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For nearly 50 years, hundreds, even thousands of Chautauquans have gathered to celebrate a hallowed Chautauqua tradition. 

Sneakers laced tightly, water bottles in hand and a gleam of excitement in their eyes, Chautauquans young and young at heart would put toes to the starting line and wait for the signal to run, and thus would begin the annual Old First Night Run/Walk. 

Though the grounds are quiet this year, the Sports Club has made it their mission to keep the tradition of the OFN Run/Walk alive through a virtual “Around the World” Race; the race can be run from anywhere in the world. The “Around the World” virtual race has existed since 2013, always in conjunction with the physical, in-person OFN Run/Walk; for 2020, it is the sole iteration of the event.

The run is traditionally held at 8 a.m. EDT on the Saturday before Old First Night — this year, Saturday, Aug. 1 — and traces a 2.75-mile path around the perimeter of Chautauqua’s grounds. This year, participants can register for the virtual race, which can be run or walked at any point before or on Aug. 1 anywhere in the world.

“We expect to hear from hundreds who will walk, run, stroll or jog the 2.75 miles from their hometowns and other locations around the world,” said Sports Club Director Deb Lyons. “We appreciate folks sending in their pictures wearing their 2020 Virtual Run T-shirts to socialmedia@chq.org to be posted on Chautauqua’s Facebook and other social media sites.”

Registration for the race includes a special edition OFN 2020 virtual “Around the World” Race T-shirt, with proceeds benefiting the Chautauqua Fund. 

In past years, runners have come from far and wide to participate, often with family members of all ages in tow. Many Chautauquans consider it a family tradition and have been running or walking in the race since they were young children. 

The 2019 first-place runner Adam Cook told The Chautauquan Daily that he was “familiar with the course, since he has been coming to Chautauqua with his parents and grandparents for years.” 

“This is a tradition, this race,” Lyons told the Daily in 2019. “You’ll find out this race has inspired people in so many different ways. Not only do some huge families have 20 people sign up every year, but generations of families do it. People have juggled this course last year, juggling it and running it. People keep coming because it is a tradition for them.”

Chautauqua’s OFN Run/Walk course may be empty this year, but it will not be forgotten. To help runners feel as if their feet are pounding the earth in their summer home, the Sports Club has posted a video of the race course; whether the 2.75 miles are run on a treadmill, on a path through a city park, down the street in a neighborhood or even on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, participants will be able to run through the grounds in spirit. 

This event is made possible by ERA Vacation Properties and DFT Communications, Partners in Technology.

The national fight for equal rights began more than a century ago, the charge led by women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and kept afloat by individual women and men across the country who believed in equality for all. 

Carol Jenkins’ fight for equal rights began before she was even born; her grandfather, a small farmer in rural Alabama with 16 children, brought each and every one of them into the world with a belief that women are equal to men. 

His ideas, so radical at the time that he was written about in a local newspaper for sending his nine daughters to college while keeping his six sons home to run the farm, shaped the mindset that Jenkins carries with her each day. 

Jenkins said her grandfather’s unique way of thinking produced “a small army of doctors, lawyers and businesswomen, an impressive crop for a small piece of land owned by an equality-believing farmer.” 

It was her feminist grandfather who planted the revolutionary seed, and it was her own passion that caused it to grow. 

“I am a believer in equality; I do the equality work; I do it every single day, and I will do it every single day until there is an Equal Rights Amendment,” Jenkins said. “We are closer than we have ever been before.” 

Jenkins, co-president and CEO of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality presented her lecture “On the Work Toward Passage and Enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment” in keeping with the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme of “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Platform.

According to a recent ERA Coalition survey, over 90% of all Americans are in favor of the passage of the ERA. Women make up the majority of the American population, yet are disproportionately affected by gender bias and prejudice.

“Women are most of the poor in our country, the un- or under-employed or the underpaid,” Jenkins said. “Women are subjected to domestic and sexual insult, assault or aggression, and are lacking in protections and rights.”

Jenkins spoke about the approaching 20th anniversary of the deaths of Jessica Lenahan’s three daughters, who were abducted and killed by Lenahan’s estranged husband after police refused to enforce an order of protection. The case is important to Jenkins because, when Lenahan filed a lawsuit against the police department on the basis of gender discrimination, the Supreme Court ruled that she had no due process right to enforcement of her restraining order. Surpreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the police department was only required to make arrests for protective order violations at their discretion, prompting the ACLU to file a suit on behalf of Lenahan alleging gender discrimination.

Sexual discrimination often goes hand-in-hand with racial discrimination, or vice-versa, and women of color are frequently faced with the highest instances of prejudice and injustice, which Jenkins believes has only gotten worse in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The current pandemic has exposed for all to see what inequality breeds, and that it can mean the difference between life and death,” she said.

The surge of protests and activism indicates to Jenkins that the movement toward justice and equality is growing and gaining traction. 

“Given the recent throngs in the streets protesting the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as charges of racism and sexism inherent in our society, it is not surprising that many of us believe that systemic change, real change, is required in America,” Jenkins said. “To that point, there is nothing more systemic than the core legal document that dictates our rights and protections than the Constitution.”

The authors of the Constitution — the “Framers” — were wealthy white men, most of whom were slave owners. As they drew up the Constitution, the rights and protections in the document were only afforded to property-owning white men. Others — namely, women and enslaved people — were excluded.

However, the Framers, anticipating growth and transformation of the young country in years to come, included a clause which created an amendment process for the Constitution should there be a need to adjust the governing document moving forward. 

As of the year 2020, the Constitution has been amended 27 times, notably granting rights and citizenship to African-Americans and allowing women the right to vote. 

However, there is still no clause prohibiting discrimination based on sex; the Equal Rights Amendment is meant to eradicate injustice based on gender in what would be the 28th amendment to the Constitution. 

As the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 1920 19th Amendment approaches, so too does the centennial anniversary of the proposal of the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced by suffragette Alice Paul in 1923. The amendment, if ratified, would contain an explicit statement of gender equality and prohibit discrimination based on sex. 

The process for amending the Constitution is not a simple one — it requires a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress in favor of the bill, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states. In 1972, in a groundbreaking moment, two thirds of Congress voted to pass the ERA with an added provision of a seven-year time limit for it to be ratified by the required 38 states. 

Seven years passed, and only 35 states had ratified the amendment. Congress granted three more years to the time limit but still, three states were needed to finalize the process. 

“The movement for the ERA seemed to fall silent,” Jenkins said. “But there were still people working.”

Then, Jenkins said, the 2016 election sent shockwaves of indignation through the country which renewed both passion and interest in the ERA. 

“There were colossal worldwide women’s marches, the heartbreaking impact of the #MeToo movement; something was in the air,” Jenkins said. “It was the voices of women that we heard then, and soon on their lips were the letters ERA, long fallen into disrespect and forgotten by most of the country. In recent history, the ERA became alive again as a valid movement and perhaps as the thing to solve the problem of this persistent inequality of women in this country.”

In response to the swelling movement, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) created the ERA Coalition, which provided a forum for groups fighting for the ERA to work together, now representing millions of women and girls across the country and hundreds of organizations. 

Soon after its formation, the ERA Coalition won a great victory — Nevada had become the 36th state to ratify the amendment. A year later in 2018, Illinois voted to ratify the ERA, leaving only one more empty slot. 

On Jan. 27, 2020, Virginia became the 38th and final state to ratify the amendment.

“What an exhilarating moment, sitting in the chamber with women who had worked their entire lives for this, watching the mostly women of color legislators who carried that bill see it pass,” Jenkins said. “It was an incredible breakthrough for everyone doing the equality work.”

Now all they needed was an archival ratification — for the bill to be signed by the Archivist of the United States, the position which oversees the National Archives and Records Administration.

The Department of Justice ordered the bill not to be signed on the grounds that the time limit had expired, prompting three states, 52 women’s and social justice organizations and over 90 businesses to file a lawsuit compelling the archivist to sign the ERA, a fight which is still ongoing. 

Though obstacles still remain in place, Jenkins finds great inspiration in the progress toward equality made thus far, especially when it comes to her 10-year-old granddaughter — who has lobbied for the bill with Jenkins since the age of 7. 

Her granddaughter was present when Jenkins gave a speech to the night before the vote in the Virginia House of Representatives for ratification; Jenkins wanted to show her the impact of the movement. 

“I wanted her to see what courage, commitment and dedication to equality look like. I wanted her to see your faces and know that tomorrow, you will be casting a vote for her equal future in this country,” Jenkins said. “I want her to see that it was all worth it.”

Jenkins ended her lecture with a question: “How can we continue to look into our daughters and granddaughters faces and tell them that we will do nothing to raise them up in this society that has cast them as second class citizens and kept them there, when a remedy — the 28th Amendment — was at hand?” 

“The Senate and the courts demand equality for the girls and women of this country,” Jenkins concluded.

Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin’s love was forbidden. 

Amidst the politics of the Soviet Union he was born into in 1937, Joseph Stalin himself claimed the relationship was too outspoken, too unpredictable, too unconventional.

Kapustin and jazz got together anyway. 

