The Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School presents the third in a four-part series of conversations with writers and thinkers who are extending the boundaries of discussion on some of the key public policy issues of today.
Bob Abernethy, host of PBS' Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, brings his interviewing skills to the stage to ask about the great spiritual questions of our day.
Panelists include writer Chris Hedges (American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America); Blu Greenberg, an award-winning writer, psychologist and co-founder and the first president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance; and Irving Greenberg, president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation.
Bio
Bob Abernathy
Bob Abernathy
Host of PBS' Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly.
Bill Bole
Bill Bole
Formerly Washington correspondent and associate editor of Religion News Service, associate editor of The American News Service, and lecturer in mass media and social communications at Catholic University. Currently a senior correspondent of Our Sunday Visitor. Articles published in the Washington Post, New York Times Syndicate, Commonweal, America, Christian Century, and other outlets. Co-author of Forgiveness and International Politics: A New Road to Peace (Georgetown University/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, forthcoming) and, with the late Msgr. George Higgins, Organized Labor and the Church: Reflections of a "Labor Priest" (Paulist Press, 1993).
Rabbi Irving Greenberg
From 2000-2002, Irving Greenberg served as Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. An ordained Orthodox rabbi and a Harvard Ph.D. and scholar, Greenberg has been a seminal thinker in confronting the Holocaust as an historical transforming event and Israel as the Jewish assumption of power and the beginning of a third era in Jewish history.
Rabbi Greenberg has published numerous articles and monographs on Jewish thought and religion, including The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (1988), a philosophy of Judaism based on an analysis of the Sabbath and holidays, Living in the Image of God: Jewish Teachings to Perfect the World (1998), and For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (2004).
Blu Greenberg
Blu Greenberg is active in the movement to bridge the gulf between Orthodox Judaism and feminism. In 1997 and 1998, she chaired the first and second International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy, and is co-founder and first president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.
She has also tried to build bridges between women of different faiths by helping to set up "Women of Faith," and by her involvement in the "Dialogue Project," which seeks to unite Jewish and Palestinian women. She lectures widely at universities and to Jewish communities in the United States and elsewhere.
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and a former seminarian.
He is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and teaches in the Program for American Studies at Princeton University; he is also the recipient of this year's Lannan Literary Writing Fellowship.