CRCV Presents
Summer Seminar Day 3
The AUM Civil Rights & Civic Virtue Society will host our second Summer Seminar, a special week-long seminar for selected students, faculty, and staff. This workshop is connected to the themes of a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation titled “From Civil Rights to Civic Virtue: Forming Character through Community.” Student participants in this event receive $500 for their participation, which will be paid as a scholarship on their student account. Faculty and staff participants will receive a stipend for their participation.
The Summer Seminar will include visits to important historic sites and museums associated with the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery and Birmingham, structured reflection about these visits, and facilitated conversations on readings about the Civil Rights movement and the civic virtues of Civil Rights participants.
Our seminar speakers will be experts on civil rights, civic virtues, and character education. Our keynote speakers include Dr. Julie Armstrong, known for her work on civil rights literature; Dr. Meena Krishnamurthy, known for her work on civil rights activists; and Dr. Michael Lamb, known for his character education and the role of virtues in public life.
We will select up to 30 student participants for this exciting opportunity. We will fund up to 7 faculty participants and up to 3 staff participants. We hope that faculty and staff will consider applying for this opportunity themselves and in sharing this information with students who might be interested, particularly students who have been at AUM for at least one semester and who have at least two more semesters before graduation.
Bio: Dan Henry is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of African American Studies and The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. His research centers on traditions of African American democratic thought, and has been published in the journals Theory & Event and American Political Thought. Underlying both his teaching and research is a focus on the ways African American intellectuals, artists, and social movements have sought to rethink the practical, moral, and conceptual bases of politics in democracy’s absence
Title: “The Art of Reconstruction”
Date/Time: Thursday, June 27, 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Place: Goodwyn 109
Abstract: As Du Bois argued in his classic Black Reconstruction, redeeming the promise of democracy in the aftermath of the Civil War required not only institutional and legal transformations, but deep shifts in the public’s moral sense, (white) habits of citizenship, and political imagination. A failure of the latter on the part of the white working class, he argues, was a key factor in Reconstruction’s fall. While they are not often discussed together, Du Bois wrote his classic tragedy of Reconstruction at the same time as he was considering the civic possibilities of Black artistic expression in democracy’s absence: the power of art to reconfigure the perceptions, feelings, and imagination of its audience, and to introduce new ideas of the good society. I argue that the two bodies of work, both important for understanding his civic thought, ought to be understood as part of one conversation. Du Bois’ writings on the politics of artistic expression in fact served as a means of rethinking the potential bases of multiracial democratic community, a necessary measure to realize Reconstruction’s possibilities both in his time and our own.
Bio: Kevin Timpe holds the William H. Jellema Chair in the philosophy department at Calvin University. His scholarship work explores a range of issues in ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, and philosophy of disability. He’s written or edited 11 books, including The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2021), The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals (Routledge 2019), and Disability and Inclusive Communities (Calvin Press 2018). He’s held visiting positions at the University of Notre Dame, Oxford University, Peking University, and Innsbruck University. In addition to his scholarly work, he does disability advocacy through 22 Advocacy.
Title: “Religious Freedom, Disability Discrimination, and Civic Virtue”
Date/Time: Thursday, June 27, 1 – 2:15 P.M.
Place: Goodwyn 109
Abstract: Civic virtues are, roughly, excellences within a society that enable it to flourish by contributing to the common good. When civic virtues are lacking, civil rights legislation is often used to protect individuals within that society from harm or discrimination. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was hailed as an extension of civil rights protections to disabled people. At the signing ceremony for the ADA, President Bush said “We rejoice as this barrier falls, proclaiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America…. Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come done.” Nevertheless, the ADA contains an exception for religious organizations that has enabled them to discriminate on the basis of disability for the 34 years since the ADA was passed. Especially for those religious institutions that have theological commitments regarding the equal value and importance of disabled people, legal permissibility does not entail ethical appropriateness. In this talk, Kevin Timpe argues that religious discrimination against disabled people is contrary to civic virtues, even if legal. If non-discrimination is a civil right, then disabled people deserve that right not only from society as a whole, but also from religious groups.
