We know within seconds upon entering a new house if we feel at home. We know when a place makes us feel more alive. This is the mystery that interests Howard Mansfield — Why do some houses have life, are home, are dwellings, and others are not?
Lois Lowry has opened the gates of literature for young adults in her classics such as Number the Stars and Anastasia Krupnik, and her brilliant dystopian novel, The Giver. Her talk at the Lyceum will coincide with the August, 2014, opening of the film version of The Giver, starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep. Ms. Lowry will speak about her life as a writer, and books that have been pivotal in her career, including The Giver and its journey to the screen.
Traditional Navajo ceremonies contribute to healing the human body at multiple levels. Navajo healing, using chant, prayer, and guided imagery, has been shown to change how the brain functions (neuroplasticity). The Navajo approach to keeping the physical body strong is a blend of mind-body medicine. The Navajo healing ceremony, an archetype of the Native culture, demonstrates the blend of traditional foods, Native spirituality, and connection within the community and to the natural world.
Panacea was a Greek goddess with the power to heal wounds and cure sicknesses. Nowadays the word panacea denotes a single solution to a complicated problem. Biology professor Bernd Heinrich views Nature as a panacea to humankind’s problem of surviving happily on this planet. Nature offers models to help understand the causes of diseases, provides chemicals to cure or control them, shows ways to manage our environment, and inspires us.
Making music is not merely a pastime but a priesthood. Join Dr. Bill Banfield as he journeys through the development of American musical culture, highlighting creative artists such as Rosetta Tharpe, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Kurt Cobain, all committed to art and social engagement. Banfield will show how popular music artistry is a critically important and needed interpretation of the human condition, defining, informing and therefore shaping our culture. His acclaimed band, Bill Banfield’s The Jazz Urbane, will join Bill to play music both during and after the lecture.
The media bombards us with hyper-sexualized images conveying powerful messages about sexuality, gender identity and intimacy. These images are so commonplace that they form the wallpaper of our young people’s visual landscape. They amount to a mass-produced industrialized vision of sex that profoundly limits our ability to form authentic relationships free of violence and degradation. Dr. Dines explores the need to adopt a public health approach to this issue to develop strategies for minimizing the harm of living in a culture saturated with hypersexualized and pornographic images.
Growth in manufacturing employment and productivity has improved significantly since the 2008 economic downturn. Is this a temporary phenomenon or a revival? Can American manufacturing recover from the offshoring phenomenon of the late 1990s and 2000s? Harvard Business School professor Dr. Willy Shih will discuss how the stage is set for improved productivity across the manufacturing
sector; potentially leading to a manufacturing renaissance in the United States.
We remember Louisa May Alcott as the author of Little Women, the story of four girls growing up in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts. Alcott was also an abolitionist, a feminist, a Civil War nurse, and a participant in the Transcendental intellectual movement. To help us understand the complete Louisa May Alcott, Marianne Donnelly will bring us her carefully researched Alcott re-enactment, in which Alcott will tell us about her connections to the anti-slavery movement, the Underground Railroad, and the Monadnock region.
When Susan Maushart first told her three teenagers she was pulling the plug on their phones, laptops, TVs and games for six months, they were strangely silent. Then they uncorked their earbuds and actually heard her.
Since the posthumous publication of her poems in the 1890’s, Emily Dickinson has been portrayed as a virginal recluse, a mental case, and a victim of a broken heart. Susan Snively’s talk challenges these myths by discussing the poet’s letters to the powerful Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a widower who had been her late father’s best friend. Unpublished until 1954, the letters reveal a playful, tender, passionate Emily, happy in a mutual love that graced her middle age.