Kapustin started playing piano when he was 7, writing his first piano sonata when he was just 13, a traditional classical composition. But he soon discovered jazz, which had been suppressed under Stalin, and developed the rest of his career as a jazz pianist, arranger and composer. He recently passed away in July 2020, leaving 161 published works behind. 

Kerry Waller, a student from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, narrowed it down to just one: the first four movements of Kapustin’s “Eight Concert Etudes,” Op. 40. 

“He loved to blur the line between classical and jazz,” Waller said. “Now, I do too.”

Waller, along with five other students from the Chautauqua School of Music Piano Program, will perform in their third recital of the season at 4 p.m. EDT on Friday, July 31, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch. Joining him are pianists Charles Berofsky, Samuel Betanzos, Rixiang Huang, Hanxiao Lai and Heemin Park.

“Etude” is French for “study,” and in classical music, Waller said piano etudes are “usually designed” as short, considerably more difficult practice material for perfecting a particular skill. 

According to Waller, Kapustin’s etudes threw guidelines “out the window.”

“Kapustin wasn’t one to stick to the status quo,” he said. “His etudes have a lot of variety to them, so there is not one area of focus to note throughout. They certainly check off the difficult category.” 

Though a variety in terms of technique, Waller said all of the etudes are “exciting in tone.” The first movement is a relaxed “sort of prologue, where the music unfolds in a friendly manner in front of you.” 

The second movement, Waller said, is an “illusion of dreaminess.” 

“The second etude has a lot of alternating, tricky notes on the right hand, which then passes the melody to the left hand,” Waller said. “But it’s also like a sandwich — both ends have that dreamy sense, while the middle is more vibrant.” 

The third is a toccata, a piece typically featuring fast-moving, lightly fingered or otherwise virtuosic passages or sections, intended to emphasize the dexterity of the performer’s fingers. Waller said the third etude is a piece “with a driving repeated note in which the motion never stops.” 

“There is a constant motion of sixteenth notes over and over and over again,” he said. “It’s like a machine that never stops going. It’s definitely a sound that is completely in your face and a bit darker than the rest.”

The last movement revisits the dreamy sound of the second etude. 

“It’s not a strong ending by any means; it fades off into nothing,” Waller said. 

Rixiang Huang, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, will honor German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Huang said Mendelssohn is an “all-time favorite,” one he has listened to since he was 3 years old. 

“I have so much love for him as a composer because I feel so connected to Mendelssohn’s music,” Huang said. “I present his work whenever I can.”

Huang will perform all three movements of Mendelssohn’s “Fantasy,” Op. 28 in F sharp minor. The three movements — ranging from “slow, moderate, and very fast” — are inspired by the 19th-century composers he worked alongside, among them Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Bruch. 

“You can hear a lot of distinct hints of Beethoven’s ‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’ because he, like Mendelssohn, also challenged the boundary of what is considered a sonata and what is considered a fantasy,” he said. “You can hear a lot of Bach in his works, too. He wasn’t afraid to learn from those around him.”

In 1829, Mendelssohn visited Scotland, where he found the inspiration for his “Scottish Symphony” at the Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh. Mendelssohn’s “Fantasy” was published shortly after in 1834 and includes characteristics of Scottish folk music in the harp-like preluding of the opening and widely spaced chords, according to Huang.  

Like Kapustin’s jazz elements, Huang said Mendelssohn’s Scottish twist on classical composition requires an “open mind” from the listener.

“This piece is one of the more major pieces by Mendelssohn and the technique shows it loud and clear,” Huang said. “The audience has to open up their imagination for this one, but I promise, it’s worth it.”

Through arpeggios, flamenco rhythms and lip trills, two Chautauqua School of Music instrumental students will conjure the imagery of Spain in their third recital of the season. 

Rebecca Salo, a french horn player from Indiana University, will perform Vitaly Buyanovsky’s “España” for solo horn.

Buyanovsky is considered one of the most influential teachers and players in the “Russian Horn School,” or Leningrad Conservatory, now known as the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Throughout his five-decade career, Buyanovsky produced several original and transcribed works for horn, including his collection “Pieces for Solo Horn,” subtitled “Four Improvisations from Travelling Impressions.” Each movement represents a different location — Scandinavia, Italy, Spain and Japan. 

Salo said Buyanovsky uses “traditional horn techniques” such as lip trills and stopped horn techniques to generate the imagery of each individual country, and sounds of clanging church bells, eccentric rhythms and an “air of flamboyance” illustrate Spain.

“When you listen to it, you can easily picture someone with a guitar in the countryside singing along with it,” Salo said. “It paints a beautiful portrait of the culture and community.”

Salo and four other students from the Chautauqua School of Music will take to the digital stage at 7 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch. Joining her is cellist Emma Osterreider and violinists Eugenia Cho, Katherine Morris and Julimar Gonzalez.

There is a lot of energy to put into it and a lot of technical elements, especially in the sense of intonation,” Gonzalez said. “It’s nerve-wracking, but once you get through it, you have the satisfaction of knowing you just finished a performance that took every part of you to complete.”

Through arpeggios, Salo said “España” makes use of flamenco guitar rhythms and phrasing. Flamenco is a form of song, dance, and instrumental music commonly associated with the Andalusian Roma of southern Spain. 

“It is wild and rambunctious, to be very straightforward,” she said. “It is so full of spunk and flavor that it’s a ride for both the performer and the audience to experience.”

Even though the piece is less than five minutes long, Salo said it is “demanding in terms of endurance.” 

“It is high in range, so it asks for a lot from the performer, like a lot of acrobatic movements to different registers,” she said. “It is quite involved, so you really have to be smart about your pacing or it gets the best of you.” 

Julimar Gonzalez, violinist from Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, will play French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, Op. 61. Composed in 1880, Saint-Saëns dedicated the concerto to Spanish composer and violinist Pablo de Sarasate, who played the solo at its premiere in January 1881. 

“Pablo, to me and many others, is still the greatest Spanish violinist of all time,” Gonzalez said. “There was seemingly nothing he couldn’t do. You can hear and see the lengths of the instrument in this piece thanks to his versatility.” 

Gonzalez will play the first of its three movements, which she said has a bold, dramatic first theme, followed by a lighter, contrasting theme. Intertwined in its Spanish notes are a handful of rapid scales, arpeggios and double stops. 

“There is a lot of fire and passion in this piece, with a hint of romanticism to it,” she said. “The hard part is to diminish that fire. There are so many moments of intensity in this piece, that you have to work to find a moment to relax the sound before you practically fall over.”

Gonzalez was working on the piece earlier in the year to enter into a competition and said she figured there was “no better time than now” to begin rehearsing and performing it again. Every time she has come back to it, however, she said it’s “harder than I remember it.” 

“There is a lot of energy to put into it and a lot of technical elements, especially in the sense of intonation,” Gonzalez said. “It’s nerve-wracking, but once you get through it, you have the satisfaction of knowing you just finished a performance that took every part of you to complete.”

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women’s constitutional right to vote.

The year 2020 is also the year in which a groundbreaking news publication, The 19th, was born, aptly named for its one of its main focal points: the intersection of gender and politics. 

Co-founder Errin Haines told the story of The 19th during her lecture, “The Role of Journalism and Media at the Intersection of Gender, Politics & Policy,” which she presented at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, July 29, on CHQ Assembly Video Platform, as part of the Week Five theme for the Chautauqua Lecture Series, “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond.” Due to technical issues, Haines’ lecture will not be reposted to the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, but will be reproduced as an episode of the Institution’s CHQ&A podcast.

During her lecture, Haines not only elaborated on the founding of The 19th but also discussed the role of journalism in the discourse surrounding race and gender in politics and elections, specifically the role played by The 19th.

“Race and gender were not just a story of the 2020 election, they’re the story of the 2020 election,” Haines said. She said the online publication began to take shape following the 2016 presidential election, the media coverage of which Haines and The 19th co-founder Emily Ramshaw found very frustrating.

“The majority of the political writers were white men,” Haines said. “We realized newsrooms needed to be more inclusive.”

With the acknowledgment of the stunning lack of diversity in newsrooms and political journalism across the country, thus began the quest to build an outlet that represented the electorate and was a safe and equitable space for women and people of color. 

Over half of the United States population identify as female — a statistic that is not paralleled in governmental offices or in newsrooms reporting on these offices. However, though female representation in office and in journalism is lacking, the representation for people of color, specifically women of color is even smaller. 

Historically, women of color have been disproportionately underrepresented at the ballots. The 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, intended to guarantee a right to vote regardless of sex, did nothing to dissolve the Jim Crow laws enforcing race-based voter suppression throughout the Southern United States for many years. This asymmetric distribution of voting rights is the reason behind the inclusion of an asterisk in The 19th’s website logo, meant to symbolize a recognition of the omission of women of color from the ballot. 

The 19th launched on Jan. 27, 2020, right in time for the Iowa caucus. Political journalists across the country were poised and ready to jump on the presidential campaign trail, which Haines referred to as “our Super Bowl.” 

Then, COVID-19 swept through the world, leaving in its wake national shutdowns and transforming the physical aspect of the 2020 campaign trail into a ghost town of solely virtual coverage. 

“It was not really the start we envisioned, but we still have an important role to play,” Haines said. “Women are disproportionately affected by the pandemic and are sitting at the intersection of so many things.”

