LU News

APPLETON, WIS. — Ted Peters, an ordained minister, and Martinez Hewlett, a biochemist-turned-philosopher, examine the scientific and theological aspects of the question “Can You Believe in God and Evolution?” Thursday, Jan. 25 in an address at Lawrence University. The presentation, at 11:10 a.m. in Stansbury Theatre in Lawrence’s Music-Drama Center, is free and open to the public.

Peters and Hewlett are the co-authors of two books on the subject: “Evolution from Creation to New Creation” in 2003 and “Can You Believe in God and Evolution? A Guide for the Perplexed,” which was published in July, 2006.

The power-point presentation will examine the basic science of biological evolution, the social and philosophical “shrink wrapping” that was placed over the science more than 100 years ago as well as the societal responses to both the science and the overlay.

Peters and Hewlett contend that the science is not a challenge to belief. They support theistic evolution in which they take the science of evolution seriously but with an understanding their religious faith is enriched, not challenged, by the advances of science.

A pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Peters has taught systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary since 1978 and served as PLTS’ interim president from mid-2003 until early 2005. He is also a faculty member at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., and is affiliated with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences as a research scholar.

In addition to his collaborations with Hewlett, Peters also has addressed issues related to science and religion in several other books, including “Science, Theology and Ethics” and “Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom.”

Hewlett, a Roman Catholic, spent 27 years on the faculty at the University of Arizona as a molecular biologist. After retiring in 2003, he closed his research laboratory and turned his attention to teaching and creative writing, focusing on the philosophical aspects of science. He is the author of “Sangre de Cristo: A Novel of Science and Faith,” which has been republished as “Divine Blood.”

His interest in the spiritual aspects of existence led Hewlett to become a lay member of the Dominicans and he currently serves as an adjunct professor at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union.

Peters’ and Hewlett’s appearance is sponsored by the student organization Lawrence Christian Fellowship.

APPLETON, WIS. — Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr discusses the role of the Second Amendment as a core foundation of the Bill of Rights and the importance of self-reliance in preserving one’s life and property against attack from criminals, foreign powers or even a malevolent government in an address at Lawrence University.

Barr presents “The Second Amendment is About More Than Just Guns” Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. in Science Hall, Room 102. The event is free and open to the public.

The address will examine the current relevance of the right to keep and bear arms as established by the framers of the Constitution and the importance of not turning this responsibility solely over to the government.

A member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 -2003, Barr was dubbed “Mr. Privacy” by New York Times columnist William Safire in recognition of his leadership in privacy matters. While in Congress, Barr served as a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee and as vice-chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

Since leaving Congress, Barr has occupied the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the Virginia-based American Conservative Union. He is a board member of the National Rifle Association and serves as the chairman of the organization Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances.

He also works with the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va., and is a member of The Constitution Project’s Initiative on Liberty and Security, based at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. From 2003-05, Barr served as a member of the Long Term Strategy Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Norms in the War on Terrorism at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

A former official with the CIA (1971-78), he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia by President Reagan in 1986 and served as president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation from 1990-91.

Barr is a frequent guest on network and cable news programs and writes a column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is the author of the 2004 book “The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton,” in which he offers a sharply contrasting perspective on the Clinton administration than the one touted in Clinton’s own memoir.

His appearance is sponsored by the Lawrence University Sportsman’s Club.

APPLETON, WIS. — The theme for the sixth annual Celebration of Black Heritage at Lawrence University is “Legends in the Making…From Black Face to My Face.” The event, which is sponsored by the Black Organization of Students, is set for 6:00 p.m. February 3 in the Buchanan Kiewit Recreation Center gymnasium.

This event replaces Lawrence’s celebration of Kwanzaa. It commemorates African-American history and culture through a dinner and program. The program begins with a welcome by the current president of the Black Organization of Students who will explain what the organization is and what it stands for. The introduction will be followed by several acts including singing, poetry, theatrical duets, dancing, and more.

Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children 12 and under. Tickets can be purchased at the Lawrence University Box Office, located in the Music-Drama Center, or by phone at 920-832-6749.

APPLETON, WIS. — “Creators: Commercial Music Careers,” an open forum for individuals interested in careers as composers and songwriters of pop, jazz, film, television, radio, and media music, takes place at 1:00 p.m. February 10 in Harper Hall, located in the Music-Drama Center on the Lawrence University campus.

