full of seemingly magical feats, Ali’s greatest may have been his transformation from one of the nation’s most reviled characters to one of its most beloved.

Preorder your copy of Ali: A Life through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by Sylvia and Larry Margolies.

Presenters:

Jonathan Eig is the author of four critically acclaimed books, two of them New York Times best sellers, including The Luckiest Man, Opening Day, Capone, and The Birth of the Pill. Eig is a former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, and he remains a contributing writer there. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Washington Post, and other publications. He has appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and in two Kens Burns films for PBS. He is currently working with Burns to develop a documentary on Muhammad Ali.

Writers are told to “write what you know,” yet death is ultimately unknowable. We can witness the moment right before, but the next reality remains elusive and writers unavoidably focus on life. Two-time National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat comes to CHF to discuss her astute and intimate The Art of Death, a personal account of her mother’s death from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning of how other writers, from Toni Morrison to C.S. Lewis, have approached death in their own work. Tracie Hall Director of Culture Program at the Joyce Foundation, joins Danticat for this profound and moving discussion.

Preorder your copy of The Art of Death through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This annual lecture is supported by the Doris Conant Endowment for Programs on Women and Culture.

Presenters:

Edwidge Danticat is the acclaimed and best-selling author of several books, including the novels Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, and the memoir Brother, I'm Dying. She's received many awards and honors, which include the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, two National Book Award finalists, the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Story Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and others.

Tracie D. Hall is the Director of Culture Program at The Joyce Foundation. Before her Joyce Foundation appointment, Tracie was most recently Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) for the City of Chicago where she oversaw the Arts and Creative Industries Division which included the Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music Industry, and Farmers Market programs, as well as the Chicago Film Office, Chicago Artists Month and Lake FX Summit and Expo.

“His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world.” — Marilynne Robinson

In his 2013 memoir My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, poet and scholar Christian Wiman writes that “human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.” That idea serves as a manifesto of sorts for Wiman’s profound exploration in prose and poetry of difficult subjects: spirituality, doubt, morality. His new book, Joy: 100 Poems, seeks to illuminate this often unexplored topic in contemporary life through a survey of modern poetry, from Emily Dickinson to Mahmoud Darwish.

Preorder your copy of Joy through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Presenters:

Christian Wiman is the author of numerous books, including a selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, and My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. He was the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003-2013 and now teaches at Yale Divinity School.

Believing passionately in the importance and impact of science for our everyday lives, filmmakers Clayton Brown and Monica Ross document people driven by a search for scientific truth, whether hot on the trail of the Higgs Boson particle (The Atom Smashers) or done in by an obsession with cold fusion (The Believers). Their latest, We Believe in Dinosaurs, follows the construction of a life-sized replica of Noah’s Ark by the Creation Museum in Kentucky, an enterprise claiming to provide scientific evidence for Biblical stories.

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. A student matinee featuring Clayton Brown and Monica Ross is generously underwritten by Baxter International.

Presenters:

Clayton Brown is a filmmaker and senior lecturer at Northwestern University. Interested in the compelling stories that emerge when people pursue their passions, his work includes Galileo's Grave, winner of the Chicago IFP Production Fund, and The Darkening Sun, a screenplay about the first woman to photograph a solar eclipse. He is a co-founder of 137 Films, a documentary company committed to exploring America’s complicated relationship with science.

Monica Ross is a filmmaker and playwright. Along with exploring America’s relationship with science, she collects home movies and tells stories about women navigating American culture. Her films have screened internationally, including Dinner, a finalist at the Rose d'Or Montreux in Switzerland, The Story of My Life, Women’s National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Atom Smashers (co-directed), PBS's Independent Lens, and The Believers (co-directed), Best Documentary Chicago International Film Festival 2012. Monica is a co-founder of 137 Films where she is currently co-directing We Believe in Dinosaurs.

“An elegant historical tale…[from] the master storyteller of astronomy.” — The Boston Globe

In the mid-19th century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as “human computers” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the women turned to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of a half a million plates that Harvard amassed enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries. Renowned science writer Dava Sobel (Longitude, Galileo's Daughter) comes to CHF to tell the little-known true story of this group of remarkable women whose work forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

Preorder your copy of The Glass Universe through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Dava Sobel is one of the most prominent, critically acclaimed, bestselling narrative nonfiction writers working today. A former science reporter for the New York Times, she is the recipient of the National Science Board’s prestigious Individual Public Service Award, the Boston Museum of Science’s Bradford Washburn Award, and many others. She has served as the editor for The Best American Science Writing, and even had an asteroid (#30935) named for her. A long-time contributor to The New Yorker, Audubon, Discover, Life, Omni, and Harvard Magazine. Sobel is the author of five books, including Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, and The Planet.

Architect Julio Bermudez asks you to expand your definition of a sacred space beyond mosques, cathedrals, and other religious sanctuaries. Cities, he argues, can be designed to elicit contemplation and empathy, concern for the environment, or even a reduction in violence. To explore and define the potential of “spiritual urbanism,” Bermudez studies the intersection of architecture and neuroscience, and modern life and religious practice, making a passionate case for the creation of urban environments that foster spiritual and civic development.

This program is generously underwritten by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

Presenters:

Julio Bermudez directs the Sacred Space and Cultural Studies program at the Catholic University of America School of Architecture and Planning. His scholarship focuses on architectural phenomenology in relationship to culture and spirituality. Dr. Bermudez has widely lectured, led symposia, and published in this area, including Transcending Architecture and Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality. His current research uses neuroscience to study contemplative built environments. Bermudez is the president of the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, an international organization that he co-founded in 2007.

Most ancient peoples, from Asia to the Americas, would not have known how to answer the question, “What do you believe in?” Religion was about life itself, positioning oneself in a dynamic world of spiritual powers. Through years of fieldwork at the ancient pre-Columbian city of Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), anthropologist Tim Pauketat has developed a perspective that blends social theory with vivid description of everyday agrarian life in this early civilization, including how the institutionalization of religion was a marker of its decline.