Haines was prepared to report on the presidential race but soon realized a new topic had taken precedent. 

“The other pandemic of systemic racism reared its head with the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,” Haines said. It was at that point that she realized the need for open and extensive coverage of the intersection of politics, gender and race. “When we talked about what we produce in our newsroom, it was a vision that was very long overdue and very important in this moment.”

One unique element of The 19th is that it is free and all-access, free to reprint — making it one of the few national-scale news outlets not hidden behind a paywall.

“We are seeking to democratize journalism for the majority of the electorate; making our news free to consume and free to republish means that you have women — and especially women of marginalized communities, who may not be reading the news on paid sites — being able to access our news,” Haines said. “It is not as important to us that they know it’s The 19th’s stories as it is that they are getting our journalism.”

The hope that Haines has is that The 19th will open new avenues for political participation, specifically for those who may have felt left out of the discourse.

“We encounter so many women who want to have those conversations, but don’t necessarily have the vehicle to start them in the communities where they live,” Haines said. “We can be that bridge.”

Another unique facet of The 19th is its lack of an opinion or editorial section, something Haines said was done intentionally to avoid ostracizing those who may share different beliefs.

“We decided not to have an opinion or editorial section in order to build faith with our readership through reporting and through facts,” Haines said. “We want to encourage a community; we seek to be a home for all women regardless of their political strife. We want people to feel welcome.”

When asked by moderator Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt about the role that men play in her reporting, Haines assured viewers that no one was excluded, saying that “men are absolutely part of this conversation. Frankly, we couldn’t be covering the 2020 election if we were not covering men.”

However, she wanted to emphasize that the purpose of The 19th was to elevate the role of female journalists in an atmosphere where there is less representation, citing the fact that over two-thirds of political journalists are men. 

“Women are as qualified and capable of weighing in on our politics and of shaping the conversation around our politics as men are,” Haines said. 

“As editor-at-large, I have the role I wanted to play, not only as one of the first reporters, but also as an ambassador,” Haines said regarding her appearances on and in various news platforms, including NPR and PBS. “This is an opportunity to be among these visionaries not fixing a culture, but building a culture.”

Haines went into the creation of The 19th with a goal of creating an inclusive environment.

“You have to create the climate for women and minority journalists to thrive, to do the kind of journalism that is going to be impactful, that is going to afflict the comfortable, that is going to right wrongs and that is going to move us to a more free and fair democracy,” she said.

As the United States continues to battle COVID-19, Haines believes that political journalism is more important than ever.

“The pandemic is absolutely political,” Haines said. “With the pandemic, it is our duty to inform women of how they can safely and fully participate in this democracy.”

As the 2020 election draws closer, many issues are appearing in the forefront of the media, forcing many people who may have been previously isolated from engagement to involve themselves in politics. 

“This national reckoning has really presented an opportunity for people to learn and expand their worldview,” Haines said, calling it “very encouraging.”

One concern that Haines hopes to dispel with The 19th’s bias-avoidance publication style is the creation of yet another echo chamber where people simply surround themselves with like-minded thinkers and close themselves off to new thoughts and opinions.

“Our timelines are filled with people who think like we think,” Haines said. “We have to be more deliberate about expanding that circle.”

Haines has been inspired by the shift of race and gender issues to the forefront of public concern, and is adamant that journalism must continue to play a large role in the dissemination of factual reporting.

“This country was founded on protests and dissent and revolution,” Haines said. “Journalism has the potential to be part of that ongoing revolution in our country that helps to perfect our union.”

As systemic injustices are more widely recognized, Haines is hopeful that the dissolution of historically biased institutions and ways of thinking will allow a space to build unity.

“The important conversations that we have now are about the centennial of the suffrage movement and what voting means and who gets to participate in this democracy,” Haines said. “These are the big questions that we have an opportunity to wrestle with, hopefully with the goal of finding a new way forward together.”

Valarie Kaur has been here before.

“Here” isn’t a place, it’s a feeling; the internal struggle of working to sustain both anger and love through years framed by Donald Trump’s presidency, a pandemic and racial violence. But Kaur has been advocating for marginalized people through tumultuous times since the George W. Bush administration, and Gene Robinson, Chautauqua Institution’s Vice President of Religion, said “she has a lot of the good fight left.”

“With recent dark times, especially since Trump came into office, she poses a question about the current darkness: Is this darkness in our country the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?” Robinson said. “Meaning, is something dying or is something being born from it? I know that gets her through.”

Kaur, civil rights activist, filmmaker, lawyer and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, will deliver “See No Stranger: The Spiritual and Political Force of Revolutionary Love” at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as a part of the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Feminine Spirit.”

The Revolutionary Love Project is a production of stories, tools, curricula, conferences, films and mass mobilizations that “equip and inspire people to practice the ethic of love.” The current focus of the project is geared toward reversing racism, nationalism, and hate against Muslim, Arab, South Asian American and Sikh communities.

“I was part of this generation of Sikh advocates who had this frame that if the nation only knew who we were, then it would be enough, then it would stop this tide of hate,” Kaur told the Observer. “But knowing is not enough. We have to be agents of revolutionary love.”

Robinson met Kaur through the Auburn Seminary Senior Fellows program, aimed to connect faith leaders who are committed to “catalyzing and advancing multifaith movements.” Robinson said she was a leader in the effort to allow Sikh citizens to participate in the military while still wearing “emblems of their religion,” such as turbans.

I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as monsters in this world,” she told the Observer. “Loving our opponents is not just a moral call — it’s pragmatic, it is strategic, it is how we learn to fight in ways that don’t just resist bad actors or remove bad actors from power, but actually change the systems, institutions, and cultures in which they operate.”

“She brings so much energy and spirit to everything she advocates for,” he said. “I think people think of the feminine spirit as something soft and gentle and kind and sweet, but she has a way of describing a love ethic that is tough, hard-hitting and powerful.”

Kaur’s 2020 memoir, See No Stranger, is an account of her efforts to learn and live that “revolutionary love ethic.” Her understanding of that ethic began with her family’s American story, specifically that of her paternal grandfather, Kehar Singh. Singh came to the United States in 1913, only to be immediately imprisoned due to the country’s immigration policies. A white immigration attorney, Henry Marshall, helped with Singh’s release and Kaur credits Marshall’s kindness as the reason for her being. 

“I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as monsters in this world,” she told the Observer. “Loving our opponents is not just a moral call — it’s pragmatic, it is strategic, it is how we learn to fight in ways that don’t just resist bad actors or remove bad actors from power, but actually change the systems, institutions, and cultures in which they operate.”

Part of loving oneself is allowing a feeling of anger when others harm you. The opposite of love is not anger, but indifference, Kaur told the Observer.

“Especially as a woman of color, I was always taught to be ashamed of my rage, to suppress it down inside of me,” Kaur told the Observer. “It took me a long journey, as you read, to understand that my rage carried information, that it showed me that my body and my life were worth protecting, that I had something worth fighting for.” 

Kaur told the Observer she has found hope through the activists who clogged airports to protest Trump’s 2017 Muslim ban, to those who particpated in the 2016 and 2020 Black Lives Matter marches across the globe. With every metaphor of rage and war, she said she returns to metaphors of labor and birth, of new beginnings and a belief that something better is always on the horizon. 

“How do we show up to the fire and still breathe and push and breathe and push?” Kaur told the Observer. “It’s true love.”

This program is made possible by the Waasdorp Fund for Religious Initiatives.

Feminine spirituality, Mirabai Starr said, is a paradox in a world that prioritizes masculine energy and attitudes.

“The feminine inhabits this paradoxical space between form and formlessness, between interconnection and very specific embodied experience,” Starr said. “The masculine spirituality has emphasized this world, this body. Many of our spiritual practices, that most of us take for granted, are actually predicated on this belief in the illusory (feminine) quality of human experience.”

Starr delivered her lecture, “Fierce & Tender Wisdom: Reclaiming Women’s Voices Across Spiritual Traditions” at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 28, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Starr pre-recorded her lecture on July 19 in her Taos, New Mexico, home. Her discussion centered on her book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.

Starr is an international speaker and teacher on contemporary interspiritual dialogue and practice. Her spiritual journey began when she moved to the Lama Foundation at 14 years old and was influenced there by the late interspiritual scholar and teacher Ram Dass and other teachers from faith practices including Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism.

Chautauqua’s Director of Religion Maureen Rovegno led the subsequent Q-and-A with Starr, who called in from her publisher’s recording studio in Boulder, Colorado, where she is recording an audiobook version of Wild Mercy. Audience members submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and on Twitter with #CHQ2020. During the Q-and-A, Starr clarified that feminine spirit is not only found in the traditional definition of a woman.

“When I am speaking about feminine spirituality and the sacred feminine, I am speaking about and to the feminine in all of us,” Starr said, including men and other gender expressions.

Starr said the feminine spirituality in all faith practices deals in relationships, emotions, ambiguity and a wild creativity that threatens masculine values of human life.

“We have, for way too long, taken … the prototype for humanity, for humanness, as white maleness,” Starr said. “The white male is the picture, the prototype, for what it is to be human. It’s time to subvert that paradigm, to dismantle it, to allow it to come undone.”

