Are we born to fight? How do you make peace in a post 9-11 world?
These kinds of questions get asked at the War and Peace lecture series at Sonoma State University, which has seen doubled enrollment in the class and triple the audience size since Sept. 11, 2001. Many more visitors are now coming from the community to the Tuesday afternoon lectures.
"9/11 turned people's minds around. We had been a pretty complacent society up to that point," says mathematics professor Rick Luttmann, host of the 17-year-old lecture series which is used to much smaller audiences each semester in Darwin Hall.
One of the upcoming topics includes the Middle-East conflict, which is addressed on Nov. 12 when Therese Mughannam lectures on "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Personal Reflections."
Mughannam is of Palestinian descent and a peace activist trying to bridge the gap between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The War and Peace lectures take place on Tuesdays from 4 to 5:15 p.m. in Darwin 108. They are free and open to the public.
The schedule of upcoming lectures include:
Oct. 15-Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons
(Carmen Works, Professor of Chemistry, SSU)
Oct. 22-The United Nations
(Urs Cipolat, Peace Studies, Berkeley)
Oct. 29-Nation Building and Military Civic Action: A Critical View
(Richard Sutter, International Programs, SSU)
Nov. 5-Are We Born To Fight?
(Rick Luttmann, Professor of Mathematics, SSU, and Chuna McIntyre, Yup'ik Eskimo Cultural Ambassador)
Nov. 12-The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Personal Reflections
(Therese Mughannam, Santa Rosa activist)
Nov. 19 -The US in Latin America: From Cold War to NAFTA and Neo-liberalism
(Tony White, Professor of History, SSU)
Nov. 26-War and the Arts: German and English Images of WWI
(Philip Beard, Professor of Modern Languages) and War and Peace Theme in Music (Rick Luttmann)
Dec. 3-Citizen Activism: Doing What You Must
(Sunil Sharma, SSU alumnus and activist)
Dec. 10-Making Peace in a Post-9/11 World
(Medea Benjamin, co-founding Director of Global Exchange, San Francisco)
For more information, contact Dr. Rick Luttmann at (707) 664-2543 or rick.luttmann@sonoma.edu.