Hosting this educational event is Fred Sturm, director of jazz and improvisational music at Lawrence University and a jazz, orchestral, and media music composer. “This forum will give interested composers and songwriters the opportunity to ask questions about what to study, how to prepare themselves, and what they need to know about commercial music as a potential career,” said Sturm. “Our area high schools and universities effectively inform aspiring composers about the worlds of jazz and classical music. But commercial music careers frequently get short shrift, for institutions typically assume that music students will explore pop, film, TV, radio, and media music on their own.”

The guest panel for the day includes Maury Laws, John Harmon, Lovell Ives, and Patty Darling. Laws, is the music director for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the renowned Rankin/Bass animated television specials and films, and arranger for Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury, Burl Ives, Danny Thomas, Art Carney, Judy Collins, and Ethel Merman. Harmon is a composer of music for jazz, orchestral, choral, and chamber ensembles, a former composer and pianist with Matrix, he has music recorded on RCA, Warner Brothers, and Pablo Records, and was the featured artist on Marian McPartland’s PianoJazz.

Ives is the retired director of the Green Bay Packers Band, the retired director of jazz studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, conductor of the annual Cerebral Palsy Telethon in Green Bay, instructor at the Institute of Advanced Musical Study in Crans, Switzerland, and renowned composer and arranger of jazz, pop, and commercial music. Darling is a composer and producer for numerous industrial, film, television, and radio commercial music productions, a staff composer for Saxe Productions in Appleton, and an outstanding jazz, classical, and media music composer.

“We’re blessed to have some of the most respected and diversely experienced commercial music composers serving on our panel. They’ll have meaningful answers to most the questions coming from their audience,” said Sturm.

APPLETON, WIS. — The Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Becker, premieres La Serenissima, a composition by Joanne Metcalf, Lawrence University assistant professor of music, at 8:00 p.m. January 27 in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Metcalf will give a pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Both the concert and lecture are free and open to the public.

The concert features solos by Lawrence Conservatory of Music faculty members Patrice Michaels, associate professor of music, Steven Paul Spears, assistant professor of music, and John Gates, visiting assistant professor of music.

La Serenissima was composed by Metcalf while on sabbatical last year as a composition fellow at the MacDowell Colony. The composition is an extended scene from the opera Orphans of the Heavenly City, an opera on the extraordinary phenomenon of the all-female professional orchestra and choir of the 18th century Venetian Ospedale della Pietá. The Pietá was one of four ospedali, or social welfare institutions, that functioned as places of refuge for the sick, the abandoned, the unwanted, and the socially undesirable. The Pietá’s clientele consisted entirely of abandoned infants who, if they were female and musically gifted, would be given 10 years of musical training and might spend the entirety of their lives in the coro. These women would neither marry nor take formal religious vows, but acted as servants of liturgical music, performing in services and liturgical concerts daily.

In this scene, the soprano sings the role of La Serenissima, or Venice personified, who watches the foundlings as they are admitted to the Pietá through the scaffetta, a small opening discreetly place on the side of the building. She sings from the libro di scaffetta, an intake ledger that lists the barest facts of the infants’ young lives including apparent age, state of health, clothing worn, and identifying tokens left by the mother. Her music resembles a gentle lullaby, but it is surrounded by fateful, dissonant, crashing chords that allude to the harsh destiny those children would have met on the streets of Venice. The men, each in his time a Doge of Venice (the Republic’s highest leader) and member of the Board of Governors of the Pietá, sing the words of a papal bull of 1548 that are inscribed on a lapide, or stone tablet, that remains on the outer wall of the Pietá today.

Metcalf’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in more than 25 countries worldwide and she has received commissions from the Hilliard Ensemble, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Scottish Arts Council, Cappella Nova, the Netherland-America Foundation, Ensemble Hex, English tenor John Potter, Norway’s Trio Mediaeval, and many more. Her composition Il nome del bel fior has received over 85 performances worldwide and was featured in the 2002 German television documentary Wenn Engel singen: Das Hilliard Ensemble; its recording won the 2005 German Echo-klassik prize, the German equivalent of a Grammy, for Best Vocal Ensemble Performance. Metclaf’s works are recorded on ECM New Series and Oehms Classics labels.

