Faith & Values in the Public Square
About the Initiative
Across the globe today, there is lively debate over the implications of our multicultural and multireligious society in civic, religious, and educational institutions. How we shape a positive pluralism is one of the most important questions American society faces in the years ahead. Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry is committed to assisting in this endeavor.
With funding by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Alfred and Tillie Shemanski Testamentary Trust, and generous individual supporters the School is fostering deeper and higher levels of interreligious interaction over the next few years in a number of ways to help answer this question, including:
• Faculty are working to include interreligious content in their fields of research and in their curricula.
• The Faith & Values in the Public Square lecture series presents diverse voices about what it means to be a person of faith who is engaged and active in the world today for the greater Seattle general community.
• A new blog, FaithandValuesBlog.com, explores how faith and spirituality intersect in the 21st century global community with its unique tensions and questions.
• The “Red Chair” series for the student body offers speakers from a variety of faiths opportunities to provide their unique perspectives on contemporary issues and for students to discuss over lunch together.
• Support of the School's annual signature event, the Search for Meaning Book Festival.
You're
invited to engage this unique space for conversation about how faith
and spirituality intersect in the 21st century global community with its
unique tensions and questions.
Visit the blog >>
The Lecture Series, 2012-2013
Please join us! Free tickets required.
Thursday, May 2:
LOCATION CHANGE - SEATTLEU CAMPUS, Wyckoff Auditorium
"How to Live a Contemplative Life in a 24/7 World" - Judith Valente
Friday, January 11:
"The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America" - Ray Suarez
(Click here for video recording, from The Seattle Channel)
Friday, November 2:
"Mormonism in the Election Spotlight"
- Dr. Joanna Brooks & Dr. Matthew Bowman
Judith Valente is an awarding-winning print and broadcast journalist, poet and essayist.
She
began her work in journalism at the age of 21 as a staff reporter for
The Washington Post. She later joined the staff of The Wall Street
Journal, reporting from that paper's Chicago and London bureaus. She was
twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
For the past eight years,
Ms. Valente has been a regular contributor to the national PBS-TV news
program "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly." She has won eight broadcast
awards for her work on the show. Her work has also appeared on PBS-TV's
"The News Hour with Jim Lehrer." She is also a commentator for National
Public Radio and Chicago Public Radio where she covers religion,
interviews poets and authors, and is a guest essayist.
Ms.
Valente has a new full length book of poems just out entitled
"Discovering Moons," published by Virtual Artists Collective of
Chicago. Ms. Valente is also co-editor with Charles Reynard of “Twenty
Poems to Nourish Your Soul” (Loyola Press, 2005), an anthology of poems
and essays on finding the sacred in the everyday.
She is
currently writing a non-fiction book on contemporary monastic life and
its applications for people in the work world, based on her experiences
over a period of years with the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St.
Scholastica Monastery in Atchison KS.
Judith Valente grew up in
Bayonne, NJ in the shadow of New York City. She graduated from the
Academy of St. Aloysius in Jersey City, NJ, and received a bachelor's
degree in English and classical languages from St. Peter's College in
Jersey City. She holds a masters in fine arts in creative writing from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the daughter of the
late Charles and Theresa Valente. She is married to Charles Reynard, an
Illinois Circuit Court Judge and poet. The couple lives in Chicago and
Normal, IL.
Ray Suarez is Author and Senior Correspondent for The NewsHour. Ray Suarez joined The NewsHour in October 1999 as a Washington-based Senior Correspondent. Suarez came to The NewsHour
from NPR where he had been host of the nationwide, call-in news program
"Talk of the Nation" since 1993. Prior to that, he spent seven years
covering local and national stories for the NBC-owned station, WMAQ-TV
in Chicago.
He
is currently at work on the companion volume to a coming documentary
series for PBS chronicling the history of Latinos in America. He is the
author most recently of a book examining the tightening relationship
between religion and politics in America, The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America. Suarez also wrote The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration (Free Press), and has contributed to several other books, including What We See (New Village Press, 2010), How I Learned English (National Geographic, 2007), Brooklyn: A State of Mind (Workman, 2001), Local Heroes (Norton, 2000), Saving America's Treasures (National Geographic, 2000), and Las Christmas
(Knopf, 1998). Suarez also hosts the monthly foreign affairs radio
program “America Abroad” for Public Radio International, and the
nationally-broadcast weekly political program “Need to Know” for PBS. At The NewsHour,
Suarez is the lead correspondent for the program’s global health
coverage. He has reported on some of the world’s most threatening, and
little-known health crises from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Earlier
in his career, Suarez was a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, a
producer for the ABC Radio Network in New York, a reporter for CBS Radio
in Rome, and a reporter for various American and British news services
in London. Over the years he has narrated, anchored or reported many
documentaries for public radio and television including the
nationally-broadcast “Anatomy of a Pandemic” (2009, PBS) and “Jerusalem:
The Center of the World” (2009, PBS), a weekly series, Follow the Money (1997, PBS), and programs including “Homeland” (2012, PBS) Who Speaks for Islam? (LinkTV, 2005, 2009), By The People
(PBS, 2004-07), “The Journey Home” (2004, WETA), “The Execution Tapes”
(2001, Public Radio), and “Through Our Own Eyes” (2000, KQED).
In
2010 Suarez was inducted in the Hall of Fame of the National Assn. of
Hispanic Journalists. He is a co-recipient of NPR's 1993-94 and 1994-95
DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton Awards for on-site coverage of the first
all-race elections in South Africa and the first 100 days of the 104th
Congress, respectively. He was honored with the 1996 Ruben Salazar Award
from the National Council of La Raza, and the 2005 Distinguished Policy
Leadership Award from UCLA's School of Public Policy.
Suarez
holds a B.A. in African History from New York University and an M.A. in
the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. He has been awarded
honorary doctorates by many colleges and universities, most recently by
the State University of New York. He is a winner of a Benton Fellowship
in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Chicago. He has also been
honored with a Distinguished Alumnus Award from NYU, and a Professional
Achievement Award from the University of Chicago. A native of Brooklyn,
New York, Suarez lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three
children.
Dr. Joanna Brooks is a national voice on Mormon life and politics and an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture. The author of The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith, she is a senior correspondent for the on-line magazine ReligionDispatches.org and has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.com.
A twenty-year veteran of the Mormon feminist movement, she was the subject of an extensive CNN.com profile: “Crossing the Plains and Kicking up Dirt: A New Mormon Pioneer” at CNN.com (February 5, 2012) and of the acclaimed American Public Media show On Being’s “Mormon Demystified” show (October 20, 2011).
She has also been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, BBC’s Americana, Interfaith Voices, and Radio West, as well as on PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, Al-Jazeera English and Estonian national television. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and Michigan Quarterly Review and she has been utilized as a source on contemporary Mormonism by the New York Times, Reuters, Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press, Washington Post, Salon, New America Media, Pittsburgh Gazette-Post, The Tennessean, Headline News Network, Fox News, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and the Deseret News.
Brooks is also writing about Mormonism and public life for the Future of Religion in America book series (Columbia University Press) and writes a regular column at Askmormongirl.com.
Her first book American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford University Press, 2003) was awarded the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Brooks has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society for her scholarship on religion and American culture.
Dr. Matthew Bowman is the author of The Mormon People: the Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012) and the forthcoming The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2013), as well as many articles about Mormonism and American evangelicalism. The assistant editor of Dialogue: a journal of Mormon thought, he teaches religion at Hampden Sydney College.
Meet the Project team!