Starr used meditation as an example. Masculine meditation styles “often beat us into submission” while feminine meditation could best be described through the Hindu tradition of Hridaya, or the heart cave, where a meditator looks inward into a sanctuary space where they are able to challenge and let go of false thoughts holding them back.

“Meditation practice becomes a refuge, a sanctuary, a space of refreshment and renewal, and also an intimate coming to know the nature of our own minds so that we don’t take ourselves so seriously when it really counts,” Starr said.

Starr said in Judaism, the faith she grew up in as a child, the Shabbat on Fridays is part of an extended space of celebration that allows for a return to a spiritual space that is inherently feminine.

She said Shabbat allows people “to disentangle from the tyranny of tasks that bosses us around most of the week and allows ourselves to take some time to just be, rather than do.”

Shabbat is a return to the Shekhinah, or an in-dwelling that Starr said is a feminine spirit, which is an internal source that mirrors the unknowable divine presence found everywhere. By joining with the community, people can be realigned with God. She said this was similar to a Taoism teaching which calls for rest, so a person can develop enough patience for dust to settle and to act from a space of deep listening.

This feminine energy does not equate to submissiveness, Starr said, but a powerful silence.

“It is a space that is deeply alive and listens, tuned to the realities of what is,” Starr said.

In Taoism, Tao is something that cannot be fully defined, though some of its aspects outlined in Tao Te Ching teachings can be considered as an eternal mother. It is a classic feminine paradox of both knowing and not knowing.

Starr said Judaism’s command to keep Shabbat holy is similar to Buddhism’s refuge vow, where Buddhists are invited to take refuge in learning about the life of Buddha, Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) and the Sangha, which are teachings from the community of Buddhist practitioners.

God transcends distinctions in many faiths, including Islam, though its texts and prayers primarily use masculine language to describe God. However, Starr said, the names Rahman — mercy — and Rahim — compassion — are both names of God found in all five daily prayers and the Quran.

The root found in both words, rah, means womb.

Starr has always felt drawn to many different faith traditions, but she said now she takes greater care in acknowledging their cultural origins.

“I have always felt drawn to many different faith traditions, but I do so now without the entitlement that I used to carry as a white person in this world, that I could just help myself to the cultural treasures of any tradition that I pleased,” Starr said.

Starr’s award-winning work in creative nonfiction and translations of sacred literature of mystics includes her translations of “The Dark Night of the Soul,” a poem by Saint John of the Cross, and The Interior Castle by Saint Theresa of Ávila. She first came across the two writers when studying Spanish Christian mystic literature in college.

“The Dark Night of the Soul” describes times in life when everything dries up and there is no access to a felt sacred presence, when constructs of the self and its belief systems are deconstructed. With only masculine spirituality, Starr said these moments can feel dark and cold without a feminine spiritual presence.

“‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ is about the liberation (we experience) when we’re able to let go of our sensory and conceptual attachments, to the way we think spiritual life is supposed to be, and have a naked encounter with what is, with love itself,” Starr said.

Saint Theresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle describes the soul as she saw it from a vision — as an interior crystal, a castle with many sacred spaces inside. Theresa detailed a three-part journey of Christian mystical experience: purification, illumination and union. Purification under masculine scrutiny is defined as the task of fixing oneself to be worthy of God’s love, while the feminine acknowledges the catastrophes that naturally occur in life and calls people to show up fully in those moments.

Starr herself has found that traumatic events of loss, including the death of her brother when she was 7, her boyfriend at 14, and the death of her own 14-year-old daughter in 2001 when she was 40 years old, catapulted her spirituality into a transformation each time.

“Grief empties us,” Starr said, and allows room for a person to be an instrument for peace.

All faith traditions have a feminine spirit, so they need women as teachers to light the way, Starr said. Starr said that people, regardless of what faith or faiths they call home, should seek guidance from women teachers they know and also seek out those they may not — including those who are young, old and especially women of color, who Starr said have been radically silenced in traditions around the world.

“If you can’t find them, create them,” Starr said.

In almost 40 years of working in theater production and lighting design, Michael Baumgarten has seen decades of technological evolution.

“When I started doing lighting, it was when they had the very first computer board. Before that, you had people manually moving little handles to change the lighting looks,” he said. “The next thing you had was moving lights, and all those computerized lights … and now you have LEDs, and (you’re) able to change color everywhere (in) a single moment.”

In today’s opera world, lighting isn’t the only tool at his disposal.

For this week’s Chautauqua Opera Behind-the-Scenes Series: Video and Projections, Baumgarten, Chautauqua Opera’s longtime director of production, resident lighting designer and video and projection designer, will join former General and Artistic Director Jay Lesenger in conversation with General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood. The event will air at noon EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch.

Baumgarten and Lesenger worked together at Chautauqua Opera for 20 years before Lesenger’s retirement from the position in 2015. He continues to direct operas around the country.

“We joke that we’re like brothers,” Lesenger said. “We know each other very well and we laugh at each other. … Sometimes we yell at each other, but most of the time we laugh.”

For the Behind-the-Scenes Series, they will share stories and answer audience questions, with an emphasis on Chautauqua Opera’s 2018 production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Lesenger returned to the Institution to direct the opera, with Baurgarten in charge of the production’s extensive video and projections.

“It was wonderful to work with my friends again. I love the family up there,” Lesenger said. “Candide is an extremely challenging piece, and in all of my years I was running the company it was always on my list but I didn’t take it on, because frankly, I didn’t have time with what was a very busy directing career and running the company.”

The opera follows the titular Candide on a haphazard journey around the world, featuring scenes in more than five different countries. To account for the many and diverse scene changes, Lesenger and Baumgarten decided to use a minimalist set with projected backgrounds.

“(Baumgarten), in my years, had really developed the use of video projections at Chautauqua,” Lesenger said. “That was a relatively recent addition to the design process up there.”

To give the backgrounds a cohesive and whimsical feel, Baumgarten and Lesenger modeled the backgrounds of Impressionist oil paintings.

“We didn’t want it to be realistic projections or realistic places,” Baumgarten said. “We happened on a Monet painting and we said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the end of the opera.’”

As well as compiling or designing the backgrounds, Baumgarten created animations for the projections, such as location names that move themselves off stage and even an exploding house.

“There’s a wonderful battle scene … and (Baumgarten) was able to animate it so you watch the chateau blow up and be destroyed,” Lesenger said. “It was actually very funny to look at — it was meant to be comical.”

When he’s not at Chautauqua, Baumgarten works as the director of production and resident lighting designer for Opera Carolina in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has a feeling he’ll be back at the Institution for many years to come. This summer, he’s working as director of production for the digital CHQ Assembly.

“What keeps me coming back? My wife,” he said. “She has so many friends here after 25 years that she told me I can retire from my job here in Charlotte, but I could never retire from Chautauqua.”

Fairy tales and picking flowers — both seemingly lighthearted activities on the surface, but for the third voice recital of the season, School of Music voice students are looking deeper, playing on the dark tones buried underneath.

Lucy Evans, a mezzo-soprano from Northwestern University, will perform three cycles from Benjamin Britten’s “A Charm of Lullabies,” Op. 41, including “A Cradle Song,” “A Highland Balou” and “Sephestia’s Lullaby.” The collection includes five songs based on poems by William Blake, Robert Burns, Robert Greene, Thomas Randolph and John Phillip.

“They are all settings of English and Scottish poems for children, but each is creepy in its own sense,” Evans said. “I don’t think they get performed often at all, so it’s usually something different and unexpected for any audience. They are completely underrated.”

In all three, Evans said she takes on the role of a child’s caretaker who is “either stressed or upset,” often touching on themes of death or the trials the children will face throughout their lives.  

“I am speaking on the fears I have for the child’s future, or the stress of being a single mother,” she said. “So many of the stories we tell to children, even fairy tales, have a dark side or element to them, but the way (Britten) sets the text brings it out in an unsettling way.”

Evans, joined by seven additional students from the Chautauqua School of Music Voice Program, will perform at 7 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, July 29, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch. 

Luisa Hidalgo, a soprano from the Eastman School of Music, will sing the first two selections from Richard Strauss’s “Brentano Lieder,” Op. 68, including “An die Nacht” and “Ich wollt ein Sträußlein binden.” Both were composed in 1918 for soprano and piano. Also known as “Sechs Lieder,” the collection is set to poems by German poet Clemens Brentano. 

“They are epic poems, almost like prose, but they are all slightly ambiguous,” she said. “You have to work to find your own interpretation.” 

“An die Nacht,” meaning “holy night,” is about a woman who is embarking on a “significant rite of passage,” or coming of age, Hidalgo said. 

“This song speaks in a borderline erratic, yet stirring light,” she said. “It is almost like a mini opera within itself.”

“Ich wollt ein Sträußlein binden” is a “somber story,” Hidalgo said. It begins with Hidalgo singing as herself, on her way to pick a flower in a field. In the middle of the piece, the perspective shifts, making Hidalgo the flower.

“It sounds strange, but the story I am telling as the flower is still very human,” she said. “I am basically asking this person who is about to pick me to spare my life and give me another chance.”

The song presents a “very disheartening metaphor for love,” Hidalgo said, accompanied by a satirical tone of voice. 

