Upcoming Live Events

I am delighted to host Ethan Shearer, one of  my favorite former students at Etown College, a United Methodist pastor, and now a graduate student in religion at the University of Virginia. Ethan will speak about his research interests related to ancient Christian writers and their work on spirituality and the passions.  What makes Shearer’s take on this topic interesting, is that the early Christian writers were concerned with how passions impacted the individual, but he wants to think about passions on a larger scale, like how the body politic can be consumed by rage or lust.

Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca (University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D.) is College Professor of International Studies (Endowed Chair), Professor of Political Science, and Director of International Studies Minor at Elizabethtown College, PA. Her research interests include Turkish foreign policy, transatlantic security, European Union, South East Europe, and peace operations. She is the editor of two books – The European Union as an Actor in Security Sector Reform (Routledge, 2014) and External Interventions in Civil Wars (co-edited with Stefan Wolff, Routledge, 2014) as well as a number of scholarly articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Foreign Policy Analysis, Civil Wars, European Security, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, French Politics, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, and Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, among others, and chapters in various edited volumes.  She is frequently interviewed by international media as a subject matter expert, including BBC Radio in the UK. Her book titled, Turkey–West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge University Press) was published in January 2020.

Barbara has a long history of walking with God, with experiences in mission and church and with a husband who she cared for during his journey with Alzheimer's disease. Barbara has been writing her memoirs and will share where she has seen God at work throughout her life, and how her life experiences have shaped how she sees the Kingdom of God from this vantage point in her life. Another opportunity to hear from one of the saints!

David Brown is a long-time colleague and well established American historian and author of several books on U.S. thought and culture including The Last American Aristocrat  (Scribner, 2020),  Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald  (Harvard, 2017), and  Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography  (Chicago, 2006); the latter was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  His work has been reviewed in a number of outlets including the  New York Times, New York Review of Books ,  The New Yorker , and more. We will discuss the recent essay by The New Yorker editor Michael Luo entitled "The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind." 

John shares about the abduction and murder of his son, MJ (Michael Jesse) and co-worker Zaida Catalon who were abducted and murdered while on a U.N. assignment to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were on their way to meet and investigate a relatively new rebel group in the Kasai Central Province. Both were abducted and shot that day, March 12, 2017. MJ and Zaida were dedicated to building peace and improving the lives of the Congolese they had come to love in a place MJ called paradise. They gave their lives in the cause and possibilities of nonviolent resolution to conflict.