This program is presented in partnership with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Poetry Foundation.

Presenters:

Timothy R. Pauketat is a Professor of Anthropology and Medieval Studies and an archaeologist with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on ancient intersections of humanity and history as understood through the study of the materials, substances, and phenomena of urban experience in ancient America. The author or editor of a dozen books, Tim is currently studying agrarian settlement, climate change, religious practice, and political administration at and around the pre-Columbian American Indian city of Cahokia, near St. Louis.

“Joan Didion meets JG Ballard, with a dash of Mad Max.” — Vice Magazine

In her highly acclaimed short stories and debut novel Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins has established herself as one of the more original literary voices to emerge in some time, as well as a keen chronicler of a not-too-distant, dystopian American West. Born and raised in California and Nevada, Watkins imagines a world remade by crippling water scarcity and Los Angeles facing obliteration by sand. Join Watkins, hailed by the National Book Foundation as one of its “5 Under 35,” for a conversation with Chicago poet and artist Krista Franklin, about living and writing through climate change.

Preorder your copy of Gold Fame Citrus through the CHF box office and save 20%

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Presenters:

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus, and is the recipient of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim, among other honors. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named Claire one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35. An assistant professor at University of Michigan, she is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

Krista Franklin is an interdisciplinary artist who works between the literary and the visual with a focus on popular culture, African diaspora, and the psychic interiority of people of color. She is the recipient of the Propeller Fund, a Cave Canem Fellow, and held an artist-in-residency at University of Chicago’s Arts & Public Life initiative.

“Lévy's message is essentially uplifting: that the brilliant scholars of Judaism, the authors of the Talmud, provide elucidation into 'the great questions that have stirred humanity since the dawn of time.'” — Kirkus Review

France's preeminent contemporary philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him. In his latest work The Genius of Judaism, Lévy offers a new vision of what it means to be a Jew, one rooted not in blind observance but in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict and borne out in struggle and study. Always a challenging thinker, Lévy provides a surprising critique of the rise of a new form of anti–Semitism and a provocative defense of Israel from the left.

Preorder your copy of The Genius of Judaism through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker. Among his dozens of books are American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications throughout Europe and the United States. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racisme and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.

“A dance about the economy, choreographed to the rhythm of the beautiful game.” — Marc Bamuthi Joseph

In 2015, Marc Bamuthi Joseph brought a preview of his multi-disciplinary performance /peh-LO-tah/ to CHF audiences. Now he returns to talk about the connection between sports, politics, and belief. Joseph uses poetry, performance, and soccer to explore how teamwork or group movement can be a bridge for discussing immigration, international diplomacy, and global economies. Join him in conversation with his long-time friend and fellow poet, Roger Bonair-Agard.

The annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series recognizes a significant gift from founding CHF board member and distinguished art dealer Richard Gray and is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Presenters:

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and a winner of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He co-founded the Life is Living Festival, and has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum to produce “the restless dead”, a series of site specific performed elegies for Brooklyn-born ghosts. Joseph’s new libretto with Bill T. Jones for the Opera Philadelphia premieres this fall. He currently serves as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

A rabid fan of the beautiful game, Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad & Tobago, and Brooklyn. He is a two-time winner of the National Poetry Slam and has appeared on numerous occasions on HBO's Def Comedy Jam. Roger is Writer-in-Residence at National Sawdust, co-founder of NYC's Louder Arts Project, and frontman for the band Miyamoto is Black Enough, a founding member of NYC's Vision INto Art, and creator and facilitator of The Baldwin Protocols: Reading Series. He is Program Director with Free Write Arts & Literacy at Cook County Juvenie Temporary Detention Center.

Drawing on decades of social science research, Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of The End of White Christian America, argues that today’s most divisive debates—over immigration, the rise of white supremacy groups, and police violence—can only be understood against the backdrop of demographic, religious, and cultural transformations that are challenging longstanding assumptions about what it means to be an American. These challenges are daunting, but Jones argues they also represent an opportunity to take up the work of weaving a new national narrative in which all Americans can see themselves.

Preorder your copy of The End of White Christian America through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by The Joyce Foundation.

Presenters:

Robert P. Jones is the founding CEO of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to research on politics, culture, and religion. Jones writes a column for The Atlantic online on politics, culture, and religion and appears regularly on Interfaith Voices, the nation’s leading religion news magazine on public radio. He is frequently featured in major national media such as MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.

Hirsch Perlman makes art that asks questions, or asks us to ask questions, that circle around belief. What is testimony or documentation or proof? Why do so many things—piles of garbage, wooden blocks—look human if you stare at them long enough? What makes us think we can separate our minds from our bodies? Currently chair of the art department at UCLA, Perlman comes home to Chicago for Fallfest/17 to draw from his latest work and talk about art and embodiment, about what we cannot help but believe.

The annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series recognizes a significant gift from founding CHF board member and distinguished art dealer Richard Gray.

Presenters:

Hirsch Perlman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe including one-person exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; a Projects exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstraum, Vienna; in the 1989 and 2002 Whitney Biennials as well the 1993 Venice Biennale and is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. He has received two NEA artist’s fellowship grants and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and The Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship (2005).

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.”

This annual lecture recognizes a generous multiyear contribution to the Chicago Humanities Festival by Julie and Roger Baskes and is presented in partnership with the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Presenters:

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of A Revolution in Language: the Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France and Common Sense: A Political History, which won the Society for the History of the Early American Republic book prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. She also writes frequently on contemporary issues in historical perspective for publications including The Nation, Dissent, and the Washington Post. She is currently co-editing a cultural history of ideas from antiquity to the present and at work on The Choices We Make: The Roots of Modern Freedom.

