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Bart Campolo is not fond of the title of the book he co-wrote with his father — Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son.

In his Friday lecture in the Hall of Philosophy, “Cultivating Friendship and Community in an Age of Anxiety,” part of Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety,” Campolo proposed a different title for his publisher.

“What he should’ve titled it was ‘How I Managed not To Alienate My Evangelical Father After I Left,’ and my dad’s part should have been ‘How I Stayed Close to My Humanist Son Even Though He Broke My Heart and Embarrassed Me,’ ” he said.

It’s not that Campolo, humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California, thought his parents were “phonies” for their faith. His father is evangelical activist Tony Campolo, and Campolo knew he was sincere in his preaching. Bart Campolo was never a “rebellious minister’s kid” either, raised in the Christian faith only to turn against it to prove a point.

“The problem for me as a young person was: I didn’t believe in God, and it’s hard to be a Christian when you don’t believe in God,” Bart Campolo said. “It’s one of those basic theological obstacles that is very difficult to overcome.”

Campolo didn’t embrace Christianity because of his parents’ requests. Instead, it was through a boy on his soccer team, who invited Campolo to “the most unbelievably high-tech youth group” he could imagine, where every Thursday from then on he would be surrounded by “300 high school kids who loved each other.”

One weekend, on a youth retreat in the mountains, Campolo said he heard from God. It was nighttime, and everyone in attendance was singing “I love you, God” by candlelight. Despite the fact he had been “faking it until he made it” to that point, Campolo had a “transcendent experience.”

“There are these things that happen to us in our lives where we have moments in which we become aware that we’re part of something much bigger than ourselves,” he said, “that there’s something going on above and beyond what we can explain.”

Soon after, Campolo was taking his youth pastor’s charge to find the “lost and lonely” at his high school, to befriend them, to help them find “purpose, meaning and identity” as part of the evangelist “army of goodness.”

As for the doctrine, Campolo didn’t know if he fully bought in.

“The dogma of Christianity, all those teachings … that was not the attraction of Christianity for me, that was the price of admission,” he said. “Believing that stuff was hard.”

He would do anything to get in — including professing to have “faith in that which is unseen.” This, he said, is why he makes a great humanist chaplain. At USC, students are “desperate for the kind of community” a united religious body brings. In fact, every psychological study Campolo has read on joy says the emotion comes from investment in a “handful of loving relationships.”

“I used to think that happy people were grateful, but when I read the science, I found out that it’s actually not the way … the truth is that grateful people are happy,” he said. “The act of reflecting on your lessons actually makes you enjoy them more.”

The humanist chaplaincy at USC, founded in 2014, hosts activities similar to a Christian group — mission trips, games, songs. If someone came to visit, he said, “it would look like every youth group on planet Earth.”

“It’s the same-old, same-old,” Campolo said. “The only difference is that these kids are pursuing goodness in a secular way — just because it makes sense to them, just because they’re convinced it’s the best way of life.”

“The problem for me as a young person was: I didn’t believe in God, and it’s hard to be a Christian when you don’t believe in God,” Campolo said. “It’s one of those basic theological obstacles that is very difficult to overcome.”

Many of the students he spends time with did not grow up in a youth group, so they’re under the impression he “invented fellowship.” Once, when Campolo delivered a 10-minute talk to the group, someone asked if it was a sermon.

Campolo is equally fond of speaking to a larger crowd as he is getting coffee with an audience of one. One afternoon he met with a student named Jordan who had it all together on paper — member of a fraternity, scholarship student, intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and “stone handsome.” But there was something missing.

“The truth of the matter is every week I hear you talk about friendship, and I realized I don’t have one real friend in the world,” Jordan said. “When you talk about having somebody that you can trust, somebody that you can confide in and talk about your troubles, somebody that you can be real with, I don’t have one of them.”

This is a common problem, Campolo said, in society today. Students know how to “write a term paper, fix your car or reprogram your computer,” but they are coming up short when it comes to being a good friend.

“All of their communications are mediated, and what happens is in that process of Facebook mediation, not only are they not communicating directly, they’re not communicating honestly,” Campolo said. “There’s a tremendous amount of pressure for kids today to project that they are always busy, that they are always happy, that things are always going great.”

This picture millennials are painting shows them having “a thousand friends,” but no matter how many digital connections they make, they still live life alone.

“They spend a lot of time commuting, they spend a lot of time on the computer, they spend a lot of time working, but they don’t spend a lot of time together,” Campolo said.

And friendship, he said, is the basis of a healthy romantic relationship, parenthood, workplace dynamic or neighborship. The toxicity that results from the lack of a common understanding corrodes people’s trust.

So Campolo told Jordan, and the Hall of Philosophy audience, his crucial message: “You can do friendship.”

“You don’t have to be an extrovert,” he said. “You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be funny. You don’t have to be good-looking. You don’t have to be confident.”

Jordan asked what, then, he needed to do. And when Campolo told him all they needed to do was set up weekly meetings, Jordan wondered if Campolo couldn’t just send him a YouTube link or article instead. Campolo simply gave him advice.

“The truth of the matter is, in our society, we teach young people to assign top priority to everything else,” Campolo said. “We teach them to assign top priority to their schoolwork. We teach them to assign top priority to their career choices and to their extracurricular activities and to everything else they’ll look at at Harvard when you apply.”

He asked audience members: If they wanted to take up archery, what would they do?

“You would get lessons, you would buy a book about archery, you would look at YouTube videos, you would go to an archery club and hang out with the other archers, you would ask people to help you, you would practice,” Campolo said.

So then, Campolo said, people need to practice friendship in the same way — because right now, we’re doing it all wrong.

“These college kids, these young people, they are so caught up in the ‘who’s good at school’ and ‘who’s good at life’ and ‘who’s making money’ and ‘who’s got the most friends’ that (Jordan) thought that the way to make good friends was to look for status people,” Campolo said.

Instead, he taught Jordan how to spot someone with good spirits, not just good stature. These lessons — how to listen, ask the right questions, make conversation, look people in the eye — helped Jordan express affection in an “intentional” way.

“You don’t have to be an extrovert,” Bart Campolo said. “You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be funny. You don’t have to be good-looking. You don’t have to be confident.”

And Chautauquans, Campolo said, aren’t exempt from these lessons either.

“You people are the champions of intentionality in relationships,” he said. “This is why you come here for a week. You’re like, ‘Let’s go and get close to people and talk about meaningful stuff.’ ”

So when talking to others, especially children and grandchildren, Campolo said, people need to ask the right questions to get purposeful answers.

“You ask about schoolwork, and you ask them about their careers, and you ask them about their cars and their houses,” he said. “You ask them about their hobbies, but you don’t ask about their relationships and you don’t tell them about yours. You don’t tell them how you form them, you don’t tell them where the problems came up, you don’t tell them about the ups and the downs and the bumps and the grinds in a relationship. You don’t talk about their marriages with them, you don’t talk about the inner workings of being close to another human being. You talk to them about that other stuff, and as a result, they think that other stuff is what’s really important.”

At the end of the school year, Campolo’s group hosted one last potluck dinner, and it was there that he saw Jordan smiling, laughing and surrounded by a handful of friends.

“I’m here to tell you that there’s only one lifeboat I know that really makes the difference when people go into the water,” Campolo said. “And that’s community.”

Even though Michael Gerson is a Republican, he isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to the ethics of the administration of President Donald Trump.