“It is basically alluding to this concept that love ends that way in every form, that love is eventually going to pick your heart out,” she said. 

Seyquan Mack, a tenor from the Oberlin Conservatory, will perform Henri Duparc’s “L’invitation au Voyage” and “Phidylé,” two “sorrowful selections.” Mack will begin with “L’invitation au Voyage,” composed in 1870 and a setting of two of three verses of French poet Charles Baudelaire’s poem describing his love of the countryside in Holland and the longing of a man wishing to be with his lover.  

“You can almost visualize what is happening in the piano accompaniment partnering with the vocals,” Mack said. “His compositions are so full of imagery; it’s truly a joy to experience.”

Mack said Duparc, a French composer, frequently combined the soft simplicity of art songs with dramatic operatic elements, of which “Phidylé” is a prime example. “Phidylé” was dedicated to his friend and French Romantic composer Ernest Chausson. It is a setting of a poem with the same title from French Parnassian poet Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes et poésies.

“It has a peaceful entrance, but the piece ends with a big, triumphant moment, which is something you see a lot in his music,” he said. “As a vocalist, it gives me a lot to play with.”

Jaime Sharp, a mezzo-soprano from the University of Michigan, will perform Florence Price’s “An April Day” and Brandon Spencer’s “Dream Variation.”

It has such a summery, blissful tone to it,” Sharp said. “This piece makes me just as happy to sing as it does to listen to it. Florence is one of my favorites composers of all time because she has this unmatched ability to make beautiful music that soothes the soul. I really hope it does that for the audience as well.”

The better known version of Spencer’s “Dream Variation,” is that of Margaret Bonds’ “Three Dream Portraits,” which is set to the same text from poet Langston Hughes, found in his collection The Dream Keepers and Other Poems. Spencer is a Black composer, and Sharp said the piece is distinctly written from the “perspective of the Black experience.” 

“Brandon is a good friend of mine, and we both agreed this is a piece that is important to hear from a Black singer’s standpoint,” she said. “While the sound has an upbeat tempo, the text is fairly heavy and layered.” 

The music is whimsical, as if to suggest the speaker’s desire for freedom of movement. Sharp said in its “sense of effortlessness,” Price’s “An April Day” is a contrasting work that brings a “certain lightness along with it.”

“It has such a summery, blissful tone to it,” Sharp said. “This piece makes me just as happy to sing as it does to listen to it. Florence is one of my favorites composers of all time because she has this unmatched ability to make beautiful music that soothes the soul. I really hope it does that for the audience as well.”

Equality. “Good event, bad event. Who knows?”

Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister framed each expansion of women’s legal rights with this question. While women gained new legal freedoms over time, remaining social and legal restrictions would keep the full expression of those freedoms just out of reach. 

After (white) women in the United States gained the right to vote in 1920, women wouldn’t be allowed to serve on juries until the 1970s. And after being encouraged to work in male-dominated fields during World War II, many were forced to give up these jobs when the war ended.

Chittister spoke at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, July 27, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. She discussed topics such as equality and its impacts at both national and global levels in her lecture “A Woman’s Life: A Good Event/Bad Event World.” She pre-recorded the lecture on July 24 in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she resides.

When Chittister was 14, she found three books on spirituality authored by women in her high school library, including a book of poems by an unnamed nun from Stanbrook. 

Now, after experiencing extensive discrimination as a woman in her own career as a nun and former Catholic high school teacher, Chittister is an award-winning author of 60 books and an international lecturer.

Chittister kicked off Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Feminine Spirit,” with a story about a farmer and his son. With each failure and success in his life — losing his horse, the horse returning with a horde of wild horses for the farm, a wild horse crippling his son and his son not dying in war as a result of his condition — the farmer said, “Good event, bad event. Who knows?” in response to his neighbors’ questions.

Chittister said this can also describe the constant give-and-take of women’s rights. When the Equal Pay Act of 1963 passed, companies worked around its requirements by giving men and women the same job responsibilities with a different job title and a higher wage for the man. This loophole wasn’t resolved until 2009 with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Similar roadblocks occurred with Title VIII, which opened up collegiate programs for women. As many women as men attended college by 1980, then women surpassed men in doctoral degrees by 2004.

But promotion and wage opportunities have not increased along with higher education. To this day, women reach their peak earning point at 40 years old with an average of $60,000 annually. Men in comparison peak at 65, earning $102,000 a year on average.

“Women got the jobs, but they didn’t get the money,” Chittister said.

Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women who make $7.25 per hour, a non-negotiable federal rate (though this varies by state). While working 40 hours a week at this rate, a single mom and two kids would be $8,000 short of a livable wage.

The United States is also one of the worst developed countries for women. In 2019, National Geographic ranked the United States as one of the worst countries in the developed world for women due to less political, economic and social opportunities and heightened personal, physical and psychological abuse which occurs despite legal protections.

“Men do not really respect women,” Chittister said. “We have found out they harass them. And when women get a job at the highest level, they too often find that the job depends not on their talents but on their sexualization. You don’t believe me? I wouldn’t believe me either. Why don’t you leave here and ask the Weinsteins, and the Aileses, and the Epsteins, and the Cosbys, and the media, and the number of offices we’ve had to empty because women weren’t safe six feet away from the door?”

Chittister said this is not just a problem of the working and domestic worlds of the United States, but also in the global shadow economy of human trafficking.

“Why don’t you ask the little girls on the roadsides out there now who are being trafficked for pleasure, left in poverty, used up and thrown away while we do little-to-nothing except maybe pretend that we don’t see them at all on Super Bowl Sunday?” Chittister said.

Chittister then cited a Pew Research Center poll which reported that 40% of women under 30 want to leave the United States.

“Our daughters have figured out that they are neither safe nor valued here,” Chittister said.

Chittister said that above all, women everywhere need education. Women make up two-thirds of the world’s illiterate. And women in many developing countries still need freedom over their own finances and marriages, as in choosing who they want to marry and gaining the right to divorce someone if needed. Forty-nine countries lack domestic abuse laws while women killed by a domestic partner make up 47% of homicides worldwide.

“Men kill women the way they kill animals,” Chittister said.

Chittister said that religions like Christianity — despite Genesis calling for men and women, both created in God’s image, to take responsibility for dominion over the world — that enshrine male gods and establish male values play a part in the patriarchy’s oppression of women.

“This moral sickness is a sickness of the soul,” Chittister said.

While the U.S. Constitution and subsequent amendments are supposed to protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups, Chittister said that presidential executive orders and the Supreme Court have been stripping away rights for women.

“(The) Constitution is being shredded for its lack of specificity,” Chittister said.

The federal government’s lack of respect for women is presented on a global stage by maintaining trade relationships with countries who enslave women in open contract work.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Chittister said. “We have simply allowed it to be like this.”

Chittister cited the Rule of Saint Benedict from the sixth century, which was the first document in the West to define human relationships. Written in a world defined by male authority and rule, Benedict not only defined appropriate behavior of benevolent rulers to be nonviolent, non-dominant and non-authoritarian — the antithesis of Roman men who ruled the Western world at the time — but also outlined women to have similar agency.

This document outlined eight corollaries for both men and women to follow, which throughout called for men to stop putting themselves above women, who also need to speak up for their needs.

Chittister said these attitudes can be boiled down into four behaviors that need to be happen to make space for equality and in turn, a better world: Men need to listen to women, women need to speak up for their needs, men need to stop “blustering commands” at women, and women need to be treated like fully functioning adults.

Chittister said multiple times that women should not tolerate unacceptable behavior by men in their marriages, workplaces or anywhere in the world. She ended her lecture with one last warning.

“The patience of women may be what destroys women,” she said.

American history books look at women’s suffrage as a simple story in which a civil group of suffragists asked for the vote through the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls convention, and they were given it by the United States government. But Monday morning, journalist Elaine Weiss dispelled this as a myth through a presentation on the turbulent history of the 19th Amendment. 

Weiss painted a more detailed picture of this history at 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, July 27, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, opening the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme for Week Five: “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond.”

She recounted over 70 years and three generations of women clawing their way to suffrage through strategic lobbying, public discussions, public relations campaigns, marches, picketing, and hunger strikes. These insights came from her 2018 book, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. 

Suffrage efforts began pre-Civil War among the abolitionist movement. Weiss described suffrage and abolition as “sister causes,” where most supporters of one supported the other. 

“Women fully expected that at the end of the (Civil War) they, too, would be given the right to vote — all the disenfranchised classes: Black men, Black women, white women — would be given the vote,” Weiss said. “They are sadly disappointed when they’re told after the war, that the nation can’t handle two big reforms at once. It would be another 50 years they would have to wait.”

Out of frustration, many early suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the 15th Amendment, which secured the vote for Black men, because it excluded women — and in particular, white women. They cited the fact that white women were more educated than Black men, therefore deserved the right to vote more. 

“Race would continue to vex the suffrage movement, employed by the suffragists when politically expedient, but even more by the anti-suffragists, who used race as a weapon against enfranchisement,” Weiss said.

Weiss addressed the concurrent anti-suffrage movement in her lecture as well. Many men were opposed to women’s right to vote, but so were a number of women.