APPLETON, WIS. — With its abundance of natural resources and a young, dynamic population, Africa long has been viewed as a land of great promise. But political instability and crippling economic challenges have often produced more turmoil than prosperity. The world’s second largest continent in size and population will be the focus of Lawrence University’s annual Povolny International Studies Lecture Series, “Africa Today: Problems and Solutions.”

Noted Africanist M. Crawford Young, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, opens the five-part series Monday, Jan. 22, at 7 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium with the address “Beyond State Crisis in Post-Colonial Africa?” All lectures in the series are free and open to the public.

“It has been more than 25 years since most African countries became independent, yet Africa as a region remains the poorest in the world, troubled by persistent conflict, high levels of poverty, refugee flows and social problems brought by famine and disease,” said Claudena Skran, Lawrence University associate professor of government and the series coordinator.

“This year’s series looks to address both the historical and political roots of African problems as well as examine solutions to them, including conflict resolution, foreign aid, trade and different development strategies.”

Young will share an historic review of the optimism widely held by nationalist leaders, academic observers and the policy community around 1960 when much of the continent gained independence and examine the factors that prevented reality from matching that optimism, among them underestimating the burden of the colonial legacy, economic vulnerabilities and the negative impact of Cold War rivalries.

Young also will discuss the reasons why soon after gaining independence, many of the new country’s democratic institutions put in place by withdrawing colonizers gave way to single-party systems, including the use of military coups in the last half of the 1960s and the rise of “neopatrimonial autocracies” of the 1970s and ’80s. According to Young, the present map of Africa “was entirely constructed by colonial cartography, thus bearing the original sin of alien origin and artificiality.”

Regarded as one of the world’s leading scholars on Africa, Young has written seven books on African politics, edited six others and has had more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters published.

He gained academic prominence with the release of “The Politics of Cultural Pluralism” in 1976, which earned the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association.

His 1994 book, “The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective,” was awarded the Lubbert Prize from the American Political Science Association as the best book written that year in the field of comparative politics. Other books written by Young include “The Ideology and Development in Africa” and “The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State.”

In addition to spending 38 years (1963-2001) on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Young served as the dean of the faculty of social science at the Universite Nationale du Zaire from 1973-75. During his career he also served as a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal.

A former president of the African Studies Association, Young was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and named to the Library of Congress’ Scholars Council in 2004. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Other scheduled speakers in the series include Joseph Sebarenzi, former head of the Rwanda parliament who was granted asylum in the United States (Feb. 20), Michael Fosdal, a specialist on British politics who teaches government at Lawrence’s London Center (April 3), Jacqueline Klopp, assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University (April 10) and John Roome, an operations director with the World Bank (TBA).

The “Africa Today: Problems and Solutions” lecture series is sponsored by the Mojmir Povolny Lectureship in International Studies. Named in honor of long-time Lawrence government professor Mojmir Povolny, the lectureship promotes interest and discussion on issues of moral significance and ethical dimensions.

APPLETON, WIS. — Robert Suettinger, a former U.S. intelligence officer and a scholar on East Asia, will spend seven weeks of Spring Term as Lawrence University’s Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor. He will be in residence in the government department from March 22 to April 19 and again from May 8-29.

A 1968 graduate of Lawrence, Suettinger will reunite with his former mentor, Professor Emeritus of Government Chong-do Hah, to team-teach the seminar “The United States and Rising Asian Powers.”

Suettinger, currently an analytic director with Centra Technology, Inc., an Arlington, Va., consulting firm that provides national security research and analysis, among other services, brings an extensive background in East Asian affairs and policy making to Lawrence.

He spent three years as director for Asian affairs for the National Security Council in the mid-1990s, where he dealt regularly with NSC advisers Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger and occasionally briefed President Clinton. He also twice served on the National Intelligence Council for East Asia, first as a deputy national intelligence officer (1987-94) and later as a national intelligence officer for East Asia (1997-98).

Suettinger began his career with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, spending 12 years with the agency as a researcher, senior analyst and branch chief in the China division of the Office of East Asian Analysis. He joined the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1987, where he spent two years as the director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific.

He has written extensively on U.S. and China foreign policy issues, including the 2003 book “Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000,” in which he argues that the Tiananmen Square “massacre” in June, 1989 produced an overnight shift of Chinese-American relations from “amity and strategic cooperation to hostility, distrust and misunderstanding.” He contends the bloody confrontation in Beijing continues to undermine cordial relations between the two countries yet today.

