The Providence College Humanities Forum SP2025

Fearless Speech: Radical Truth-Telling in the Auto/biography of John Swanson Jacobs

Jonathan Schroeder

Lecturer, Rhode Island School of Design

Friday, January 24 at 3:30 p.m. Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. In this talk, Schroeder will consider how truth-telling—which Michel Foucault links to the ancient concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech”—assumes a modern form in John Jacobs’s writing as a style that constitutes at once a radical denunciation of American injustice and a spectacular performance of autobiographical freedom.

“No Mercy from a Distance”: Aquinas on Compassion and Natural Friendship

John O’Callaghan

Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame

Friday, January 31 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Mercy is often thought of in our culture as an act of forgiveness of some offense, whether civic or personal, that reduces or eliminates punishment that is due for that offense, and is dominated by questions of justice. That sense of mercy is hard to square with other uses of the term that suggest something more like assistance to those in need, as in the religious notion of “works of mercy” directed to the poor and suffering.  It is also hard to square with the sense that mercy requires compassion, suffering with another, a compassion that is not necessarily required by forgiveness, and may even be at odds with the justice of punishment.  Thomas Aquinas provides an account of mercy that helps us understand how it differs from forgiveness and necessarily involves compassion for those who suffer. The ground for his understanding of mercy is that such compassion is grounded in natural human friendship.  But the idea of natural human friendship is perhaps even more at odds with our modern sensibilities in which we typically think that while justice binds us, we are nonetheless free to choose our friends as we like.  If Aquinas is correct, we do not have such freedom, and are more bound by mercy grounded in natural friendhship than we are by justice.

Diversity Is Not Just the Differences You Like: How Campuses Can Model Healthy Pluralism For the Nation

Eboo Patel

Founder and President, Interfaith America

Thursday, February 6 at 2:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Diversity issues have dominated the headlines for decades, and that’s how it should be. The United States is the world’s first attempt at diverse democracy, and embracing our differences while maintaining our unity should be a top priority in the years ahead. Unfortunately, too much of the discourse is stuck in a binary “victim or villain” frame. In this talk, Founder and President Eboo Patel will trace the intellectual traditions of constructive diversity work, outline how campuses can model a healthy pluralism for the nation and demonstrate to students that they can be leaders for cooperation across differences.

The WEIRDest People in the World

Joseph Henrich

Professor of Biological Anthropology, Harvard University

Thursday, February 13 at 4:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has revealed not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. To explain these patterns, I’ll first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and the family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the last two millennia, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, thereby altering people’s psychology and opening the door to the proliferation of new institutional forms, including voluntary associations (charter towns, universities and guilds), impersonal markets, individualistic religions and representative governments. In light of these findings, I close by arguing that the anthropological, psychological and economic sciences should adopt a unified evolutionary approach that considers not only how human nature influences our behavior and societies but also how the resulting institutions, technologies and languages subsequently shape our minds.

Who Counts as French? The Unusual Story of Jean Cras

Paul-André Bempechat

Concert pianist, scholar, and music teacher at Harvard University

Friday, February 21 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

A lecture and performance on Jean Cras, French admiral, composer, and polymath. A very pious Catholic, his position as a career naval officer was threatened after the separation of Church and State in 1905, and his ability to navigate the politics and to uphold his spiritual convictions makes for interesting reflection on human nature and professionalism.

The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

Jeffrey Rosen

President and CEO, National Constitution Center

Friday, February 28 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

What did “the pursuit of happiness” mean to our nation’s Founders, and how did that famous phrase define their lives and become the foundation of our democracy? Jeffrey Rosen examines the most influential founders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good—the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government.

This presentation is made possible through the support of a grant from Wake Forest University and the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The opinions expressed at this event are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wake Forest University or the Lilly Endowment, Inc.

C.S. Lewis and Shakespeare

Sarah Waters

Professor of English, University of Buckingham

Friday, March 21 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Description forthcoming

“Doing our utmost to specify the humanum“

Tom Jeannot

Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University

Friday, March 28 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Description to come — keynote address of the “Dreaming of a Better World: Aristotelians, Marxists, and Christians in Dialogue”

Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War

Michael Vorenberg

Professor of History, Brown University

Friday, April 4 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Michael Vorenberg transports us back to the precarious time between war and peace at the conclusion of the Civil War, the conflict at the core of American identity. When did the war truly end? Was it on April 9, 1865, as conventional wisdom holds, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox? Or was it ten weeks later on June 19—Juneteenth—when Black Americans in Galveston celebrated the end of slavery? Or was it a few days after that, when the Cherokee leader Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender? Not until August 20, 1866, was there something like an official end, a mere declaration by President Andrew Johnson that the war was over, even as racial violence and political chaos continued to tear the country apart. The eye-opening story of the multiple endings and non-endings of the Civil War told by Vorenberg contains revelations about America’s greatest struggle and about war itself. To search for the Civil War’s endpoint is to grapple with the war’s true nature and legacy. It is to ask whether any war has an obvious ending, and who, if anyone, gets to say when it’s over.

Creating Reality: Self and Truth in the Internet Age

Tara Isabella Burton

Writer and Mercatus Fellow at George Mason University

Friday, April 11 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

In this talk, Tara Isabella Burton will consider at our networked algorithmic age, and the selves and identities we create in it, as downstream of a fundamentally modern (and deeply magical) set of religious ideas about the self, its freedom from embodiment, and its authority to self-divinize through both scientific knowledge and internal gnosis.

Transcendence in the Modern World

James K.A. Smith

Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University

Friday, April 25 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

It has been argued that we are characteristically “modern” – or characteristically “secular” – in that we are able to imagine significance for our lives (individually and collectively) in a constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural (rather than supernatural) order. This is to say, the modern social “imaginary” precludes transcendence. In the fourth annual Veritas Conference, we propose to examine the concept of “transcendence.”

The First Asians in America:

Diego Javier Luis

Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University

Friday, May 2 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

 From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons sailed between the Philippines and Mexico. They connected Spain’s Asian colonies to the rest of its colonial world and opened a new and unprecedented chapter of global trade across the Pacific Ocean. Through these vessels, the first populations of free and enslaved Asian peoples arrived in the Americas. They originated from South Asia, Japan, and everywhere between. Luis’s talk and book of the same name unearth that history and, in particular, how these diverse Asian subjects confronted colonial race-making and became “chinos” in the Americas.