ACLU staff attorney and trans-activist Chase Strangio is at the epicenter of the legal push for LGBTQ rights. He worked for marriage equality before the Supreme Court, was lead counsel in a civil lawsuit against the Department of Defense brought by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who came out as transgender while in prison, and is part of the team representing Gavin Grimm’s demand for bathroom access at his high school, a case considered a landmark in civil rights. Strangio will discuss the challenges and rewards of combining his legal acumen and activist training to further equality in the U.S.

Presenters:

Chase Strangio is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. In this role he works to combat discrimination against LGBTQ communities across the country through litigation, lobbying and public education. He served as lead counsel to Chelsea Manning in her civil lawsuit against the Department of Defense. Prior to joining the ACLU, Chase was an Equal Justice Works fellow and the Director of Prisoner Justice Initiatives at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Chase is a graduate of Northeastern University School of Law and Grinnell College.

“Far too often,” astrologer Chani Nicholas says, “healing is geared towards elevating attributes that are deemed valuable by the status quo.” With a website featuring more than a million regular visitors, Nicholas' ideas and concepts have been and are constantly shaped by LGBTQIA, people of color, feminist writers, artists, thinkers, activists, and community members. Nicholas comes to CHF to share her take on why her writing style and brand of astrology appeals to so many on the front lines of social justice and healing work. Social justice facilitator, healer, and doula adrienne maree brown joins Nicholas in conversation.

Presenters:

Chani Nicholas has been a student of astrology for 30 years and a counseling astrologer for 20. Many of her ideas, philosophies and concepts have been, and are constantly shaped by, the incredible lineages of LGBTQI2S, POC, and feminist writers, artists, thinkers, activists and community members as well as by the extensive wisdom of both ancient and modern astrologers. She aims to make astrology practical, approachable and useful and hopes to use this age-old art form as a vehicle to support the activists, healers and changemakers of the modern world.

adrienne maree brown is the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and a writer, facilitator, pleasure activist, coach, healer and doula living in Detroit.

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.

This program is presented in partnership with The Center for Humanities, Washington University.

Presenters:

R. Marie Griffith graduated from the University of Virginia and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She specializes in American religious history and has taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining Washington University as the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. She serves as Editor of the online journal, Religion & Politics, and has authored or edited five books, including the upcoming Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics.

For more than a decade, actor and author Alan Alda hosted PBS’ Scientific American Frontiers, interviewing scientists from physicists to neuroscientists. In this rare public conversation, Alda engages Edward O. Wilson, one of the most celebrated biologists of our time, whose The Origins of Creativity offers a sweeping examination of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences and how both are rooted in human creativity—the defining trait of our species. Join a master communicator and the “senior statesman of science” for an eloquent exploration of creativity and its manifestations throughout human history.

Preorder your copy of The Origins of Creativity or If I Understood You Would I Have This Look on My Face through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program

This program is presented in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Presenters:

Alan Alda has earned international recognition as an actor, writer, and director. He has won seven Emmy Awards, received three Tony nominations, is an inductee of the Television Hall of Fame, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator. Alda is an active member of the science community, having hosted the award-winning series Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years and founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Alda is the author of two bestselling books, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned and Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself.

Regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists, Edward O. Wilson grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region’s forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants—the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ants and The Naturalist as well as his first novel Anthill. Wilson, a professor at Harvard, makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

“A rare mind that can see numbers and their functions as clearly as the rest of us see colors and shapes.” — The New York Times

With her sharp eye for the unseen and a passion for clarity, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager is a pioneer in the search for signs of life—or Earth-like planets—in our galaxy. Using light and its absence, Seager locates ‘exoplanets’ around nearby stars and then studies their atmospheres. The next step is to use future telescopes to identify which planets might have the atmospheric conditions suitable for life. While her quest is now accepted, it wasn’t that long ago that such ideas were associated more with science fiction than science proper. Come hear how Seager, who claims “everything brave has to start somewhere,” had the courage to believe in her own work and to forge a new and exciting path for science.

Presenters:

Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist. She is a pioneer in the vast and unknown world of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun. Her ground-breaking research ranges from the detection of exoplanet atmospheres to innovative theories about life on other worlds to development of novel space mission concepts. Now, dubbed an “astronomical Indiana Jones,” she is on a quest after the field's holy grail, the discovery of a true Earth twin. Seager is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and was named in Time Magazine's 25 Most Influential in Space in 2012.

To what extent do the wiles of computer algorithms influence our worldview? If social media flattens our political discourse, how can citizens in a democracy engage in dialogue? “Echo chambers,” “filter bubbles”—whatever we call them, we know that Google, Facebook, and Twitter mediate our consumption of the news. Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan comes to CHF for a probing discussion of the complex role technology and social media play in shaping our beliefs—and to offer some positive solutions.

Presenters:

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of five books on copyright and new media, including The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry. His forthcoming book on Facebook, Anti-Social Media, will be available in spring 2018.

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.

Preorder your copy of Bleak Liberalism through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University.

Presenters:

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and the Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author of Bleak Liberalism, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture, and the forthcoming Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology.

“A searing memoir and sharp social critique.” — Kirkus Review

Long-time CHF presenter, political theorist, and philosopher, Danielle Allen is breaking new ground with Cuz, a family memoir that recounts the story of her cousin Michael, incarcerated at age 15 and released in his mid-twenties, only to meet an early death. Allen weaves the personal and political together in her tale, exploring the failings of both the American judicial system and family in Michael’s tragic fate. WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore joins Allen in this moving conversation.

Preorder your copy of Cuz through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented as part of the annual Karla Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago.

Presenters:

Danielle Allen is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America. She is a Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs Board, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Natalie Moore is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. She is the South Side bureau reporter for WBEZ. Before joining WBEZ she covered the Detroit City Council for Detroit News. She worked as an education reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem. Her work has been published in Essence, Black Enterprise, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. She lives in Chicago.

