UPDATE: Due to the forecast, we will be gathering at our rain location, Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education (MCLE), 10 Winter Pl, Boston, MA 02108, in Downtown Boston, minutes from The Embrace. See you soon—rain or shine!
The Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture and The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University welcomes you back to The Embrace for another season of Un-monument Public Conversations on democracy, justice, memory, and values.
This conversation will bring together Robert P. George and Cornel West, who represent divergent intellectual traditions, to explore the possibilities of meaningful discourse amid political fragmentation. Their friendship demonstrates a practice of democratic engagement that addresses disagreement without falling into simplistic political categories. Through their conversation, they will show how engagement across differences can illuminate our complex moral and political landscape. As polarization increases, George and West will offer a model of intellectual exchange that respects principled disagreement while maintaining a commitment to truth, a practice important for democratic vitality in challenging times.
Brandon M. Terry, the John Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University will introduce the event.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has frequently been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. In addition to his academic service, Professor George has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has also served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology. He currently chairs the New Jersey Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Professor
George is author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford U. Press), In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford U. Press), The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI) and Conscience and Its Enemies (ISI). His most recent book, written with Cornel West, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division (Post Hill Press). His book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment will be published later this year by Encounter Books.
Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.
Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
Seating will be provided but please feel free to bring blankets in case the chairs fill.
Following the event, we'll be having a free public dinner and reception where we can keep the conversation going! Join us at Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education (MCLE), 10 Winter Pl, Boston, MA 02108, with catering provided by Black Seed. See you there!
The Un-monument Public Conversation series is produced by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, in collaboration with the Parks and Recreation Department, and Embrace Boston. This programming is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project.