February

Bill Lunch, Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at Oregon State University and Political Analyst for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), will help us understand the current political situation on both the national level and also across the street in the Oregon Legislature.

For 2010 Election Exit Polls, please click here.

All agrarian societies emerged in regions of flourishing agriculture. Each was distinctive, but shared many similarities. By 4000 years ago, cities and states were in NE Africa and Mesopotamia – soon followed by agrarian societies in N. India, N. China, and appeared later in Central America and South America. ICL Presenter: Since there were no volunteers for this session, Irene Konopasek will fill in by introducing some of the material she has been preparing for Big History Lecture 36: Using DNA to Trace Human Migration to World Zones Beyond the Africa/Eurasia Zones.

(96 minute DVD)

Geneticist Dr. Spencer Wells and a team of technicians from National Geographic Genographic Project trace the human journey through time and space, from our origin in the heart of Africa to the ends of the world.

Our moderator is ICL member Bruce Flaming

During the Renaissance, especially in Italy between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, a major cultural revolution took place, namely the emergence of a new concept of art, and consequently, the appearance of a new consciousness of what “being an artist” meant. By analysing some exemplary Renaissance works–such as Leonardo's Last Supper and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel–the lecture shall examine the historical conditions, the intellectual aspirations as well as the cultural factors that have led to such a radical redefinition of the paradigms of art in early modern Europe.

Our presenter is Ricardo De Mambro Santos, Assistant Professor of Art History & Co-Chair, Art History, Willamette University.

Willamette University Professor of History, William Smaldone will speak on the need to rethink the whole immigration issue by developing a model that draws on the lessons of the European Union. He will reserve about half of the program for what he expects to be a lively discussion session.

The woodwind chamber ensemble blå is a newly formed faculty ensemble in residence at Willamette University. Homophonous to “blow” but meaning “blue,” blå is an homage to the Blue Rose, a group of Russian Symbolist artists described by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky as being “in love with the music of color and line.” The core musicians of blå are flutist Sarah Tiedemann, oboist Catherine Lee, clarinetist Natalie Pascale, and bassoonist Helena K. Spencer, who collectively possess a broad spectrum of performance experience across North America and Europe. The group will be performing works by Francaix, Couperin, Carter, Milhaud, Bitsch, and Bozza.

Special envoys can bring attention and diplomatic muscle to resolve conflicts and global challenges. Will reliance on special envoys increase the ability of the U.S. to deal with major international issues or complicate diplomatic options? Peter Rasmussen will be our presenter.

Agriarian civilizations changed during the 4000 years after their first appearance. Agrarian civilizations spread and incorporated more of the world’s population and increased the power of agrarian rulers. By the end of the later Agrarian era, Agrarian civilizations – which at first controlled just one or two corners of the Earth – had expanded to include most people on Earth.

ICL Presenter: Harlan Heyden

Agrarian societies expanded because they were innovative. They developed new ways of extracting resources and managing populations through “collective learning.” How much innovation was there and how rapid? Population growth gives a crude initial measure. Why was the rate less than in the Modern era?

ICL Presenter: Hardin King.

The Apostle Paul was one of the major figures in early Christianity. He is identified as the author of thirteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. He was the first Christian theologian and many argue that he was the founder of Christianity as an institutional religion. But opinions about Paul are varied: he has been both loved and reviled throughout the centuries. Why such mixed views of one of the most important leaders of Christianity? This presentation will compare the four portraits of Paul in early Christianity: (1) Luke's portrait of Paul the missionary in the Acts of the Apostles; (2) the image of Paul as a proto-orthodox, authoritarian leader in the Pastoral Epistles (1-2 Timothy, Titus) and in Colossians and Ephesians; (3) the proto-gnostic, ascetic Paul in the writings of Marcion and the Acts of Paul; and (4) the egalitarian, pastoral Paul in the "great letters" (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians). A methodology for discovering the real Paul will also be discussed.

This presentation is based on the book by Arthur Dewey, Roy Hoover, Lane McGaughy, and Daryl Schmidt entitled The Authentic Letters of Paul: A New Reading of Paul's Rhetoric and Meaning (Polebridge Press, 2010). Our presenter is Dr. Lane McGaughy, Senior Research Fellow at the Willamette University Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology, and Atkinson Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies Emeritus, and one of the authors of the recently published book The Authentic Letters of Paul. He was also one of the founders of the Westar Institute and of The Jesus Seminar.

In this Oregon Humanities Conversation we will be led in a conversation about the vast world migration of today and the ways in which local communities need to think in new ways about the relationship between migration and globalization and their effects on Oregon communities. We will be led by Dr. Elliott Young, a native of New York city currently teaching Latin American and borderlands history at Lewis and Clark College. He currently is doing research on the Chinese diaspora in Cuba, Mexico, Canada, and the US.