To create this unique performance, host Rob Lindley and musical director Doug Peck asked simple questions: What do you believe in? What do you stand for? How do you want your song to be sung? Together they commissioned a global songbook featuring newly composed songs contributed by songwriters forming a rainbow of races, sexual preferences and identities, religions, and cultures. This one-night-only concert will feature CHF favorites E. Faye Butler and Bethany Thomas, Chicago's beloved Trinity United Church of Christ Choir, debut compositions from Diana Lawrence and Veena instrumentalist Saraswathi Raganathan, and many, many more. Borrowing the title from the 1873 hymn “Blessed Assurance,” this year’s Flory concert explores beliefs in a time of turmoil, with new songs to sing and new ways to harmonize.

This program is generously underwritten by a gift from Greta Wiley Flory, in memory of her late husband Bill, a longtime friend and supporter of the Festival.

Professor of economics at Yale University and co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index of U.S. home prices, Robert Shiller has written extensively on just how large a role belief plays in economic behavior: on stock market bubbles in Irrational Exuberance, on Keynesian psychological forces in the economy in Animal Spirits, on trickery in marketing in Phishing for Phools. Shiller, a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics for his work on predicting asset markets, will deliver this year’s Franke Lecture, sharing some of his latest thinking about the role narrative plays in economic life.

This annual lecture recognizes the significant contributions to the Chicago Humanities Festival made by its founder and chairman emeritus Richard J. Franke.

Presenters:

Robert J. Shiller is known the world over for his brilliant forecasts of financial bubbles and his penetrating insights into market dynamics and how human psychology drives the economy. For his empirical analysis of asset prices, Robert was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. He has offered audiences unerring predictions of the last two bubble collapses and he continues to offer a road map for reversing the financial crisis we face today. Dr. Shiller is the Sterling Professor of Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management.

The American record holder for consecutive days spent in space, astronaut Scott Kelly comes to CHF to deliver a candid account of his remarkable voyage aboard the International Space Station, the flights that proceeded it, and his colorful formative years. His new memoir Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery describes the extreme challenges of a year in space, both existential and banal: the devastating effects on the body; the isolation from everyone he loves, the pressures of constant close quarters, the catastrophic risks of depressurization. Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! host Peter Sagal joins this natural storyteller and modern-day hero in conversation.

Ticket purchase includes a copy of Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. An option for 1 book + 2 tickets is available through the box office at (312) 605-8444.

This program is generously underwritten by Bank of America.

Presenters:

Scott Kelly is a former military fighter pilot and test pilot, an engineer, a retired astronaut, and a retired U.S. Navy captain. A veteran of four space flights, Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on three expeditions and was a member of the yearlong mission to the ISS. In October 2015, he set the record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space, the single longest space mission by an American astronaut. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Peter Sagal is the host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Since debuting in January 1998, Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! has become one of the most popular shows on public radio, heard by nearly three million listeners on 520 public radio stations nationwide and heard by a million people every month via podcast.

“There goes Kevin Young again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential.” — Marlon James

Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Poetry editor of The New Yorker, joins us for a timely conversation about his latest book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post–Facts, and Fake News, which traces a peculiarly American history, woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race as the most insidious hoax of all. From Joice Heth, a black woman whom P.T. Barnum presented as George Washington’s 161–year–old nursemaid, to the made–up memoirs of James Frey, to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal, Young reveals how forgers and frauds sell us lies.

Preorder your copy of Bunk through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Urban League.

Presenters:

Kevin Young is the new Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award. His collection Jelly Roll: a blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. Young will be Poetry Editor of The New Yorker starting in November 2017.

In what’s been hailed as a “tour de force of scholarly recovery,” Britt Rusert reveals in Fugitive Science a fascinating if little-known intersection of art and science in 19th-century America, when African-American writers and poets, performers, and visual artists sought to rebut the era's claims of scientific racism. Excluded from the institutions of science, Rusert demonstrates how, for these artists and intellectuals, cultural spaces from books to stages became sites of experimentation and refutation.

Preorder your copy of Fugitive Science through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.

SPECIAL TICKET LANGUAGE

Presenters:

Britt Rusert is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. Her work explores the intersections among race, science, and culture, and she also researches and teaches histories of Afrofuturism, black speculative fiction, and critical theory. She teaches in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Ms. Driscoll’s most ambitious project to date.” — The New York Times

In her latest work, Play, Bessie Award–winning director and choreographer Faye Driscoll turns to the ritual of storytelling to explore how we relate to one another and how we form identities as individuals and citizens. The second installment in her Thank You For Coming trilogy, the work furthers Driscoll’s contention that we all are wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not. Come experience a strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice and persona, where the physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, and performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, and speak through and for each other.

• Thursday, November 9: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#706)
• Friday, November 10: 7:30 – 8:45 PM (#709)
• Saturday, November 11: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#813)
• Sunday, November 12: 2 - 3:15 PM (#903)

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Charter Humanists must purchase member-price admission for this program. Student and teacher tickets are limited in availability.

Sunday, November 12 at 2pm: This performance is open to everyone, but the artists are offering it as a relaxed performance. Relaxed performances are for people, with or without disabilities, who prefer some flexibility in regards to noise and movement in the theater. Stage lighting and sound have been adapted by the artists to be less intense. Patrons are free to leave and reenter the theater as necessary, and the theater lights are kept at a glow to facilitate movement. Sensory rest areas are available outside the theater for patrons to take a break before returning to the show. Volunteers, many of whom are members of the disabled community, are present to assist. ASL interpretation and audio description is also provided. For more information, call the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010

Presenters:

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer who has been called a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times. Her work has been presented at venues nationally such as the Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA/Boston, The Kitchen, American Dance Festival, Fusebox Festival, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she has toured internationally to France, Greece, Ireland, Argentina and Australia. Driscoll has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and is a grateful recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and Fellowship.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is one of America’s leading public intellectuals on civil rights and the African-American experience. Currently at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Muhammad directed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the world’s leading library and archive of global black history, for five years. His work examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in the modern U.S. A Chicago native, Muhammad will discuss the successes and failures of civil rights, and their relation to the ideals and convictions at the heart of our republic.