Gerson, a columnist with The Washington Post, will talk about politics under Trump with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, at 2 p.m. Monday in the Hall of Philosophy. The conversation, titled “Five Things Everyone Should Know about Politics in the Age of Trump,” kicks off the interfaith segment of Week Eight’s theme, “Media and the News: Ethics in the Digital Age.”

“(Gerson) has been a part of a valuable camp of writers over the last few years trying to bridge the gap between what are ongoing conservative principles and also the values of his faith, which he takes very seriously, and the emerging direction of the Republican Party under Donald Trump,” Fallows said.

Fallows will interview all five guest lecturers this week and said he is excited to speak in-depth, especially at Chautauqua Institution, about a topic he has written about for years. The renowned journalist — Fallows has won the National Magazine Award and the American Book Award — first came to Chautauqua about 25 years ago with his family and has returned repeatedly since.

Although he has written about the intersection of politics and ethics for decades, Fallows said he is excited to learn from the guest speakers, some of whom are more focused on faith and others on politics, like Gerson. According to Fallows, Gerson’s lecture will likely be the most overtly political of the week.

Neither Fallows nor Gerson are strangers to the challenges of the White House. Gerson spent six years as former President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter and Fallows spent two years in the same position for former President Jimmy Carter.

Gerson is also known for his strong Christian faith. In 2005, he was named by Time as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America” and he most recently co-authored a book titled City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.

Lately, Gerson’s columns have focused on how these two topics — politics and faith — intersect, with a focus on the Trump administration. Some of the topics have included how a values-free philosophy has hurt the U.S. State Department and how the investigation into Russia’s meddling has shown that the administration has no conscience.

“It has been particularly strange to hear religious conservatives claim that the character of leaders doesn’t count,” Gerson wrote in his July 13 column in The Washington Post. “But the character of a president leaves an imprint on everyone around him.”

Both Fallows and Maureen Rovegno, associate director of the Department of Religion, said they thought Gerson was the right person to address the week’s topic. Rovegno recalled that Gerson had been a strong contributor the last time he spoke at Chautauqua in July 2012.

While Fallows has some questions prepared, he said he is ready to let Gerson and the other speakers lead the conversation. He said that there are no doubts about Gerson’s credentials as someone who takes religion — and its connection to conservative political values — seriously. They will hopefully be able to get to the bottom of some of Fallows’ more challenging dilemmas.

“The larger question, I think, that people want from this moment in national history — and this week’s exploration of it — is, essentially, ‘Is there any hope?’ ” Fallows said.

In the midst of a new, tumultuous political climate, Jay Rosen believes that journalists are under attack — but it didn’t begin with the 2016 presidential election.

“There is an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country,” said Rosen, associate professor of journalism at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and author of the blog “PressThink.” “In some ways, it began in 1969 when Spiro Agnew was sent out by the Nixon White House to begin attacking the major news networks for being unfair to the president, inaugurating a kind of biased criticism that has only grown in intensity since then.”

Since Donald Trump was elected president, the White House has banned CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, The Guardian and other outlets from various press briefings.

One of the campaign’s main goals, Rosen said, was to undermine trust, and while he believes that Trump’s attacks are not new to the Chautauqua audience, he wants to “help them make sense of those developments and understand them historically, but also break down the parts of it.

Rosen kicks off Week Eight — “Media and the News: Ethics in the Digital Age” — with his 10:45 a.m. lecture Monday in the Amphitheater.

“Digital news is so much more vast than the media universe was during the ‘golden age of mass media,’ ” Rosen said, and described that age as a combination of “broadcasting, monopoly newspapers and a handful of weekly news magazines.”

“(Digital news) is bigger, it’s more diverse, it’s more contentious — there’s more tumult and revolution in the air,” Rosen said.

And with that Digital Age also comes what Rosen calls “interlocking crises for public service journalism.”

“There’s crises of trust, there’s crises of revenue, there’s a political crisis around these attacks,” Rosen said.

The explosion and integration of social media within mainstream media comes with both positive and negative outcomes, according to Rosen.

“It exposes (news outlets) to attack and ridicule and organized efforts to defame them more,” Rosen said. “They have a closer connection to the public that supports what they do, but they’re also much closer as targets for the people who are generating kind of a hate movement towards the press.”

Though Rosen said he does not identify as a journalist, he said he “gets attacked all the time.” He attributes that to voicing his opinion through social media, primarily on Twitter.

“I am a journalism academic, press critic and student of the American press,” Rosen said. “I engage with journalists and I argue with them, I educate them, criticize them, but I don’t consider myself part of their profession or tribe.”

During last summer, Rosen said he felt compelled to write and warn people about the growing campaign to discredit the mainstream press.

“It is happening — it is disturbing and dangerous,” Rosen said.

According to Rosen, the most important cause for concern is an unknown number of people who “aren’t in the same information universe, the same factual world” as, for example, journalists in the White House.

“A segment of the American public, electorate and news audience has kind of been broken off from the rest,” Rosen said, and there’s no way for most journalists to reach them.

“They don’t trust (the media),” Rosen said. “They believe the worst about it that is spread by this organized movement.”

He estimates that number could be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the American population.

“That’s a serious matter because when journalists get up in the morning and get to their desks, it’s like 20 to 30 percent of their public is gone before they have a cup of coffee or open their laptop,” Rosen said. “It’s not hard to imagine how that number creeps up, which is what Trump is trying to do, to make it go up.”

Rosen suggests that living in an alternate factual universe creates problems that don’t have immediate solutions.

“The intention is to eliminate any common basis of reality for the American public,” Rosen said. “It’s working — it’s succeeding.”

Figuring out to re-establish trust is the “biggest, deepest problem facing journalists today.”

“It’s not something that will yield to an easy fix or any one fix,” Rosen said. “It’s going to take a long time and it’s going to require a lot of events that we don’t even see on the horizon right now.”

Rosen is currently working with an ad-free, Holland-based news company called De Correspondent that he believes has “optimized their entire operation for trust,” in part because they’re “almost completely member funded” and “innovative.” With the support of Nieman Lab, they’re researching and working on a 2018 U.S. launch.

“This is my way to responding to this crisis of trust,” Rosen said.

The first time Chautauqua Theater Company conservatory actor Adrianna Mitchell saw a black woman in a Shakespeare play, she was 20.

“You know that it happens, but I just hadn’t seen it,” Mitchell said. “So for me to have this role, and to be a part of this process, and to tell this story, is really special.”

Mitchell will portray one half of the star-crossed lovers in CTC’s production of Romeo & Juliet, which opens this weekend and includes performances at 6 p.m. Saturday, and 2:15 and 8 p.m. Sunday in Bratton Theater.

It’s “a happy coincidence,” according to Mitchell and others in the cast and crew, that several main characters, including Romeo and Juliet, will be portrayed by people of color.

“I think there’s a traditional image that you have in your head when you think about Juliet and Romeo, and it can be something else, and it’s a perfectly valid interpretation,” Mitchell said.

The story remains the same, but audiences will see the kind of representation onstage that Mitchell missed out on as an aspiring actor. She is thankful younger viewers will be included — during the run, CTC and Chautauqua Institution are offering a special performance that is free and open to educational and community partners both on the grounds and off.

It’s only in recent years that actors of color have started getting more opportunities to portray leads in Shakespeare, according to both statistics and personal anecdotes.

In a 2015 interview published on the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Art Works Blog,” Sherri Young, executive director and founder of San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company, said she noticed in the early ’90s that actors of color were playing iconic Shakespearean roles in drama school, but then weren’t getting those roles after graduation.