“Many other of these anti-suffrage women were social and religious and cultural conservatives who feared that suffrage would bring about a profound and unhealthy shift in gender roles — it would endanger the American family, it would bring about what they called the moral collapse of a nation. It will alter private life, as well as public life, and that’s what made it so dangerous,” Weiss said. “This is an important reminder that the fight over women’s suffrage was never just a political fight. It was also a social and cultural, and for some, a moral debate about the role of women in society.”

Both male and female suffragists faced this opposition in the form of violent confrontation in the street, degrading political cartoons, and questions about their moral standing and patriotism. They reached out to the masses to sway opinion through posters, literature, public demonstrations, and public speaking. 

Here, Chautauqua played a key role in bringing women the vote. Many suffragists traveled to Chautauqua Institution, and daughter Chautauquas across the nation, to speak on suffrage.

“The suffragists had a not-so-secret weapon for, as Susan B. Anthony said, educating and agitating. … That secret weapon was Chautauqua,” Weiss said. “Chautauqua provided the perfect audience of educated, progressive, reform-minded citizens for this radical concept of women’s political equality and enfranchisement.”

Weiss pointed to the irony of this, because Chautauqua co-founder and Bishop John H. Vincent was opposed to women’s suffrage. In the early years of the Institution, women were not allowed to lecture because it was deemed inappropriate. The first woman to speak at the Institution was Frances Willard, who spoke on the temperance movement. 

A Constitutional amendment securing women’s right to vote was stuck in the federal courts for four decades, so suffragists took to the states in the meantime. Through lobbying and public relations campaigns, they won the vote for several states. But they found that many states would never budge on their conservative stance, and federal legislation was necessary.

Alice Paul emerged from Carrie Chapman Catt’s mainstream suffrage movement to try a more radical approach. She, and the members of her organization, the National Woman’s Party, made history by being the first to protest at the White House. They sported signs and flags questioning President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to give women their basic rights as citizens. These women were arrested and thrown into prison where their communication was stifled, and after a hunger strike, were force fed.

After their release, Paul and the other ex-cons traveled in a car they nicknamed the “Prison Special” to tell the story of how they, average women, were arrested and tortured for simply requesting the right to vote. 

“Alice Paul, as a radical who advocated for very controversial and very confrontational political methods, was never invited to speak at Chautauqua,” Weiss said.

Paul’s unsettling methods lit a fire under the federal government to move the 19th Amendment along. After being passed in Congress and ratified in 35 states, the fate of women’s suffrage rested in Nashville, Tennessee, as the amendment awaited the make-or-break vote by its legislation on its ratification. 

“All sides confront one another in Nashville and it gets wild — there’s bribes and booze and propaganda and blackmail conspiracies and kidnappings and fistfights. The newspapers call it suffrage Armageddon,” Weiss said. “The outcome remains in doubt, until the very last moment. I won’t spoil it for you — but it does come down to a single vote of conscience by the youngest member of the Tennessee legislature, who receives a letter from his mother.”

Once ratified, rather than retiring from political efforts, many suffragists went onto the next step for women: having representation in the government. Catt formed the League of Women Voters, and Paul wrote an early draft of the Equal Rights Amendment, which one century later has yet to be ratified. Weiss said that most suffragists expected that with the right to vote, the government would be flush with elected women. 

“I think the suffragists would be shocked and appalled that at this point, a century later, we have not chosen a woman president. Remember, most modern democracies have had a woman executive of their nation,” Weiss said. “We are very much laggard in that regard, just as we were not pioneers with women’s suffrage — we are only the 22nd nation to grant the vote to women.”

Weiss pointed out that the arguments as to why women are not fit for president are the same arguments anti-suffragists made in the late 19th century — women are too emotional, and their leadership —considered amoral — would disturb gender roles. Many of the tactics used to silence women in the #MeToo movement, Weiss said, are similar to tactics anti-suffragists used to silence suffragists. 

“(Political cartoons and public ridicule were) all to keep women from speaking out, from communicating their complaints, their sense of injustice. That’s what those anti-suffrage (efforts) were about: keeping women quiet,” Weiss said. “Of course, one of the goals of the (#MeToo) movement was to abolish that silence, to make it no longer appropriate for women to be silent. We’re 100 years later, and we’re still dealing with that.” 

But these injustices do not stop at the #MeToo movement. Recent efforts toward social justice have paralleled major moments in the suffrage movement.

“More recently, seeing the Black Lives Matter protests — I think anyone who’s dealt with the suffrage movement was given a real shiver when we saw protestors in Lafayette Park being invaded by the police, arrested and forcibly removed,” Weiss said. “All I could think of was, ‘That’s the (National) Women’s Party.’ They were in Lafayette Park as they were crossing the White House with their picket signs and they were arrested.”

Weiss stressed that while many of the social justice struggles currently echo those of the century previous, the solution may be the same.

“What has to happen now, and what did happen for suffragists, is that (public demonstration) has to be followed up by political action. You have the public awareness and how you have to harness that in very specific strategies to make change where it can actually happen,” Weiss said. “That means the political world, and convincing the corporate world in influencing our national debate. But to make real and lasting change, there has to be big use of the vote.”

Black. Indigenous. Colonized. To Lisa Sharon Harper, this is Jesus.

“People of African descent and other people who have been colonized around the world, when they read the text for themselves, irrespective of what their master told them what the text meant, they see a Brown, colonized, indigenous Jesus,” Harper said. “They see a people serially enslaved and serially colonized. There is a kinship of experience and social location with every single writer of this text.”

Harper, founder and president of Freedom Road, spoke on progressive Evangelical Christianity for Week Four’s Interfaith Friday at 2 p.m. EDT July 24 on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Chautauqua Institution’s Vice President of Religion and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson joined her in a conversation while the audience submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and through Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Robinson said the two have been friends for many years, but he had not heard Harper speak on the subject of her latest book, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. The book, which references the Book of Genesis, best fit the creation focus for this season’s Interfaith Friday series.

“When I chose this theme to bring before our Interfaith Friday presenters, I immediately thought of you because of this wonderful book,” Robinson said.

The journey to Harper’s latest book began 17 years ago on a trip across the American South with her college ministry. On a bus of 25 people and children, she retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears before retracing the African experience in the United States, from slavery to civil rights. She hoped to understand how the Biblical concept of shalom intersects with the value for racial consideration, justice and healing.

Both legs of the trip reminded her of her own family. On the Trail of Tears, she said she recalled this history’s ties to her ancestors, who most likely escaped from the trail and hid in the nearby mountains. Slavery had also pulled her ancestors apart.

“My family was enslaved in nearly every state in the South, according to DNA,” Harper said.

Considering her family roots, Harper’s mind returned to her great-great-great grandmother Leah Ballard, the last adult enslaved woman in her family. Harper asked herself if Ballard would react to the gospel as she did.

“If I were to share my understanding of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, would that good news cause her to jump and shout for joy?” Harper said. “Would it cause her to scream hallelujah?”

By the end of that summer, Harper realized that her great-grandmother had 17 children likely because she was a breeder — “her job on the plantation, for which she never got paid, was to breed money for her master,” she said. “She lost children to the slave trade. She lost children and husbands to death.”

So if she told her Grandma Ballard that God gave her a purpose and all she had to do was pray to enter heaven, would Grandma Ballard rejoice?

“When I was honest with myself, I realized the answer was no,” Harper said.

Harper said this launched a yearlong bout of depression.

“If my entire understanding of the gospel would not be received as good news by my very family, then could it be good news?” Harper said. “If my understanding of the gospel could not be good news to the ones that need it most, I came to understand that it’s actually not good enough.”

This prompted Harper to study the Book of Genesis for 13 years. Four Hebrew words in the beginning of the Bible reframed her understanding of the gospel: tov m’od (very good), tselem (icon), radah (dominion) and dmuwth (likeness).

Greeks translated the good in tov m’od as a perfection that existed inside a person or thing. But in Hebrew, it means “overwhelming goodness” between things.

“God saw everything He had made and saw that it was not just good, but very good,” Genesis 1:31 states.

Harper said that this referred to the relationship between God and humanity, men, women, all genders, systems and all of creation.

Tselem means an icon or representative figure. “Let us make humankind in our image,” but not just in kings and queens. Some Biblical scholars believe that either Moses wrote all of the Book of Genesis or that this text was written by priests fleeing Babylonian in exile.

“No matter who you think wrote this text, the context of the writing was oppression,” Harper said. “They were oppressed while they were writing this text. They were enslaved. They were — in Moses’ case — just been enslaved. And that is what moved them to write this text.

Harper said that these people had been enslaved for 70 years and still chose “radical goodness.” They could have easily said to make either the priests or Moses in our image. 

“But they didn’t,” Harper said. “Instead, they took that power and cast it out for all humanity at exactly the moment they could have grabbed it for themselves.”

The word radah has been mistranslated to dominate earth. There are eight different ways to say “dominion” in the Book of Genesis, but this one means “to tread down,” to exercise agency and ensure the wellness of relationships between all things and protect radical goodness. Harper said that to till and keep the Garden of Eden translates to serve and protect.

“That’s what dominion looks like,” Harper said. To be human is to be made in the image of God and called to serve the world.