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Suettinger earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in political science from Lawrence in 1968, undertook Chinese language study at Princeton University and Middlebury College and earned a master’s degree in comparative politics at Columbia University.

He joins a long list of distinguished scholars and notable public servants who have previously held the Scarff professorship, among them McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Karl Scheld, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., former chaplain at Yale University, noted civil rights advocate and peace activist, Takakazu Kuriyama, former Japanese ambassador to the U.S. and George Meyer, long-time secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The Scarff Memorial Visiting Professorship was established in 1989 by Edward and Nancy Scarff in memory of their son, Stephen, a member of the Lawrence class of 1975, who died in an automobile accident in 1984. It was designed to bring civic leaders and scholars to Lawrence to provide broad perspectives on the central issues of the day.

APPLETON, WIS. — A musical petting zoo, a play-a-thon, and a “Choose-Your-Cruise” raffle are just many of the activities taking place at the Lawrence Academy of Music tutti! scholarship benefit. Tutti!, which means “together” in Italian, will take place on January 27 from 1:00-5:00 p.m. at Appleton North High School, 5000 N. Ballard Road.

Many events and activities will be held throughout the day, including a silent auction, a bake sale, and a KidZone with musical games and crafts. Refreshments will also be available for purchase throughout the day. The drawing for the $2,500 “Choose-Your-Cruise” raffle takes place at 4:00 p.m. Tickets for the raffle are $10 each and are available at the Academy of Music or from any Academy student or teacher. A play-a-thon will feature Academy students, teachers, and ensembles.

All proceeds from this event go directly to the Academy’s financial assistance fund, which provides financial aid to families who would not otherwise be able to afford music instruction for their children. Admission to this fun-filled day is free, however, donations will be accepted at the door.

For more information on this event, call the Academy at 920-832-6632 or visit www.lawrence.edu/dept/acad_music/events.shtml.

APPLETON, WIS. — Beginning Jan. 10, Lawrence University’s Seeley G. Mudd Library will host a national touring exhibition of the 2006 Paul Revere Awards from the Music Publishers’ Association of the United States. The exhibition will be displayed in the cases just inside the library’s main entrance through the end of January.

The collection features nearly 50 scores of works recognized as outstanding examples of graphic design. Approximately 10 scores will be exhibited at a time with changes made to the display on a weekly basis throughout the month. The Paul RevereAwards honor the publishers for their efforts in creating art for the music industry.

Lawrence is the fourth stop on the exhibition’s national tour, which began at Florida State University last September and included previous stops at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and Columbia University in New York City. In February, the exhibition travels to Connecticut College.

APPLETON, WIS. — Love and courtship is a tangled, exhilarating mess as Lawrence University’s dance company in residence, Wild Space Dance Company of Milwaukee, presents Various States of Undress at 8:00 p.m. January 19 in Stansbury Theatre. Tickets for this production are $10 for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students. Tickets are available at the Lawrence University Box Office, located in the Music-Drama Center, or by phone at 920-832-6749. If available, tickets will also be sold at the box office beginning one hour before the performance.

From uncertainty to intimacy and back again, Wild Space reveals these states through full-bodied dance, inventive choreography, and clever wordplay. In the title piece, “Various States of Undress,” fictional characters John and Mary are in love; or at least that is what the writer thinks as he creates them in his imagination. But the course of true love does not run smooth in this text and dance work inspired by Diane Schoemperlen’s “How to Write a Serious Novel About Love.” There are infidelities and insecurities as John, Mary, and their creator wryly navigate the risks and rewards of love, romance, and the interior monologue. Played by Wild Space Dance Company members, Randy Talley and Laura Murphy, John and Mary take direction–and sometimes give it–to guest performer Scott Howland as the writer.

The performance also features “One Time at Lunch” by Artistic Director Debra Loewen, a light-hearted quartet set to the offbeat country songs of Terry Allen, and works by company members, Monica Rodero, Dan Schuchart, and Katie Sopoci. Guest artist, Sofi Askenazi, performs in Sopoci’s choreographed, “The Existential Crisis of the American Youth” (or “I wish I was a cat”).

Wild Space Dance Company has intrigued audiences for 20 years as one of Wisconsin’s most dynamic and creative performing companies.