"Jesus, Jefferson, Angelou, and Hitchens Convene an Emergency Meeting at the Mayflower Hotel: Some Thoughts on a Possible American Future"
I was invited to give this public lecture by my friends at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Central Nassau, in Garden City, Long Island. In it, I address the divisions in our country and the need to heal them - divisions represented in many respects by Fox News on the one hand, and by MS-NBC on the other hand. I call on Americans to widen our souls so that we can learn to listen to the real concerns of fellow citizens, even when they sometimes seem very distant, and even when they appear to hold positions and views at odds with our own. In it, I construe the truly democratic soul as "the magnanimous soul," and suggest that democracy is not the stuff we do in the voting booth or at the ballot box, but is rather an activity of the soul, a soul capable of dissolving into itself the seemingly disparate views of others, experience their tensions, and reconcile them for the sake of something noble.
Note: The lecture is spilt into two mp3 files. See below.
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A Public Lecture
Part of The Jay Smith Forum Lecture Series
Friday, November 11, 2011 at 7:30 P.M.
The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Central Nassau
223 Stewart Avenue
Garden City, NY 11530
Dr. David E. McClean
Lecturer in Philosophy
Rutgers University & Molloy College
"Jesus, Jefferson, Angelou, and Hitchens Convene an Emergency Meeting at the Mayflower Hotel: Some Thoughts on a Possible American Future"
| Jesus, Jefferson, Angelou, and Hitchens Convene an Emergency Meeting at the Mayflower Hotel (Part 1) |
| Jesus, Jefferson, Angelou, and Hitchens Convene an Emergency Meeting at the Mayflower Hotel (Part 2) |
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