Harper moved onto Genesis 2, the story of the two trees. One was the Tree of Life, which Adam and Eve could eat from and live forever. The other tree was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It was distinct because the eater experienced evil in relationship to the command attached to it. Planted in the center of paradise, the tree confronted Adam and Eve with the decision to conclude that humans are in need of God, must trust God and choose God’s way to peace. They were given an opportunity to trust God and choose God’s way. By eating, they experience evil.

“The evil is the very act of not trusting God, of not choosing God’s way to peace,” Harper said.

Harper said that Shalom can only be accessed through God.

“If we trust our own way, then we forfeit God’s peace.”

Human shalom, in comparison, is broken peace. Harper said this starts the blame game between men and women. It breaks the relationship between all of dominion. It begins human mortality.

“Who wants to live forever in a broken world?” Harper said.

The stories following Genesis track the breaking up of the world. War in the Bible comes in the context of colonization. On a screen behind her, Harper flipped through images of Manifest Destiny, lynchings, exploitation of Black slave labor and Asian stereotypes, Japanese internment camps in the United States, and transgender discrimination.

“(These are the) kind of discussions, conversations about how the polis will live together that remove the other, or crush the other or twist the other or hang the other or exploit the other or exclude the other or exclude any people or people group from the capacity to exercise dominion in the world,” Harper said. “What we are also doing is we are removing, we are hiding, we are exploiting, we are crushing, we are excluding the image of God on Earth.”

Harper said images of ancient kings marked where that king ruled and indicated the health and richness of a kingdom. Meanwhile, busted, fallen images of a king indicated war against the kingdom.

“What if God understands that to be a declaration of war against that kingdom, against God’s kingdom, against God’s rule?” Harper said.

Harper said this will require the coming of the kingdom of God, or moments in the world when God’s followers show up. This would look like the message in Luke 4, when Jesus explains he’s come to free the oppressed and captives. 

“Those captives would likely have been political prisoners,” Harper said. “Because the year Jesus was born, that same year, there was an attempted insurrection in northern Galilee. And more than 2,000 men and boys were crucified in one day because they attempted to rise up against those who tried to colonize them.”

The writers of the Bible look like the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. They look like Gallatians 3 and 27. And in Gallatians 29, Paul writes to his people: “As many of you who were baptized into Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer male or female. There is no longer slave or freed, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

“It is Brown, colonized, indigenous people who are writing this text,” Harper said.

Before being baptized, Harper said a person sees others through a hierarchical lens of power. But the water washes away differences and only leaves the image of God in the other.

“It means you see their inherent dignity and you see their divine call to steward this world,” Harper said.

But it takes conscious effort to operate in a God-like way when the world is not created for it.

“This world has not been crafted around this truth,” Harper said. “It has been crafted around the lie of human hierarchy.”

To actually deliver good news to her ancestor Leah Ballard, Harper now knows what she would say to her: “The king has come to confront the kingdoms of this world that are hell-bent on crushing the image of God on Earth. And Leah, this includes you.”

“That’s some good news.”

Then Harper would turn to Leah Ballard’s master and deliver the fourth Hebrew word: dmuwth, likeness. It means an image according to our likeness. Like God, but not God. 

“Oh Leah’s master, I have good news for you,” Harper would say. “You are not actually a master. You are simply human. You have the ability to come down off of the scaffolding of human hierarchy that you have built for yourself through the constructs of race and gender and all the other hierarchical categories we have given for ourselves.”

Robinson said this would be the hardest to ask the privileged to do, to give up their power.

“It was going to demand of them the very thing they didn’t want to give up,” he said.

Harper said that the principle sin for people of European descent in the United States has been to try to be God, to try to define everything and everyone.

“When those people said that my people were three-fifths of a human being, it became so according to the law,” Harper said. “Only God should be able to make that kind of (decision). And you have an opportunity to lay down your arms and join the community of the rest of creation.”

Then she laid out a thought exercise. She guided her audience to close its eyes and imagine a person who is normally hierarchically below them. She said to find their eyes,  look beyond them and find the image of God on the other side of their eyes. Then repeat: “I see the image of God in you. Let it be so.”

Harper said that repentance was the path to right past wrongs, including the assassination of George Floyd by four officers.

“To defund the police means to move funds to create actual public safety, to repent for saying, ‘This is law enforcement,’ when actually it was never created to enforce the law,” Harper said. “It was created to contain and control Black bodies and to protect the supremacy of whiteness. That is why the police were created. So we need to repent of that structure that we have allowed to exist from 1704 all the way to present.”

Harper also referenced the Bible when Jesus says “I have people you know not of” to explain how God’s people are not only the ones who know him.

“I have come to believe that it is not just believing in a set of principles,” Harper said. “Jesus is not about principles. Jesus is about God, the kingdom of God … on Earth, the image of God being set free, and I believe that no matter where we are in the world there are people who are following the Jesus way, even if they don’t know the name of Jesus.”

Just as the first days of spring swept through the grounds at Chautauqua Institution, so too did the March 16 order to close all non-essential businesses in the state of New York. 

Included in this order was the Turner Community Center, the year-round gym at Chautauqua Institution. Turner, and other recreation facilities at the Institution — including the Chautauqua Golf Club, the Chautauqua Tennis Center, Sports Club and Children’s Beach — see an influx of Chautauquans as warmer weather moves in. Only as of June 27 were all operations of the recreation pillar at the Institution up and running, albeit under new guidelines and operating procedures.

The Chautauqua Golf Club has been in operation the longest, resuming some activities in the week following the March 16 closure, followed by the opening of the Tennis Center at the end of May. Each of the operations has been able to welcome new visitors this season, something that Director of Recreation Meg Pickard finds inspiring. 

“At both the Golf Club and the Tennis Center, we have been welcoming new patrons this year. Sme trying these sports for the very first time, others revisiting a sport they haven’t had time to play in years,” Pickard said. “It’s been encouraging to watch younger generations becoming involved in greater numbers.”

Both golf and tennis have a rich history at Chautauqua, with the first lawn tennis court set up in 1878 by Chautauqua co-founder Bishop John Heyl Vincent, and the first round of golf played on July 18, 1914. Each is currently operating with new procedures and reduced capacity. The Learning Center driving range, putting greens and practice holes at the Golf Club are now open for use, along with the pro shop, restrooms and regular courses, for which social distancing guidelines are in place. The Tennis Center is also open for court use as well as limited lessons and pro shop hours. 

Though the Golf Club and Tennis Center were the first of the recreation departments to re-open, they were certainly not the last. Sports Club and Children’s Beach opened for use on June 27, offering a smattering of their usual fair. At Sports Club, kayak, paddleboard and paddleboat rentals are available, and shuffleboard courts are open. Children’s Beach is staffed with lifeguards and is open under social distancing guidelines. 

More recently, some activities have resumed at Chautauqua Health and Fitness at the Turner Community Center, including outdoor group exercise classes and limited pool operations with no more than 10 people allowed in the pool at one time. Pickard says she is unsure of when indoor fitness center activities will be able to resume, and that the Department of Recreation is relying on government guidelines to determine what will be open. 

Currently, virtual fitness videos are available to anyone who was a Chautauqua Health and Fitness member as of March 16, though Pickard hopes to expand the virtual platform to include sailing, golf and tennis videos. In addition to virtual fitness, the Old First Night Run/Walk, organized through the Sports Club, is the only other virtual programming currently available to Chautauquans.

The OFN Run/Walk, a Chautauqua tradition beloved by many, will be taking place virtually this year on Aug, 1, ensuring that Chautauquans of all ages can still participate in a cornerstone activity.

“We created a video of the Chautauqua run course so runners across the globe will feel like they are here,” Pickard said. Registration for the race includes an OFN virtual run T-shirt, and the Sports Club will be selling OFN 2020 posters. 

The transition to virtual recreation programming has been a challenging one, pushing Pickard and her associates to the limits, but they are glad to do it. “This has been an amazingly tempestuous period,” Pickard said. “This small but passionate lot of individuals makes it possible for many folks in our community to experience a bit of normalcy amongst the chaos inherent at this time.”

In February, Wendy Bryn Harmer was a few hours into an international flight when she learned her job with an opera company in Tokyo had been canceled due to COVID-19 concerns.

“(They) were just like, ‘It is what it is.’ There was no discussion of how to make something work,” she said. 

While she understands every opera company has been facing unprecedented circumstances, Harmer is glad the Young Artists of Chautauqua Opera have had a different experience.

“I really, really appreciate that Chautauqua is trying to do something to give their Young Artists an experience this summer that is going to help them, even nominally,” she said. “Most (opera) companies I know, they canceled their season and everybody went home.”

Harmer, a soprano and alumna of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists Development Program was set to star as Susan B. Anthony in Virgil Thompson’s The Mother of Us All at the Institution this year. Instead she has spent the last week working with the Young Artists as one of Chautauqua Opera’s Guest Artists.

Harmer will be joining General and Artistic Director Stephen Osgood and featured Young Artists Samina Aslam and Shafali Jalota for Cocktails, Concerts and Conversations with Chautauqua Opera at 5 p.m. EDT on Monday, July 27, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch.

Last week, Aslam and Jalota participated in a master class with Harmer.