“I had just graduated from the American Conservatory of Theatre and, there was this big push to have more diversity on the stage,” Young told the NEA. “But what was happening was a lot of the theater companies, they were putting the bodies on the stage without really incorporating the culture as part of the production. So you would have a King Lear and it would be an Asian or African American and a Latino somewhere, but they weren’t playing the major roles, and it was still a very European production.”

Across the pond, back on Shakespeare’s home turf, the statistics are similarly “embarrassing,” according to a 2016 article in the Independent:

“The British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database — using information from almost 1,200 productions over the past 75 years — reveals that while the Bard’s plays have become more multicultural over the decades, BAME actors have had scant opportunities to play the great Shakespearean leads,” according to the article, which also notes black, Asian and minority ethnic actors are “more likely to play Laertes, Ophelia, Horatio, Guildenstern or Rosencrantz than the title role in Hamlet.”

Romeo & Juliet director Dawn Monique Williams — who comes to CTC from Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where there is a focus on inclusivity — said she didn’t approach the play with any preconceived notions “about who should play these characters, in terms of race, ethnicity and, in most cases, gender.”

Benvolio, who acts as a narrator and is the first character audiences see in the show, is one case where Williams flipped the gender. CTC conservatory actor Jules Latimer portrays Benvolio as a female character, and the production suggests her character is coping with some unrequited love herself.

As someone who hadn’t done Romeo & Juliet before, Latimer said she was surprised how much fun she was having in rehearsal. As one of the “three amigos” — her term for the friendship of Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio — much of her early stage time is made up of buddy scenes.

“Once you see it, it’s like, ‘Wow, I never knew that it was this funny,’ ” Latimer said. “It’s really funny, and I thought it was all sappy, sappy, lovey-dovey stuff, but it’s very funny and it’s very relatable.”

While Williams thinks the term “colorblind casting” is a misnomer, she did want as inclusive a cast as possible. She gave credit to CTC Artistic Director Andrew Borba for building a strong conservatory with actors offering a range of skills and backgrounds.

Williams recalled viewing Mitchell’s audition tape and being impressed with how the potential Juliet lit up the screen. Meanwhile, CTC conservatory actor Siddiq Saunderson brought a “street smart, savvy kind of energy” that Williams saw as a departure from one-dimensional, overly emotional Romeos, Williams said.

“Adrianna and Siddiq really just rose to the top, so it wasn’t intentional on my part in any way to say Romeo and Juliet will be played by black actors — that just happened through the course of video and callbacks,” Williams said.

Saunderson, who started acting in abridged Shakespeare plays during his middle school years, is thrilled to finally be playing “arguably one of the best roles ever written.”

“I do feel like it’s very important for black people to be doing Shakespeare,” Saunderson said. “I feel like the reason why Shakespeare has lasted for so long is because he has written these plays about these universal themes and things that all types of people that look differently can relate to.”

That said, Saunderson said he isn’t looking for the audience to receive a certain message.

“I don’t know if there’s anything necessarily that I want the audience to leave with,” Saunderson said. “I just want them to have taken the journey with me because the play is a journey. It’s happy, it’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s loving.”

In order to prepare for their performance at Chautauqua Institution, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre spent the past month rehearsing for six hours per day, five days a week. It’s a rigorous schedule but something that artistic director Terrence Orr said isn’t out of the ordinary.

“It’s a normal process for us,” Orr said.

The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre will perform at Chautauqua for the first time since 2013, and for the first time with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, at 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater. This is also CSO Music Director Rossen Milanov’s first time working with PBT.

“It’s always wonderful to have live music,” Orr said. “Theater has to do with the fact that we’re not just dancers, we tell stories.”

The show opens with “divertissements” — a French classical ballet term that means enjoyable excerpts — from “Le Corsaire,” a ballet about pirates intertwined with comedy, adventure and romance.

The next piece in the program, “Petite Mort,” is set to the music of two piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Yoland Collin, PBT’s company pianist, is the featured soloist.

“The music is not necessarily lined up with the gestures on stage,” Milanov said. “The music generally functions as a general canvas. It’s a very interesting and visually stunning work.”

The choreography features six men and six women. Six foils embody aggression, sexuality, energy, silence, cultivated senselessness and vulnerability. “Petite Mort,” whose literal meaning is “small death,” is a euphemism for orgasm in both French and Arabic.

The finale, “Coppélia Divertissement,” features Apprentice, Festival and Workshop II students from the Chautauqua School of Dance. Orr said he traveled to the Institution about three weeks ago to meet with faculty and dancers to stage and rehearse excerpts from the ballet, which features folk dances, comedy and theatrics.

Orr just returned to Pittsburgh on Monday after coming to Chautauqua again to work on the piece.

“They’re doing a wonderful job,” Orr said. “I think it will fit together pretty easily.”

Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, artistic director for the School of Dance, choreographed the Polish folk dance — mazurka — within the piece, while Glenda Lucena, the school’s ballet mistress, staged it. The company, student dancers and orchestra rehearsed earlier Saturday in the Amp.

“There are ballets in which the music is absolutely equal to what’s happening on the stage, and there are ballets where the music naturally takes a secondary role,” Milanov said. “The classical training and technique that are certainly in ‘Coppélia’ and ‘Corsaire’ are going to be pretty much in focus.”

Orr is the featured speaker for the Chautauqua Dance Circle’s pre-performance lecture at 7 p.m. Saturday in Smith Wilkes Hall.

“I’m looking forward to being up there,” Orr said. “Chautauqua is a wonderful campus. It’s going to be very exciting for us to be in the new theater.”

Staff writer Philip de Oliveira contributed to this report.

The words “ethical” and “moral” are often used interchangeably.

Those who distinguish between them, however, generally equate “ethics” with how one treats people one doesn’t know, and thus with society or workplace-specific principles and rules about what’s right and wrong. In contrast, “morals” are viewed as how one treats people one knows — family, friends and acquaintances.

For an organization, company or country to function effectively, ethical procedures and practices are paramount. Morality — putting one’s family first — presumes that one’s special interest is more important than the common interest, the well-being of the workplace or society as a whole.

“Strong codes of ethics are important to the functioning of society,” said Gloria Duffy, who for 21 years has served as the president and CEO of the renowned public affairs forum The Commonwealth Club of California. She is also a senior fellow of the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Leadership Forum. One of ALF’s core values is “to serve the common good.”

At 3 p.m. Saturday in the Hall of Philosophy, Duffy will give a talk titled “Ethical Challenges of Leadership,” as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club’s Contemporary Issues Forum speaker series.

“If you look at countries that don’t have high standards — like Russia and countries in Latin America — they don’t tend to do well economically and socially,” Duffy said. “There’s a very symbiotic relationship between the principals at the local and national levels; they influence one another.”

Duffy, who earned her master of philosophy, M.A. and Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University, said that while ethics was not part of her formal training there, her ethical grounding was instilled in her by her family, church and mentors at all levels, including her “big boss,” Bill Perry, for whom she worked as deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1995.

“Through experience you learn to sort out what’s the right thing and the wrong thing,” Duffy said.

Having served for more than 40 years in public life, leadership experience is something she possesses in abundance.

Initially, Duffy, focused on the field of international security and nuclear arms control and dismantlement. Later, her professional and community interests diversified considerably.

At Columbia, she studied at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, the first U.S. academic center to focus on the interdisciplinary study of Russia and the USSR.