One of the steps in the quest for the real Paul is the production of a fresh translation of his authentic letters from the original Greek. St. Augustine and Martin Luther interpreted Paul as plagued by a guilty conscience. But recent American scholarship on Paul rejects this view of Paul and claims that Augustine and Luther incorrectly translated key terms in Paul's letters. The main feature of The Authentic Letters of Paul is a "dynamic equivalent" translation of his letters that allows those who are not familiar with Greek to encounter a rather different image of Paul and his theological arguments. This presentation will discuss the new Scholars Version translation of Paul's authentic letters contained in the book and illustrate the major differences from previous translations.

This presentation, like the one on February 15, is based on the book by Arthur Dewey, Roy Hoover, Lane McGaughy, and Daryl Schmidt entitled The Authentic Letters of Paul: A New Reading of Paul's Rhetoric and Meaning (Polebridge Press, 2010). Our presenter is Dr. Lane McGaughy, Senior Research Fellow at the Willamette University Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology, and Atkinson Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies Emeritus, and one of the authors of the recently published book The Authentic Letters of Paul. He was also one of the founders of the Westar Institute and of The Jesus Seminar.

The book, The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam will be used as a point of departure for a discussion around how we make decisions. Vedantam illuminates some very interesting behaviors that on the surface seen irrational, but at a deeper level appear to be tenets that guide our behavior and decision-making on some of the most important issues facing society today. We will look at why almost everyone on one floor of the World Trade Center died while almost everyone on an adjacent floor lived; how our ideas around what motivates suicide bombers are inaccurate; and why we see so many cute animal stories on the news.

After retiring from a career with the State of Oregon, Rollie Wisbrock became the Visiting Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette. He is also very well known as a Salem painter/artist.

A history of wolf reintroduction in the Greater Yellowstone Rocky Mountains.

Presenter: Tony Faast, Staff Biologist, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Agrarianism led to urbanization, power-elites, and cultural and technological innovation. It also led to population growth which eventually exceeded the resources of the surrounding eco-systems and to depletion of those resources, ultimately causing devastating societal collapses and population decline. Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834) was the first to comprehensively describe these periods of innovation, population growth, trade and urbanization, followed by periods of war, famine, disease, and eco-system collapse. This pattern known as "Malthusian cycles" has repeated itself numberous times in man's history. This lecture explores this concept.

ICL Presenter: Kasia Quillinan

It is the stories that make up the true sum of a person's life. It is the tales of how something happened that offer far more richness and record than a mere listing of achievements. In this presentation, Katrina Hays will offer insights and tips into how to begin to recall the important stories that make up a life, plus give some specific direction on how to capture these tales via writing. Resources for continuing the process will be provided at the end of the presentation.

Katrina Hays is a freelance writer and editor. Her award-winning poetry and essays have appeared online and in various literary journals and national magazines. She teaches as a poet-in-schools in California, and leads senior memoir-writing seminars for the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon. Katrina holds Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in both Creative Writing and Acting, and has been the recipient of writing fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, Centrum, and Artsmith.

As most of you know, Dr. Pelton announced recently that he will be leaving Willamette at the end of this academic year after nearly thirteen years of outstanding service, to become the president of Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. We are very pleased that he has found time in his busy schedule to once again meet with ICL to reflect on his life at Willamette and discuss the next step in his career.

In the past two lectures we considered both what stimulated and what limited growth in the agrarian civilizations of the Afro-Eurasia world zones. In today's lecture Professor Christian will begin to focus on human development in other world zones. These are the American, Australasian, and Pacific zones. We will consider when they were settled, when agriculture appeared, and compare differences and similarities.

ICL presenter will be: Irene Konopsek.

Cultural Geographers take into consideration how humans have impacted their landscape through a variety of different ways. The majority of our Earth's population live in less developed countries, where economies are predominately agrarian-based and wherejust about all of the population growth on our planet is concentrated. Is our planet overpopulated? In our lifetime we have seen military conflicts and political changes in places and regions that force us to open an atlas to figure out where the strife is located. How have Earth's inhabitants organized land surfaces into countries and alliances? The early agrarian civilizations had complex political and urban systems. How did those areas evolve into the population and political centers they are presently? This lecture will give a general overview from a geographical perspective of how our Earth's landscape arrived at its present use. We'll examine three key areas: population patterns, political influences, and urban areas.

This session is an extension of the Big History topics we are studying this semester. Lori Murphy Cole is a Cultural Geographer and a retired Chemeketa Community College instructor and administrator.

The book from which Ms. Cole's slides were made is: Contemporary Human Geography by James Rubenstein.