This program is generously underwritten by Allstate Insurance Company and is presented in partnership with Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.

Presenters:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. His work has been featured in a number of national print and broadcast media outlets, including the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and National Public Radio.

Bestselling author of Zealot and No god but God, Reza Aslan comes to CHF to deliver a wide-ranging account of humanity’s struggle to make sense of the divine, and how the idea of god—from its prehistoric origins to a single divine personality—continues to offer new ways of connecting people of different faiths. In his most personal book to date, god: A Human History, the host of CNN’s “Believer” sounds a call to embrace a deeper, more expansive understanding of God with the concept of a “humanized god”—a supercharged, divine version of ourselves—at its nucleus. More than just a history of our understanding of God, Aslan gets to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality.

Preorder your copy of god through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions whose books include No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three sons.

“Ms. Driscoll’s most ambitious project to date.” — The New York Times

In her latest work, Play, Bessie Award–winning director and choreographer Faye Driscoll turns to the ritual of storytelling to explore how we relate to one another and how we form identities as individuals and citizens. The second installment in her Thank You For Coming trilogy, the work furthers Driscoll’s contention that we all are wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not. Come experience a strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice and persona, where the physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, and performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, and speak through and for each other.

• Thursday, November 9: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#706)
• Friday, November 10: 7:30 – 8:45 PM (#709)
• Saturday, November 11: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#813)
• Sunday, November 12: 2 - 3:15 PM (#903)

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Charter Humanists must purchase member-price admission for this program. Student and teacher tickets are limited in availability.

Sunday, November 12 at 2pm: This performance is open to everyone, but the artists are offering it as a relaxed performance. Relaxed performances are for people, with or without disabilities, who prefer some flexibility in regards to noise and movement in the theater. Stage lighting and sound have been adapted by the artists to be less intense. Patrons are free to leave and reenter the theater as necessary, and the theater lights are kept at a glow to facilitate movement. Sensory rest areas are available outside the theater for patrons to take a break before returning to the show. Volunteers, many of whom are members of the disabled community, are present to assist. ASL interpretation and audio description is also provided. For more information, call the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010

“Nimble, knowing, and altogether excellent.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times

If filmmaking in Chicago is having a renaissance, one of the people most responsible is Joe Swanberg. Since 2005, the indie filmmaker has averaged at least one feature a year and recently launched the Netflix series Easy. Swanberg’s casts feature a rising generation of stars, including Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, Greta Gerwig, and Marc Maron, mingling with real Chicagoans in some of the city’s most beloved neighborhoods and cultural scenes. Never has the city looked so real. Join Swanberg for a review of his career and what’s to come.

Presenters:

Joe Swanberg is the director of many feature films including Drinking Buddies, All the Light in the Sky and Win It All. His films have premiered at Sundance, Berlin and SXSW and regularly screen at film festivals around the world. His Netflix original series Easy launched in 2016 and recently completed filming a second season. Along with Eddie Linker and Peter Gilbert, he runs Forager Film Company, which has produced and financed several feature films. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.

How has America been made and remade by men and women who dream of a better world? Why do we tell and retell their stories? Jeremy McCarter, author of Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals and co-author with Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton: The Revolution, comes to CHF for an urgently needed conversation about the challenge and the necessity of depicting American dreamers with Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, the Academy Award-nominated screenplay of Lincoln, and the forthcoming The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. Join us for a timely discussion about American ideals and the people who fight for them.

Preorder your copy of Young Radicals through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by Sally and Michael Feder and is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago in association with the exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test.

Presenters:

Jeremy McCarter is the author of Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals and the co-author with Lin-Manuel Miranda of the bestseller Hamilton: The Revolution. He has written about culture and politics for New York, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed. He spent five years on the artistic staff of the Public Theater in New York. He studied history at Harvard and lives in Chicago.

Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; the musical Caroline, or Change and the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, both with composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, among other honors. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

For Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Fellow Matthew Desmond spent years living with those on the edge of homelessness in Milwaukee. This heartbreaking, landmark book, winner of accolades from the 2017 Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible. Chicago Tribune publisher and editor-in-chief Bruce Dold joins Desmond in conversation.

Preorder your copy of Evicted through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book sigining will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Tribune.

Presenters:

Matthew Desmond is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, he is the author of the award-winning book, On the Fireline, coauthor of two books on race, and editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. His work has been supported by the Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.

“There may never be a better biography of Copley than this sumptuous, exquisitely told story of a man and his time.” — Kirkus Reviews

One of the clearest windows into the complexities of America’s revolutionary period can be found through its paintings. In her prize–winning book, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley, Harvard University professor Jane Kamensky dives into the life and times of a man who was both colonial America’s premier painter and a British loyalist, whose art and letters reveal what she deems an “unheroic, sometimes anti–heroic” man. Join the unofficial “American historian laureate” for a conversation about how revolutionary upheaval shaped Copley’s life, world, and work, and how Copley's life in turn reshapes our understanding of the American Revolution.

Preorder your copy of A Revolution In Color through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This annual lecture recognizes a generous multiyear grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Terra Foundation is dedicated to fostering the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts in the United States for national and international audiences.

Presenters:

Jane Kamensky is Professor of History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Her most recent book, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), is the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History and the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and a finalist for PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing, and the George Washington Book Prize.