After earning her first master’s, she worked for a year as a resident consultant for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, focusing on “Soviet nuclear energy and non-proliferation policies for the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation.” Her research culminated in a report, “Soviet Nuclear Export,” for the INFCE as part of Rand’s contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

This work led to a two-year position in Washington, D.C., at the Arms Control Association. There, Duffy was assistant director and editor of the ACA magazine, Arms Control Today. In addition, she completed her second master’s in preparation for her Ph.D.   

Duffy’s doctoral dissertation “analyzed how the discovery of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba in 1978 doomed U.S. Senate ratification of the SALT II arms control treaty,” according to her Commonwealth Club bio. This U.S.-USSR treaty on the limitation of “nuclear delivery vehicles” was signed by both parties in Vienna in June 1979.

While working on her dissertation, Duffy held four challenging professional posts consecutively and founded a public education forum.

As a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, she team-taught an introductory arms control course and co-authored the textbook International Arms Control: Issues and Arguments.

Duffy also served for two years as the first executive director of Ploughshares Fund — “the first public grant-making foundation in the field of international security and non-proliferation.” She then designed and established the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Program on International Security and Cooperation, “the largest funding program in this field.”

In 1985 Duffy founded an independent international security think tank called Global Outlook Education Institute in Palo Alto. She served as its president and CEO until 1992, when she returned to the MacArthur Foundation for a year to help establish the foundation’s Russia funding program and its Moscow office.

According to Duffy, Global Outlook “worked with new parliamentary and executive leaders during the Gorbachev era and after the breakup of the USSR on designing defense policies and structures suited to civil society.” It published a series of reports on that effort, as well as books and reports about Gorbachev era Soviet security policies, “attitudes of U.S. and Soviet decision-makers toward nuclear weapons and nuclear war-fighting,” and compliance with arms control treaties.

In 1987, Duffy co-founded and served as the first board president of the World Forum of Silicon Valley, an “international affairs public education organization.” Under her leadership, WFSV merged with The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 1997.

Duffy returned to Washington, D.C., in 1993 when she was appointed U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense and special coordinator for cooperative threat reduction under Assistant Defense Secretary Ash Carter and two defense secretaries — Les Aspin in 1993 and Perry in 1994. (Perry served as deputy secretary of defense in 1993.)

At the Pentagon, Duffy was responsible for negotiating more than 50 agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan regarding the dismantling, destruction and disposal of weapons of mass destruction. For these achievements, she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in 1995.

“The dismantling of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union was urgent,” Duffy said. “I headed my own research institute and within three weeks turned over the leadership and left. I got up every day and said, ‘There’s nothing more important I could be doing … than (determining) what to do with 7,000 nuclear weapons.’ … Others, too, upended their lives. Look what happened to Russia and Ukraine. What if both had had nuclear arms?”

In May 2016, Duffy received one of the Pentagon’s five inaugural Nunn-Lugar Trailblazer Awards commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act sponsored by U.S. Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar.

As president and CEO of The Commonwealth Club since 1996, Duffy has been overseeing its organizational strategy, extensive public policy programming (450-plus public forums annually), four weekly radio program feeds, The Commonwealth magazine (including her column, “InSight”), news reporting and blog website, membership activities and fundraising.

A recipient of several prestigious awards in California, Duffy has been a member, and often the chair, of numerous professional, academic and community boards and committees.

During her talk on Saturday, Duffy will discuss ethical challenges she encountered during her tenure with The Commonwealth Club, the Defense Department and three boards: Guadalupe River Park and Gardens Corporation (1996 to 1998), the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, which operates under the National Science Foundation’s umbrella (1997 to 2007) and the board of trustees of Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she currently serves.

At Occidental, Duffy’s eyes were opened to the problem of campus sexual abuse. Because there are some underlying factors that parents and grandparents should be aware of, she said she will also talk about them.

She will also speak about the problem of elder financial abuse, based on her personal experience. She said that elder abuse is everywhere and she hopes people will become more aware of it.

“I’ve found that for everything good that’s accomplished when you take on challenges, there’s always a fight,” Duffy said. “You have to be willing to fight it through. It’s never easy.”

The Rev. M. Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary and professor of pastoral ministry, returns to Chautauqua Institution as chaplain-in-residence for Week Eight. Barnes previously served as chaplain-in-residence in 2014 when Ken Burns was the weeklong presenter at the 10:45 a.m. morning lectures.

Barnes’ sermon series is titled “Saving the Elder Brother,” based on the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:25-32.

“These homilies will be focused on the second half of the parable of the prodigal son, focusing on his elder brother,” Barnes said. “Most of our presentations of the gospel assume we are speaking to prodigals in need of repenting from having left the father’s house. But many people identify more accurately with the careful elder brother. How do they find salvation, and from what?”

At the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service in the Amphitheater, he will preach on “The Gospel for Good People.” He will share his spiritual journey at the 5 p.m. Vespers Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy. He will preach at the 9:15 a.m. morning worship service Monday through Friday in the Amp.

His sermon titles for the week include “The Gospel for the Anxious,” “The Gospel for the Dutiful,” “The Gospel for the Blessed,” “The Gospel for the Right” and “Completing the Parable.”

“Everything we do here is about an encounter with this one holy Word,” Barnes writes of Princeton Theological Seminary on his webpage. “That’s the true function of the study of theology: to encounter the Word, to see the morning star that pierces the darkness, to know how to proclaim the Word that can fill any silence that dares threaten us. And the Word’s name is the Lord Jesus Christ.”

At Princeton, Barnes holds theological conversations where he engages faculty and distinguished guests in conversation about their work, their theological education and the mission of the church. Guests have included Nathan Stucky, director of the Farminary Project at PTS, on theology and sustainable agriculture; Kenda Creasy Dean, Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at PTS, on social entrepreneurship; and poet Billy Collins.

Prior to his work at Princeton, Barnes served churches in Colorado and Wisconsin; the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.; and Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, where he was also the Meneilly Professor of Pastoral Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Barnes holds degrees from The King’s College, Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, and is the author of eight books, including his two most recent: The Pastor as Minor Poet and Body and Soul: Reclaiming the Heidelberg Catechism. Barnes also serves as an editor-at-large for The Christian Century.

Sixteen-time Grammy winner Béla Fleck knows when to tip his cap.

“I wouldn’t be playing the kind of music I play in the first place if it wasn’t for seeing Chick when I was a teenager,” Fleck said in a 2007 video from the Concord Music Group teasing the release of The Enchantment, the duet album between banjo virtuoso Fleck and jazz piano legend Chick Corea.

The two musical pioneers will have their bands in tow at a special time Friday in the Amphitheater. At 7:30 p.m., the Chick Corea Elektric Band and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones will co-headline a night of jazz-infused innovation.

For his part, the 76-year-old Corea is deserving of a tip of the cap. Corea himself is a 22-time Grammy award winner, so the respect he garners as a trailblazer is substantial.

British rocker Sting even went so far as to say that “(Corea) completely devastated the landscape. It was like scorched earth — so musical, so powerful, so incredibly virtuosic.”

Corea’s long and storied career — and the music produced therein — has seen him continually push the envelope of jazz composition, both for himself as a musician and for the genre itself. Since his 1966 solo debut, Tones for Joan’s Bones, Corea has made it his mission to continue to grow and evolve as a player and composer.

“My personal successes have always been the result of following my true interests — of allowing myself to be interested in what I’m truly interested in — and then going ahead and learning more about it, increasing my abilities gradually as I go,” Corea said in a 2014 interview with Argentinian newspaper Clarín. “My ‘secret’ is I’m always the student, not the teacher others assume I am.”

Corea has played with such fellow legends as Miles Davis, as well as full symphony orchestras, electric jazz bands, flamenco stars and everyone in between. He has made a career out of collaboration, insisting that it is these partnerships that have allowed him the musical growth he has continued to experience.

“I have always tried my best to find the company of artists and musicians of great ability and creativity, and to work for them and with them, and to observe how they accomplish what they do, and to learn to apply that to my own life,” Corea told Clarín. “This approach has worked well for me.”

It is this desire to continue to work with innovators that brought Corea and Fleck together in the first place. While Fleck, 59, has made no secret of his adoration for Corea and his musical excellence, Corea was just as intrigued by Fleck.

“I was always just as interested and fascinated by this ‘young’ man’s musical vision,” Corea told the Anchorage Daily News in 2014. “When we began to play with one another the fun factor jumped out as the highest priority. We both recognized this and so continue to do projects and concerts together.”

Before their current tour, Fleck spent the month of July touring Europe with Corea, playing shows as a duo.

For Fleck, a musician best defined as undefinable, this constant movement, this constant desire to keep busy, is not just a professional drive, but a creative one as well.

“I seem to need a lot of stimuli to feel alive as a musician,” Fleck said. “If I don’t have something new cooking that stretches my abilities, I’ll start to go dark, and I don’t like that feeling.”

During Fleck’s career, he has found stimuli in myriad ways. Solidified as an impresario of the banjo, he has used the instrument as a passport into constantly widening, ever varied musical ventures.

He has performed as a solo artist, as part of collaborations and as a member of numerous bands. He has been a part of music labeled “bluegrass,” music labeled “jazz” and music labeled “world.” To date, he has composed three concertos, performing with the likes of the Canton, Colorado, South Carolina and Louisville symphony orchestras, and in 2016, his collection of duets with his wife, Abigail Washburn, won the Grammy Award for best folk album.

With his time constantly filled by one musical venture or another, Fleck has had the chance to tour with the Flecktones on only one other occasion, for less than a month, since 2012.

“We don’t play full-time these days,” Fleck said, “but we get together on certain special occasions to play certain short tours.”

The chance to bring the Flecktones on the road with Corea and his Elektric Band is one of those special occasions.

“Chick and I do a lot of different projects, but these two groups can be considered essential for each of us,” Fleck said. “When Chick asked if we would consider coming together to co-bill with his (Elektric) Band, it seemed like a great reason to get the old band back together.”

There’s been an unexpected windfall of putting the Chick Corea Elektric Band and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones on the road together, most notably on a stage that has both bands’ equipment set up at the same time. Fleck said that this makes the collaboration that has occurred during shows nothing but natural.

“The audiences are loving it,” Fleck said, “and we’re having the time of our lives.”

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Community has to be cultivated. Bart Campolo learned that after leaving Christianity — and now he teaches it to young secular people.

Campolo, the humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California, will talk about how he builds communities and why they are important during his lecture, “Cultivating Friendship and Community in an Age of Anxiety,” at 2 p.m. Friday in the Hall of Philosophy. The talk will conclude Week Seven’s theme, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety.”

“You want a sense of belonging,” Campolo said. “You want to know ‘Who are my people, where’s my tribe? What am I a part of?’ ”

In his work at USC, Campolo said he has met with many students — some of the best and brightest on campus at an already top-notch school — who encapsulate the age of anxiety that Chautauquans have been discussing this week. They can network and they appear successful, but they are full of anxiety and don’t know how to connect on a deeper level, he said.

What these students are truly searching for, Campolo said, is a deeper meaning of life. They may have hundreds of Facebook friends, but those relationships aren’t filling their need for purpose.

Campolo said he has tried to give students — most of whom have turned away from faith or have never been religious — a place to actively cultivate new friendships that nurture them and their values.

“I think a lot of people think that friendship and community is sort of a natural thing,” Campolo said. “That if you’re a good person, you’ll have good friendships. … My experience has been that those things don’t happen naturally.”

Campolo himself had to search for a new tribe in 2011, after a near-death experience made him abandon Christianity.

Before then, he had been a well-loved evangelical minister whose father, Tony Campolo, had been spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton. His split from the faith made headlines, but it wasn’t a surprise to his friends and family, who had seen him break away from traditional Christian thought over the course of decades.

Although Bert Campolo was ready to give up God, he wasn’t ready to give up community. So he packed his bags and visited Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University who spoke at Chautauqua earlier this summer. What he learned inspired him to move to Southern California to work with students, like Epstein does.

Campolo acknowledges that some people who leave religion, or are turned off by it at the start, may wonder why he jumped into a new organization so quickly. He said he understands that they may have had a bad experience with the church community or may feel that their lives are already full of community and meaning.

“But if I decided that for me to make the most of my life, I had to form loving relationships and to do work that makes a difference in the lives of people and to cultivate a sense of wonder and gratitude for the privilege of being alive, … at that point, I would say ‘I can’t do that by myself,’ ” Campolo explained.

Ultimately, Campolo said, people have to find their own way to happiness. In his experience, though, happiness has to be actively sought out and thoughtfully nurtured, which is best done surrounded by people of shared values. He said many people participate in organized religion just for that reason.

“They don’t go to church because they believe the narrative,” Campolo said. “They go for the community.”

Art makes truth easier to swallow.

“We as people, individually and as a society, often want to ignore the truth,” said Beau Willimon, screenwriter and playwright. “The artist has to investigate these things we’re afraid of in a way that’s susceptible and powerful.”

Willimon, who’s been politically active most of his life — perhaps even more so since the 2016 presidential election, said it’s an intense moment in U.S. history. In the current political landscape, he said people have to “confront, contend and sometimes resist a lot of frightening things.” In his lecture at 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater, Willimon will approach this week’s theme, “The Nature of Fear,” through the lens of an artist.

Willimon is the creator of the Netflix original series “House of Cards” and has written 12 plays. He will make his Broadway debut on Nov. 30 with his play The Parisian Woman about a group of friends in Washington, D.C., in wake of the election. His new series, “The First,” about a human mission to Mars, will start production later this year.

Willimon said creating art is a process of trial and error — with a lot of error along the way. The fear of failure, he said, is intrinsic to the artistic endeavor.

“If you’re waking up every morning setting out to do something original, to discover things that haven’t been discovered, there’s a high risk of failure,” Willimon said. “You have to not only confront the fear of failure, but your own fears as a person. Exploring those fears is at the heart of what you say.”

But in a time “where the political landscape of our country and the world has taken center stage,” Willimon said, people are confronting a number of fears that go beyond the urgency of those involved in the creative process.

“When you’re making art, your failures are tough to take,” Willimon said. “But they don’t necessarily put your life or well-being at risk.”

Willimon said in the current tumultuous period, more people are becoming aware of fears that others have been facing their entire lives. Through art, people can learn to empathize with others.

For Willimon, that’s the role of the artist — to dramatize the experiences everyone shares. In doing so, art can broaden people’s world view and help them understand the struggles others are facing.

“Only by investigating and reflecting on ourselves can we live better lives, be better people and coexist in the healthiest way,” Willimon said.

Doing so often requires artists to look at the uglier side of society. Willimon said audiences can “sense bullshit the minute they see it,” and are drawn to work that feels honest. Even when creating fiction, Willimon said the artist’s job is to arrive at the truth, no matter how frightening it may be.

By creating artwork that expresses or mirrors the harsh realities of the world, the truth becomes “easier to swallow.” As someone who’s served on political campaigns since 1998, Willimon has plenty of truth to draw on in his own work. He’s worked on Sen. Chuck Schumer and Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaigns, as well as Sen. Bill Bradley and Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaigns. While some people assume Willimon is a political writer because of his work on “House of Cards” and “The Ides of March,” he doesn’t consider his writing political fiction.