There is an absence of belief in God in Buddhism, but not an absence of belief itself. University of Michigan's Donald Lopez is a leading scholar of Buddhism, particularly how the western world encountered, explored, and in some cases embraced it. Lopez comes to CHF to remind us of the varieties of belief required by the Buddhist path, including rebirth and the infinite perfectibility of the human mind.

Preorder your copy of Hyecho's Journey through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program

This program is presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.

Presenters:

Donald Lopez is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, where he currently serves as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and as chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His recent books include The Scientific Buddha, From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, The Lotus Sutra: A Biography, and Hyecho’s Journey: The World of Buddhism. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“Transparent is a TV series that makes revolutionary art seem both irresistible and inevitable.” — The New Yorker

Jill Soloway’s Emmy award-winning Amazon series Transparent, a wholly original take on the complex interplay between gender identity, sexual politics, and familial dysfunction, has effected a trans trifecta of sorts: the show is a powerful and popular exploration of transgender life, a “transfirmative action” program for trans writers and performers in Hollywood, and has coincided with Soloway’s own coming out as gender non-conforming. The Chicago-born comedian, writer, and director returns home to talk about the evolution of their work (including their latest series I Love Dick) and life.

This program is generously underwritten by Carol Rosofsky.

Presenters:

Jill Soloway is the creator of the groundbreaking Amazon series Transparent, which received two Golden Globes and eight Emmy awards, including two for Soloway's directing. Soloway’s most recent series, also for Amazon, is I Love Dick. In 2015, Soloway founded Topple, a media brand, production company, and movement that seeks to upend the patriarchy by shifting the gaze and inspiring protagonism for women, queer people, people of color and their allies. In 2018, Soloway will debut their upcoming essay collection.

“Important documentation of Chicago’s rich cultural and religious heritage.” — Art and Theology

In Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago, art historian Kymberly Pinder provides a fascinating survey of some of the stunning religious iconography central to black belief, worship, and resistance. Beginning with images of black-Christ in key Chicago churches, Pinder explores murals, sculpture, and even t-shirts, including works by William Walker, Richard Hunt, and Damon Lamar Reed. Along the way she uncovers how and why African-American faith communities have remade religion in their own images. Join her for a fascinating, image-rich lecture.

Preorder your copy of Painting the Gospel through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This annual lecture recognizes a generous multiyear grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Terra Foundation is dedicated to fostering the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts in the United States for national and international audiences.

Presenters:

In 2012, Kymberly Pinder transplanted from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to become the Fine Arts Dean at the University of New Mexico. A professor of art history at SAIC since 1997, she served as department chair and graduate program head. She writes, lectures and teaches in the U.S, and abroad on representations of race and religion in American Art including in the work of Romare Bearden, Dox Thrash and Kara Walker. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Mellon, Ford and Henry Luce Foundations, among others. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she received recognition for promoting diversity and fostering public engagement.

The 2016 election and its aftermath have called into fundamental question the integrity of our political system and our media. Charges of Russian interference have shone a spotlight on the variety and sophistication of Russian hacking techniques and how they leverage our increasing dependence on our interconnected digital devices. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist, contributor to Foreign Affairs and the coauthor of The Red Web, updated to include a new chapter about the 2016 events and the Kremlin's interference, helps us understand the complex world of Russian cyber-warfare, a world he knows as few others do.

This program is presented in partnership with the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Presenters:

Andrei Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has covered security services and terrorism issues since 1999. He co-wrote The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB and The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries with Irina Borogan.

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, who like so many slaves before her, runs toward freedom. In this telling, however, the “underground railroad” is not a metaphor, but an actual subterranean train. Whitehead topped The New York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for how he brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors of black people before the Civil War, a narrative that weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of today. Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune columnist Mary Schmich joins Whitehead in conversation.

Preorder your copy of The Underground Railroad through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Tribune.

Presenters:

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, winner of the 2016 National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. He lives in New York City.

2017 marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, one of the great transformations of political belief. In his new book, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921, University of Illinois historian Mark Steinberg gives a powerful sense of living through those turbulent times, drawing from public art, discourse on the streets and in the press, and literature ranging from worker poetry to Mayakovsky. Exploring inequality, power, resistance, justice, and ideas about possibility and the future, Steinberg talks about events in ways that speak to our times.

Preorder your copy of The Russian Revolution through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago in association with the exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Presenters:

Mark D. Steinberg teaches at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of many books on the Russian revolutionary era, including The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution; Voices of Revolution, 1917; Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925; Petersburg Fin-de-Siecle; and The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921. He is the co-author with the late Nicholas Riasanovsky of recent editions of A History of Russia.

A mere five hundred years ago Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Germany, the first step of his excommunication, the wholesale transformation of the then Roman Catholic Church, and an entirely new political, social, and cultural era for Europe. The University of Chicago Divinity School's Martin Marty, a foremost expert on Lutheranism, returns to CHF for a wide-ranging conversation on the implications of the Protestant Reformation for contemporary religious practice and thought.

This program is presented as part of the annual Karla Scherer Endowed Lecture Series for the University of Chicago.

Presenters:

Martin E Marty is co-director of the Fundamentalism Project and the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago. He is senior editor of Christian Century. His many books include the multivolume Modern American Religion.

For years, Cathy N. Davidson has been writing and thinking about how we learn in the contemporary world. The idea of education as a public good was a pillar of the American democratic experiment, peaking with the growth of the great state universities system after WWII. Since then, that vision has been in decline. Davidson, director of the Futures Initiative at CUNY, envisions a bold new concept for higher education—one in which creativity, collaboration, innovation, and improvisational adaptability replace traditional majors and minors as building blocks for success in the “gig economy.”

Preorder your copy of The New Education through the CHF box office and save 20%

A book signing will follow this program.

Presenters:

Cathy N. Davidson directs the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, she also sits on the Board of Directors of Mozilla. She has written for the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, among other publications. The 2016 recipient of the Ernest L. Boyer Award for Significant Contributions to Higher Education, Davidson’s latest book is The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. She lives in New York, New York.

“An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life.” — Jonathan Kozol

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is self-segregation a coping strategy or a problem? Twenty years ago, in Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, brought a complicated argument to the table: an appreciation of racial identity formation as essential to any potential communication across racial and ethnic differences. With a completely revised edition, Tatum joins us to discuss why we're apart when we're together.

Preorder your copy of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is generously underwritten by Ellen Stone Belic and features an artist, writer, or other creative authority reflecting on her extraordinary career. This program is presented in partnership with Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.

Presenters:

Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, is president emerita of Spelman College and in 2014 received the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, the highest honor presented by the American Psychological Association. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

DNA testing isn't just for crime shows. Tracing genealogy and genetic ancestry has become increasingly popular in this country, particularly among African Americans. In her recent book The Social Life of DNA, Alondra Nelson, a sociologist at Columbia University and the President of the Social Science Research Council, explains how cutting-edge techniques are being used to grapple with the unfinished business of slavery, foster reconciliation, establish ties with ancestral homelands, and more. Hear about the mix of race, science, history, and how reckoning with the past can help chart a more just course for tomorrow.

Preorder your copy of The Social Life of DNA through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Presenters:

Alondra Nelson is President of the Social Science Research Council and Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Widely known for her work on the intersections of science, medicine, and social inequality, her books include The Social Life of DNA, which is a finalist for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, which was recognized with several awards. Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Science, and on National Public Radio.

“Ms. Driscoll’s most ambitious project to date.” — The New York Times

In her latest work, Play, Bessie Award–winning director and choreographer Faye Driscoll turns to the ritual of storytelling to explore how we relate to one another and how we form identities as individuals and citizens. The second installment in her Thank You For Coming trilogy, the work furthers Driscoll’s contention that we all are wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not. Come experience a strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice and persona, where the physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, and performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, and speak through and for each other.

• Thursday, November 9: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#706)
• Friday, November 10: 7:30 – 8:45 PM (#709)
• Saturday, November 11: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#813)
• Sunday, November 12: 2 - 3:15 PM (#903)

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Charter Humanists must purchase member-price admission for this program. Student and teacher tickets are limited in availability.

Sunday, November 12 at 2pm: This performance is open to everyone, but the artists are offering it as a relaxed performance. Relaxed performances are for people, with or without disabilities, who prefer some flexibility in regards to noise and movement in the theater. Stage lighting and sound have been adapted by the artists to be less intense. Patrons are free to leave and reenter the theater as necessary, and the theater lights are kept at a glow to facilitate movement. Sensory rest areas are available outside the theater for patrons to take a break before returning to the show. Volunteers, many of whom are members of the disabled community, are present to assist. ASL interpretation and audio description is also provided. For more information, call the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010

Presenters:

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer who has been called a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times. Her work has been presented at venues nationally such as the Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA/Boston, The Kitchen, American Dance Festival, Fusebox Festival, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she has toured internationally to France, Greece, Ireland, Argentina and Australia. Driscoll has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and is a grateful recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and Fellowship.

Yale University's Kathryn Lofton is a historian of religion who studies how it permeates contemporary life, impacting our experience and relationship with corporations, celebrity, race, and sexuality. She examined Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia productions as expressions of contemporary spirituality in her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. Her latest, Consuming Religion, takes up the religious dimension of contemporary consumption, from binge-watching and Britney Spears to corporate culture and Goldman Sachs. Come hear Lofton's insights into what belief means in the financial sector.

Preorder your copy of Consuming Religion through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago and The Newberry Library.

Presenters:

Kathryn Lofton is professor of religious studies, American studies, and history at Yale University, where she also serves as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Deputy Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is a historian of religion who has written extensively about capitalism, celebrity, sexuality, and the concept of the secular. In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon and Consuming Religion she examines a wide range of subjects in order to define the role of religion in the modern world.

“Henry David Thoreau: A Life is the masterpiece that the gadfly of youthful America deserves.” — Washington Post

For generations, Henry David Thoreau has been a model of how to live according to one’s deepest convictions. His writing inspired Gandhi's doctrine of passive resistance, and his experiment in living a simple existence at Walden remains a touchstone for the environmental movement. Thoreau was an immensely complex man, however, and now we have a modern biography adequate to his thought and his art, Laura Dassow Walls' Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Perhaps the leading scholar today on Thoreau, Walls puts her subject at the intersections of science and philosophy in nineteenth-century America.

Preorder your copy of Henry David Thoreau: A Life through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago and The Newberry Library.

Presenters:

Laura Dassow Walls is William P. & Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches courses in 19th-century American and environmental literature. Her most recent book, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, is the first comprehensive biography of Thoreau in over fifty years. Her earlier books include studies of Thoreau and science, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by MLA and the Merle Curti Award by the Organization of American Historians.

Starting with his first book, The Social Origins of Islam, Mohammed Bamyeh has situated Islam within political, sociological, historical, literary, anthropological, and economic contexts. He comes to CHF to discuss his forthcoming work, Lifeworlds of Islam, which traces Islam's broad historical trajectories and explores the faith not as a singular set of beliefs, but as a flexible system that has been put to use in everyday life in different times and places as a force for social movements, public philosophy, and global order.

This program is presented in partnership with the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Presenters:

Mohammed Bamyeh is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, with broad expertise in Islamic studies, cultural sociology, and civil society. He has written numerous books and articles on globalization, the sociology of knowledge, and comparative social theory; served in an editorial capacity for many projects including International Sociology Reviews and the book series Tracking Globalization; and was lead author of the first comprehensive report on social sciences across the 22 member states of the Arab League, Social Sciences in the Arab World: Forms of Presence.