In fact, Willimon believes all art, regardless of the subject matter, is political.

“I think all writing has a political component to it in so far as a writer is bringing (his) point of view,” Willimon said. “Even telling a story about folks that has not been told before, even if there’s nothing political in the subject matter, is a political act in itself because you’re opening up people’s eyes to experiences they might not otherwise be acquainted with.”

Willimon said art gives enough distance to allow audiences to engage with the truth without feeling threatened by it.

The challenge is for the artist to express difficult truths in a way that invites audiences in, rather than push them further away. Willimon said there’s no one way to find that balance, as long as the artist is true to his or her own voice.

“You have to tackle your own personal fears to show the audience and communicate that you’re going to go there yourself,” Willimon said. “Whether you’re using drama or comedy or satire or all of the above, you have to create something that feels urgent and honest — and when you’re lucky, feels original.”

Steven Mackey considers himself a kind of musical mutt.

Mackey grew up playing electric guitar. He admired Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar and Led Zeppelin. In his late teens, he had his first encounter with classical music. At the time, classical music was going through what Mackey described as a purist phase.

“Right after World War II, classical music kind of clamped down for a variety of sociopolitical reasons,” Mackey said. “It became this kind of solipsistic field.”

Generally speaking, classical music became increasingly self-referential and hermetic. Popular influences were shunned in favor of systems and procedures. The prevailing artistic vogue had a lasting effect and left aspiring composers like Mackey, who felt concert music could legitimately incorporate vernacular influences, at a loss.

At 8:15 p.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will be led by Music Director Rossen Milanov in a performance of Mackey’s double concerto for violin and electric guitar, “Four Iconoclastic Episodes.”

What makes each of the movements “iconoclastic,” according to Mackey, is the influence of various nonclassical types of music, from Indian ragas to blues and rock.

“On the one hand, we grew up with rock music and records and access to music from all over the world,” Mackey said. “But on the other hand, there was sort of this post-Darmstadt kind of mentality that classical (music) is supposed to be purebred.”

The Darmstadt School was a group of composers, headed by the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who earned a reputation as the strictest and most extreme practitioners of serial music. (Armenian-American composer Loris Chobanian frequently referred to the group as “the Darmstadt Bastards.”)

“When I was in the early part of my career I got a lot of pushback, which always puzzled me,” Mackey said. “The whole reason I got out of the rock music world and into the classical world was because it seemed to me that one aspect of concert music was its omnivorousness.”

Mackey cited Mozart as an example, noting the composer’s use of everything from Austrian folk songs and Turkish military music to Italian bel canto as source material. Handel was known for synthesizing and even parodying styles from all over Europe as a result of his extensive travels.

Composer John Harbison, who is an institute professor in the music department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known to be equally at home in jazz and atonal music, gave a young Mackey some valuable advice.

“He said several times that you never escape the music you were passionate about when you were 17 years old,” Mackey said.

Eventually, Mackey concluded that classical music is indeed a perpetually expanding and evolving amalgam of influences, not a set of rules laid down by a handful of European postwar despots. As an established composer and teacher, Mackey now lists world music and sacred Renaissance music as influences. And the music from Mackey’s early years still comes across in the double concerto.

“The first movement is explicitly influenced by fusion rock from the ’70s,” Mackey said. “The guitar plays these long lines, bending and a lot of things that I think are Ravi Shankar-influenced.”

The same movement also extensively uses altered scale degrees, creating a bluesy sound.

The concerto’s third movement incorporates elements of Indian music. Mackey said the beat cycles of traditional tabla drumming are conceptually similar to the repeated harmonic pattern of a chaconne or passacaglia in Western music.

There are plenty of double concertos in the concert repertoire dating back to the Baroque period, but Mackey didn’t look to any of them for guidance.

“I just did what came naturally,” Mackey said.

Mackey doubts the traditional examples would have been much help anyway.

“The baggage is different in the two instruments, the electric guitar and the violin,” Mackey said. “There aren’t any models with such vastly different-seeming instruments.”

The idea for the concerto came from violinist Anthony Marwood, who will perform the solo violin part alongside Mackey at Thursday’s concert. Mackey and Marwood met at Yellow Barn, an annual summer chamber music festival held in rural Vermont, where they were both artists in residence. The pair was rehearsing Mackey’s “Physical Property” for string quartet and electric guitar when Marwood commented on the sound of the piece.

“After one rehearsal he said, ‘Man, I just think the sound of electric guitar and violin is really cool,’ ” Mackey said.

Marwood suggested that Mackey compose a concerto featuring the two instruments, backed up by a string orchestra instead of a quartet.

“That statement just gave me confidence and I didn’t look to any models,” Mackey said. “I just tried to keep our personalities in mind.”

Mackey will perform the solo electric guitar part himself.

“There’s no performer I know better than myself,” Mackey said.

He said knowing his own strengths and weaknesses can sometimes tempt him to stay within his comfort zone. That’s why Mackey feels he writes at least as well, if not better, for violin.

“For the violin, I can say, ‘Yeah, he’ll practice it. He’ll figure it out!’ ” Mackey said.

Mackey described Marwood as a fairly traditional violin soloist. In fact, Mackey prefers working with classical musicians precisely because of their fastidiousness and rigorous training.

“That kind of commitment, trying to make it their own, they have that same sort of care for every phrase in my piece,” Mackey said. “He’s trying to find out the best sound for this phrase of music, just as he would do for a late Beethoven string quartet.”

In Thursday’s concert, Mackey’s concerto will be sandwiched between Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 in D major and Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C major. Fortunately, Mackey enjoys being programmed alongside dead composers.

“It’s not like I want to eliminate the competition or anything,” Mackey said. “I just like to hear my music in the context of timeless music.”

At 61 years old, Mackey still likes to check his own work against music that has survived centuries.

“How does my music stack up?” Mackey said. “Do I sound like a gum-chewing teenager?”

The Grilled Cheeselers have been here before.

Last year, as the Misfits, they lost off a walk-off single to the Hot Chauts 16-15.

This year, they didn’t even let the Hot Chauts score 10 runs.

In an Aug. 3 title rematch, the Grilled Cheeselers halted the Hot Chauts’ bid for back-to-back titles, 14-6, at Sharpe Field.

Before the game, the Grilled Cheeselers psyched themselves up by putting on eye black and sporting their new team shirts.

The Hot Chauts worked on batting technique with a few of their players and went over their game strategy.

Cold wind started to blow through the field as both teams tried to adjust.

Both teams started off hot, each scoring two runs to make it 2-2.

However, a scoreless second inning cooled down both team’s bats.

To bring the energy back up, men’s softball commissioner Mark Altschuler had a surprise.

Altschuler, along with women’s softball commissioner Carrie Zachry, paused the game to bring out former Broadway performer Stephen Stout for a little third-inning entertainment.

Stout, who plays for Altschuler’s softball team the Arthritics, performed Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” for everyone in attendance.

While initially the audience was confused about what was going on, Stout received praise for the fun and quirky performance.

“At first, people were probably like, ‘What is this guy doing?’ ” Stout said. “It was a little weird, but I’m used to that.”

The break in the action may have been just what the Grilled Cheeselers needed.

In the third, their bats started to come alive, scoring three runs. The Hot Chauts answered back with two runs, making it 5-4.

In the fourth inning, the Grilled Cheeselers extended their lead by three runs, while the Hot Chauts narrowed the gap with two more runs off errors, making it 8-6.

This would be the last time the Hot Chauts scored in the game.

Six runs in the fifth inning helped the Grilled Cheeselers pull away, but it was their defense that kept the Hot Chauts at bay.

Team captain Julia Koron said the team felt a shift in momentum, which helped them put the game out of reach.

“We just started to relax and hit the ball,” Koron said. “We cleaned up the errors and completely focused.”

In the sixth inning, the Hot Chauts loaded the bases. However, with two outs, a flyout by the Hot Chauts killed their best chance to lessen the deficit.

In the bottom of the seventh, Koron and company realized they were actually going to pull off the win against the reigning, defending champions.

“We thought, ‘Oh, my God, we just need three outs and we win,’ ” Koron said.

After seven innings, the Grilled Cheeselers avenged last year’s championship loss, winning 14-6.

Hot Chauts team captain Jen Tarr was stunned by the Grilled Cheeselers’ performance.

“I’m speechless,” Tarr said. “I’m glad we came back to try and defend. They played well. They deserve it.”

After the game, the Grilled Cheeselers celebrated by doing cart wheels on the field and hugging their teammates.

Their energy spilled out onto the field with screams of “We did it” and dancing celebrations.

After taking a breather, Koron said she and her team had a goal for next summer.

“We’re coming back next year to defend our title,” Koron said. “Grilled Cheeselers are going back-to-back.”

As she worked on her book about the bombing of Nagasaki, author Susan Southard soon realized she wasn’t writing solely about survivors.

“It’s not just the story of those five people,” Southard said. “It’s the story of a city.”

Southard is one of Week Seven’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle authors, and she’ll present her work Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War at 3:30 p.m. Thursday in the Hall of Philosophy for the second CLSC Roundtable.

The book, which is Southard’s first, traces the lives of five hibakusha — atomic bomb-affected people — over a period of nearly 70 years. Nagasaki was published in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the bombing, and was a finalist for The Chautauqua Prize in 2016.

The research, field work, and translation of the interviews with her subjects — as well as the actual writing of the book — took Southard 12 years. Southard links the stories of the five featured survivors, Dō-oh Mineko, Nagano Etsuko, Taniguchi Sumiteru, Wada Kōichi and Yoshida Katsuji, with the broader narrative of what a city and its people look like in the wake of nuclear devastation.

“I felt compelled to tell the story from the beginning, but I think it was fairly late when I started to have the confidence that I was the one to tell it,” Southard said. “When I wrote my book proposal and it got to Viking and Viking bought it, that was a pretty affirming moment. But still, I had to produce the book.”

The book’s beginnings go back a long way, Southard said.

Southard lived in Japan while she was in high school as an international exchange student. She first visited Nagasaki when she was 16, which she said was an “incredibly impactful” experience for her.

A bit of “unexpected timing” brought the city back into her life. Southard was living in Washington, D.C., in 1986 when she got a call asking if she would be willing to be an interpreter for a Nagasaki survivor while he was in town for a speaking engagement.

“That was where everything really started to come together,” Southard said.

Southard said she got to spend many hours with the survivor, who shared his experiences in a very detailed and intimate way.

“That was the seed, I think — I didn’t know it at the time — but it was the birth of a new relationship with Nagasaki,” Southard said.

In 1987, Southard returned to Nagasaki and began meeting with other survivors. Sixteen years later, she began working on what would become Nagasaki when she realized their stories stayed with her.

“I just had them on my mind,” Southard said. “I met this survivor in 1986 who was 57, and he’d been 16 at the time of the bombing. By the start of the book, he was in his mid-70s. I just kept wondering, ‘What is it like to come to the final period of one’s life and look back on a life split in two by nuclear war?’ ”

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It turned out to be quite a complicated question, Southard said.

When it came to writing Nagasaki, she said, “all of it was difficult.”

She said in terms of content, nuclear war was “not an easy topic to stay with,” especially when it comes to telling people’s personal stories of survival.

“I was constantly afraid that I wouldn’t get it right,” Southard said. “It was so important to me to honor the truth of the survivors’ stories. And I was really afraid I wouldn’t get it right. That’s one reason why it took a long time. It’s a massive, massive topic, and then I have their personal stories as well that needed to be told correctly and accurately and meaningfully. So that was my biggest fear.”

The structure of the book proved challenging for her as a writer, too. Because the book tells both the story of the city of Nagasaki and the hibakusha, Southard said she had to find a way to marry those two narratives in a meaningful way.

“From the writing perspective, it was structure,” Southard said. “How do I tell a story in a compelling way — a story of five survivors that is intimate and detailed — over 70 years? And include the historical context of the war, of the occupation, of the medical effects of radiation on their bodies? And on, and on, and on. How do I structure that in a compelling way? That was the hardest thing of all.”

It wasn’t a project without its rewards, though.

Southard said getting to know and care so deeply about the people of Nagasaki was profound and meaningful and a “really beautiful experience” for her.

And she still keeps in touch with her subjects when she goes to visit Nagasaki, she said.

Sherra Babcock, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, said that the way in which Southard tells the stories of the people of Nagasaki was what convinced her the book was a good choice for the CLSC.

Babcock said the book could easily be just depressing, but she found it uplifting.

“These people are survivors in the most inspirational ways,” Babcock said.

Babcock said she was also impressed with the way that Southard made Nagasaki her life’s work — that her experience in high school drove her to write such a thoughtful and deeply researched book. She said Nagasaki poses essential questions for the theme of the week, which is “The Nature of Fear.”

“It’s deeply affecting, especially about questioning the horror of war and its effects on ordinary people,” Babcock said.

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It’s those “ordinary people” who Southard wanted to highlight with Nagasaki. Southard said history is often told from the perspective of governments and militaries, and it leads to people having a very limited point of view when it comes to historical events.

“In the case of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that story has been, relatively speaking, quite suppressed in our culture,” Southard said. “And that keeps us from really understanding the whole story, and not just the story we were told immediately after the bombing — that it ended the war and saved millions of American lives. There’s more to the story, and I think it’s important for us to try to look at the whole story so we can understand not only our past and our relationship to the past, but also so we can be able to make more grounded and informed decisions now.”

When people accept a one-sided narrative, it can keep them from seeing all of the perspectives at play, Southard said.

The “very intentional and determined narrative” the American government put out after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima has “been really cemented in our American psyche,” Southard said, but she thinks there’s room for multiple truths to exist.

“There’s more than one truth that we can hold at the same time, and I think that is something that helps build community across cultures and across history and across nations,” Southard said. “If we’re open to that, it helps us in our own lives in terms of building community. It means we are open to multiple perspectives of whatever is happening in our lives and in our country.”

What Southard hopes is that readers of Nagasaki will think about the bombing as more than just the image of “a mushroom cloud rising high over Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she said.

It’s about more than that moment, Southard said, and that’s what she wanted to explore with her work — the ways in which the survivors have carried “the radiation and trauma in their bodies” for the rest of their lives.

“I think on a broader level, I’d be really grateful if readers feel more open to exploring the multiple facets of a given historical event,” Southard said. “There are many aspects of experience, and often either because of our own personal political perspectives or because of what we’ve learned in our education system, we don’t look at the other side of the story.”

Southard said she’s still getting used to the fact that she’s written a book that might help people understand the different and possibly unknown aspects of a larger cultural narrative.

“I was hidden away working on this book for 12 years,” Southard said. “But now it’s out in the world, and I’m understanding some of the ways that it’s had an impact. That’s very gratifying.”