“Ms. Driscoll’s most ambitious project to date.” — The New York Times

In her latest work, Play, Bessie Award–winning director and choreographer Faye Driscoll turns to the ritual of storytelling to explore how we relate to one another and how we form identities as individuals and citizens. The second installment in her Thank You For Coming trilogy, the work furthers Driscoll’s contention that we all are wrapped up in each other, whether we like it or not. Come experience a strange and enthralling collage of gesture, image, voice and persona, where the physical and aural exist in a slippery relationship, and performers ventriloquize, shape-shift, and speak through and for each other.

• Thursday, November 9: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#706)
• Friday, November 10: 7:30 – 8:45 PM (#709)
• Saturday, November 11: 7:30 - 8:45 PM (#813)
• Sunday, November 12: 2 - 3:15 PM (#903)

This program is presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Charter Humanists must purchase member-price admission for this program. Student and teacher tickets are limited in availability.

Sunday, November 12 at 2pm: This performance is open to everyone, but the artists are offering it as a relaxed performance. Relaxed performances are for people, with or without disabilities, who prefer some flexibility in regards to noise and movement in the theater. Stage lighting and sound have been adapted by the artists to be less intense. Patrons are free to leave and reenter the theater as necessary, and the theater lights are kept at a glow to facilitate movement. Sensory rest areas are available outside the theater for patrons to take a break before returning to the show. Volunteers, many of whom are members of the disabled community, are present to assist. ASL interpretation and audio description is also provided. For more information, call the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010

Presenters:

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer who has been called a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times. Her work has been presented at venues nationally such as the Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, ICA/Boston, The Kitchen, American Dance Festival, Fusebox Festival, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she has toured internationally to France, Greece, Ireland, Argentina and Australia. Driscoll has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and is a grateful recipient of a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and Fellowship.

Economic behavior is not just rational; it also turns on emotions, ethics, culture, and narrative, as behavioral economists are increasingly making clear. For years, Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University and a professor of economics, has taught a class with his friend, literary scholar Gary Saul Morson, that shows Adam Smith in Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov in Morton Friedman. In their new book Cents and Sensibility, the two explain how the humanities offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and just.

Preorder your copy of Cents and Sensibility through the CHF box office and save 20%.

A book signing will follow this program.

This program is presented in partnership with the Dolores Kohl Education Foundation.

Presenters:

Morton Schapiro began his term as the 16th president of Northwestern University in 2009. He is a professor of economics and is among the nation’s leading authorities on the economics of higher education, with expertise in college financing, affordability, and trends in educational costs and student aid. He has written or edited nine books and over 100 articles. He has received research grants and contracts from numerous foundations and boards including the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Education. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Education.

Gary Saul Morson, the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities, specializes in Russian literature. In addition to books on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and a co-authored volume introducing the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, he has written studies of utopian and anti-utopian thought; the role of quotations in shaping language and culture; and the nature of time. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Morson has won numerous teaching awards, and his class introducing the Russian novel has long been the most popular course at Northwestern and the best enrolled Russian literature class in the nation.

Many of us shy away from saying what we “believe” but are much more open about how or what we “feel.” Does that suggest some fundamental shift within Christianity and perhaps our social lives, too? David Hall, professor at Harvard’s Divinity School and one of our great historians of religion, comes to CHF to give a broad view of how that change also contains a continuity, a story that reaches back to the arrival of Europeans, and especially the Puritans, to North America in the 17th century.

This program is presented in partnership with the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago and The Newberry Library.

Presenters:

David D. Hall is a historian of religion and culture in the United States. For many years he has been writing about popular religion, witch-hunting, literacy, writing, and politics in early New England, most notably in the prize-winning Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England and, most recently in A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. An emeritus professor at Harvard Divinity School since 2008, he previously taught at Yale and Boston University

Research suggests that individuals who feel they belong to something bigger than just themselves—an extended family, a spiritual practice, work for social justice—often feel happier and have better life outcomes than those who do not. This sense of connection has a name in academia: “self-transcendence.” Candace Vogler from the University of Chicago philosophy department joins CHF to talk about her work as principal investigator of a project on self-transcendence as the key to the connections between virtue, happiness, and the meaning of life.

Presenters:

Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology and Reasonably Vicious, and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Vogler is the Co-Principal Investigator for the project Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

“Father Pfleger has done heroic work at St. Sabina Parish.” — Barack Obama

“Mike Pfleger is a man of moral authority, and he is my brother.” — Haki Madhubuti

Life-long Chicagoan, Roman Catholic priest, and outspoken civil rights advocate Father Michael Pfleger has been the pastor of Saint Sabina Church on the South Side for more than 30 years, ministering to a primarily African-American parish in a neighborhood deeply afflicted by drug-and gun-related violence. Pfleger combines an orthodox theology with radical activism, in which preaching is coterminous with politicking. His stances have brought him censure from the Archdiocese, a portrayal in Spike Lee's film Chiraq, and the utter devotion of his community. Come for a discussion of how faith and community can end Chicago’s violence.

This program recognizes the generous support of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation to the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Presenters:

The Rev. Dr. Michael Louis Pfleger is Senior Pastor at The Faith Community of Saint Sabina. In the course of his extensive and active ministry, Father Pfleger has been recognized for his commitment to equality and passionate stance against injustice. He has been involved in many issues, such as campaigns against the sale of drug paraphernalia; billboards that targeted children with alcohol and tobacco advertising and saturated communities of Color; negative music that glorified violence and degraded women. Father Pfleger has sought to break down the walls of racism and denominationalism by building unity among all people founded on truth and based on Jesus’ command to love one another.

After two weeks of complicating your most tightly held beliefs about faith, religion, and public institutions, there’ll be no better way to wrap up Fallfest/17 than a party. Join us at the Chicago Athletic Association’s Stagg Court for an autumn evening filled with fortune tellers, magicians, and maybe even a séance. Skeptics, suspend your disbelief!