Horror films can often be discounted as vehicles for mindless entertainment and cheap thrills.

Adam Lowenstein wants people to think about them more deeply and, more importantly, take them seriously.

“Film is still often perceived less as an art form and more as a disposable entertainment,” Lowenstein said. “We do that at our peril.”

Lowenstein will discuss the importance of horror films at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater as part of Week Seven’s “The Nature of Fear” programming.

Lowenstein is a film scholar and the author of Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. He is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Lowenstein previously visited Chautauqua Institution in 2009 to interview director James Ivory about film on the morning lecture platform.

Matt Ewalt, associate director of education and youth services, said the breadth of Week Seven’s theme allowed the education department to pull from many different disciplines when thinking about speakers for the week.

One discipline worth investigating, Ewalt said, was film — more specifically, horror films. Lowenstein’s expertise and passion for the genre made him a natural choice for the week, Ewalt said.

Ewalt said he was interested in the question of why “we seek out what scares us” when it comes to film — and why people tend to seek out that experience together.

“Being scared with one another — it’s a very primal thing,” Ewalt said. “It’s just fascinating.”

Lowenstein said that film is “so intimately connected to our social existence in ways that more canonical art forms are not,” and that accessibility is what makes film so important when it comes to understanding culture.

“Film is a popular medium, and that’s part of its importance and part of its social significance in a way that art forms that are solely relegated to the university or museum can’t hope to accomplish,” Lowenstein said.

For his lecture, Lowenstein said he’ll screen a clip from a documentary for which he was interviewed on the impact of horror film: 2000’s “The American Nightmare,” directed by Adam Simon. The clip includes footage from a number of films Lowenstein will discuss, such as George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Lowenstein will also do an introduction and Q-and-A for a special screening of Romero’s film at the Chautauqua Cinema at 9:30 p.m. Thursday.

Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” provides an excellent example of the depth that horror films can have, Lowenstein said, and it’s central to his argument of why horror films matter.

“That’s the central question of my talk,” Lowenstein said. “I’m hoping to encourage the audience to think with me about how and why films that aren’t always taken seriously (have) something to say about the times and the politics and the ways that we live (and) are actually worth thinking about more seriously and contemplating more reflectively.”

Horror films give people a way to relate to fears they might not experience in their everyday lives, Lowenstein said, and they provide people with “more latitude and more courage to look at ourselves and our world.”

“I think that’s a very important social and aesthetic function that films serve,” Lowenstein said. “In that sense, I really think we have things to learn about our society and ourselves from film and from horror films in particular — things we may not even know that we need to learn.”

As an expert on horror films, Lowenstein said he gets a certain question a lot: What’s the scariest movie?

It’s not an easy question to answer, he said.

“One of the things that I appreciate about the art of horror films is that there are so many different kinds of horror films that can scare you so many different kinds of ways and over so many different periods of your life,” Lowenstein said.

The way people’s relationship to film changes should be seen as a feature of the medium, not a flaw, Lowenstein said, which makes it difficult to pin down just one movie as the scariest.

“It changes over time, and I think we should see that as an impressive thing about the way film works, rather than a limitation,” Lowenstein said.

The movies that scared Lowenstein as a child aren’t necessarily the ones that scare him the most now, he said. Becoming a husband and a parent has opened him up to a variety of fears that may have seemed “quite alien” to him as a child.

While his tastes and sensibilities have developed over the years, Lowenstein said if he had to choose one horror film that stands the test of time, it would be 1974’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” He said there’s much more gore in the film’s title than there is in the film itself, and that’s what makes it terrifying.

“Its terror is not about showing us bloody images; it’s about suggesting that the world we’re watching and the world we live in is not as safe or as stable as we hoped and believed it would be,” Lowenstein said. “And that just shakes you up so profoundly that it’s hard to leave the experience behind in the movie theater.”

Lowenstein said that’s what he hopes people will take away from his lecture: the sense that horror films can have profound messages that are directly connected to “our social lives and our cultural thinking.”

“And when someone mentions the phrase ‘horror film’ or ‘horror movie,’ I hope the reaction that people have coming out of my lecture might be different than it was coming into it,” Lowenstein said.

A good song is a good song.

“I think anyone can agree on that,” Bob Ferreira said. “If it’s lyrically relevant and it catches you melodically, it doesn’t matter if it was written in 1923 or 2017.”

Ferreira is a member of the Four Freshmen, the vocal quartet that will perform at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday in the Amphitheater, in a concert sponsored in part by Donna and Stewart Kohl.

Ferreira said that he and his bandmates are going to give the audience at Chautauqua everything they can — music from the Four Freshmen’s earliest days, as well as some brand new material.

“We’re bringing back some of the old stuff,” Ferreira said. “And we’re going to be doing some brand new stuff, too: recent recordings and some of our brand-new arrangements. We’re going to run the gamut of the whole 69-year career of this group.”

The vocal group was founded in 1948 and has continued to perform and tour since then, with members changing over the decades. Built on big band sound and jazz harmonies, Ferreira said the Freshmen work from the Great American Songbook while introducing new sounds.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Ferreira said. “We still maintain the Freshmen sound and tradition, but we still bring new songs and new arrangements and new albums. It’s wonderful to be able to do that.”

Ferreira joined the Freshmen in 1992 when the group was looking for replacements. His teacher, Kirk Marcy — then a member of the Freshmen — recommended Ferreira.

“He recommended me, I auditioned, and the next thing you know, I was moving to Las Vegas,” Ferreira said. “I would always joke and say I was going to try it out for a year or two, and if the road didn’t suit me, I’d go back to school and finish my teaching degree. And Aug. 1, just a few days ago, marked 25 years I’ve been with the group.”

The other members of the current iteration of the Freshmen include Stein Malvey, Tommy Boynton and Jonathan Gaines, who joined in 2013, 2015 and 2017, respectively. While Ferreira has seniority in the group, he said their performances are always a partnership — everyone works together and gets a moment to shine.

Ferreira said he loves working with bandmates who are committed to their talents and making their music sound great.

“Just being able to trust in others doing their jobs and making their music the way it should be is probably one of the biggest parts of being a successful leader,” Ferreira said. “At least, that’s what I hope — and I’m finding it to be true. I couldn’t be happier with the sound of this group right now and the effort that these guys are putting in.”

That sound is a nostalgic one — one that harkens back to the Freshmen’s 1940s roots. Ferreira said it’s a type of music that evokes memories, and that’s what he’s come to appreciate the most in his time touring and performing with the Freshmen.

“We’ll sing a song, and I’ll see a guy kind of perk his ears up and put his arm around his lady right next to him, like, ‘Yeah, remember this song?’ ” Ferreira said. “I love those moments. Those are the kinds of things over the years that I’ve grown to appreciate more and more. That’s the impact that this music has.”

Ferreira said it’s easy to take music for granted sometimes, but the connection it has with memory is important. And it’s central to what he hopes the Four Freshmen do with their performances.

“We’re bringing back memories,” Ferreira said. “That’s a responsibility in itself. So I love that — being able to do that and then hearing people’s stories after the show about what this music means to them.”

Ferreira said whether the audience at Chautauqua is familiar with the Freshmen or not, he hopes they leave the concert feeling like they had a good time.

“If they walk away with a smile on their face, if we brought back some memories and maybe created some new ones, that’s all I could hope for,” Ferreira said. “I just want everyone to have a good time, because we have a great time onstage. We’re having a blast, and we hope everyone wants to join in on it.”