“I was very pleasantly surprised at how well the master class worked virtually,” Harmer said. “All the voices I worked with, …, I could tell, even virtually, ‘Oh yeah, there’s something here, this is a real talent. I’m very curious to hear how this voice resonates in a hall, as opposed to their bedroom in Brooklyn.’”

Highlights of the master class will be screened during the event.

“It was really a great experience. (Harmer) just knows so much, and she’s a really kind, down-to-earth person,”Jalota said. “It was nice to work on the music in a safe space and get her feedback. She’s so honest and generous it was just really wonderful.”

Even though she couldn’t physically instruct the Young Artists, Harmer still emphasized the importance of the body, breathing and movement.

“Our instrument is our body, so she touched on that for a little bit, which I thought was really helpful,” Aslam said. “She is a really big believer that you have to warm up your body before you warm up your voice.”

At the end of the event, Aslam and Jalota will premiere their a capella pieces from Composer-in-Residence Frances Pollock and librettist Jerre Dye’s Chautauqua song cycle.

Every piece in the cycle has been composed specifically for the Young Artists, derived from interviews at the beginning of the season. The lyrics are often real lines of dialogue from these talks. In Aslam’s interview, she mentioned that yoga is an important part of her process, and Pollock incorporated that into the composition.

“My piece is actually tied to the whole idea of body awareness and breath,” she said. “So there’s actually breath written into the score for me to actually inhale and exhale.”

For Aslam, the experience of working with Pollock and Dye has been a silver lining of sorts.

“Through all of this,” she said, “through how new of a territory this is, and how unsettling (it) is for everyone, this really cool piece of art has been created for Chautauqua and for Chautauqua singers.”

All humans are susceptible to changes in mood, taste and ideology. Grandparents may listen to country one day and rock ‘n’ roll the next. Children always seem to want a new adventure. Unfortunately, these little shifts in the mind often decide people’s fates, such as with life-altering sentencing that happens in the courtroom everyday.

Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel said judges’ decisions tend to change depending on the time of day, specifically before and after they eat lunch. He also said that artificial intelligence is not only able to process more information than people, but AI is dispassionate, as well. 

“The algorithm doesn’t eat lunch, doesn’t get hungry, doesn’t get low blood sugar,” Sandel said.

Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher and bestselling author, held a conversation on “Digital Responsibility in the Tech World” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, July 24, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as the final part of Week Four’s theme of “The Ethics of Tech: Scientific, Corporate and Personal Responsibility.” This Socratic conversation, meaning one driven by asking questions, included 18 members of the Chautauqua community in a Zoom call, with Sandel asking them about their opinion of certain uses of artificial intelligence, such as with COVID-19 tracing and police surveillance.

Sandel asked the participants their opinion on using cell phone data to track cases of COVID-19; half said they would support this, and the other half said no. The latter said they are reluctant to share their personal information with someone, or something, they have no confidence in, that the information could be used for other means and that their data can be leaked.

“We all have seen the unfortunate track record of even the best-intentioned protectors of data, have been leaked,” said an opponent of using cell phone data. “I don’t have a great deal of hope that this will be any different, at some future day.”

One of the people who supported using cell phone data was a physician, and they said everything in medicine is a risk, and this specific case would be for the greater good. Another supporter said that people commonly give up certain freedoms for safety, and it is important to have as much information as possible to combat the pandemic.

“Though it’s not a terrorist attack, we’re trying to keep (the pandemic) at bay,” they said. “I think it’s really important to make sure that we have as much data as possible.”

Sandel then asked supporters of using cell phone data for contact tracing what they thought about the using this data to enforce stay-at-home orders for people who tested positive for the virus.

One said they would support that use under the current climate if a person was exposed, but in the long term it would be problematic. 

An opponent said that using this technology to enforce COVID-19 quarantines could lead to this cell phone data being applied to crimes, such as missing a child-support payment. 

Sandel then asked, with the assumption that the crime rate is reduced in places that use predictive policing measures, would they support using artificial intelligence to predict where a crime will likely occur. Eight said yes and 10 said no.

An opponent said that these AI are frequently biased because they are based on historical information.

“We’ve seen a bias against minority communities,” they said. “And so using that kind of algorithm (to predict crime) really concerns me tremendously.”

A supporter said that there are many practical issues with AI, but they support the idea in theory that the technology would find more efficient methods of policing amidst limited resources. Another said that society needs to look at police departments that are already using predictive methods, and how the community responds, in order to get the best idea of how to effectively use AI.

Sandel then asked the supporters of using AI for predictive police strategies if they would be in favor of using AI to predict whether a prisoner would commit another crime and if they should be released on parole. 

A few said that they would support using these AI in determining whether an inmate receives parole, if it was used in conjunction with other evidence.

“I think the common theme in all of the scenarios we’ve discussed has been essentially a conservative approach to implementing any of these technologies or applications,” a participant said. “I believe that governance is key in all of them, but the tricky part about governance is who’s governing what, who owns the data, who is designing the algorithms that help the public, or how accessible is that information.”

A conversation participant said that the information that the AI would have to take into account would be too complex, including how well trained the officers are, what kinds of programs the jail offers, and if the inmate has a family.

“I don’t know that it would ever be completely neutral, just because I think that’s hard to do,” they said. “I think that it all involves some sort of collaboration between the data and the people who are going to deliberate this.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, who asked Sandel if it is possible, or even necessary, to teach ethical inquiry now, compared to other moments in history.

Sandel said it is necessary and possible, and he has been striving to teach ethical inquiry to his students for a long time. He starts with where people are coming from, and then invites those who have similar or contrasting opinions into the conversation.

“We sometimes, in engaging in this kind of reflection, change our minds — either about the principles we thought we believed, or about our judgment in a particular case,” Sandel said. “Sometimes we don’t change our minds, but still learn something, learn a deeper appreciation of those with whom we disagree.”

Hill then asked what Sandel explores in his book that is coming out in the fall, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good.

Sandel said that the United States’ rise in wealth inequality and political divisiveness is partly due to meritocracy, the idea that the wealthy and the poor earned their places in society. 

“That’s the tyranny of merit. That’s what’s driven us apart. That’s what’s brought such polarized politics. So I’m trying to diagnose how we got here,” Sandel said, “then ask how we could emerge from it, however we could rein in a meritocratic hubris, and and find our way to a politics of the common good.”

On a typical summer day in Chautauqua, neighbors retreat from the sun under the covered porches of Victorian homes. There, family, friends and acquaintances talk and laugh about whatever comes to mind — nostalgic stories from the grounds, that afternoon’s lecture, or burning issues in the national news. 

But summer 2020 is not a typical summer. 

Springtime erupted with the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses, schools, and institutions had to shut their doors until further notice. In May, the Chautauqua Institution Board of Trustees, nearing its summer season with no light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, voted unanimously to cancel its in-person season and instead host its programming online. 

On top of it all, the United States faced a moment that would turn its already-shifting society upside-down. On May 25, 2020, an unarmed Black man named George Floyd was suffocated in the street by a Minneapolis police officer after his arrest for suspected forgery. Footage of this incident, marked with Floyd’s plea “I can’t breathe,” circulated the internet and painted the news. 

The Black Lives Matter movement, a movement sparked from a 2013 Facebook post, began to dedicate its work to find justice for Floyd. People who weren’t typically interested in the BLM movement were faced with the statistics that Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Floyd’s story was not one-of-a-kind. 

Erroll B. Davis Jr., president of the African American Heritage House at Chautauqua, pointed to this phenomenon. 

“When you look at the situation of the police, I think the general thinking has been that there are a few bad apples,” Davis said. “Now I think the thinking, after the George Floyd incident, is that this whole tree might be poisonous.”

Americans everywhere knew this was a trend, but the question remained: What do we do now?

Most people, after George Floyd was murdered, went inwards to themselves, in their own hearts, and their own families and their own friends groups. We thought we would follow the same path of looking inward. Look at what’s going on in your own heart, in your own head around these issues,” Rozner said. “Our mission called us to create some platform for this (conversation). If we were physically on our porches together, there would be lots of those conversations happening organically and the idea was to try to replicate that online.”

Some turned to social media, joining in on hashtags like #BlackoutTuesday in an attempt to amplify Black voices. In all 50 states, Americans took to the streets for days upon weeks of consecutive protests — Portland, at the time of this article, has surpassed 50 days of protest. 

No matter the action, everyone fighting racism had to face a degree of personal reflection. What am I doing that is racist? What can I do to be actively anti-racist? What can I do to help create a more just society?

This reflection, and these conversations inspired Shannon Rozner, the Institution’s chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives. In her eyes, Chautauqua’s staple front-porch discussions are needed now more than ever. 

“Most people, after George Floyd was murdered, went inwards to themselves, in their own hearts, and their own families and their own friends groups. We thought we would follow the same path of looking inward. Look at what’s going on in your own heart, in your own head around these issues,” Rozner said. “Our mission called us to create some platform for this (conversation). If we were physically on our porches together, there would be lots of those conversations happening organically and the idea was to try to replicate that online.”

Rozner reached out to Davis with the idea to create a dynamic, conversational platform to encourage Chautauquans to discuss racism. On July 16, they announced The Mirror Project. 

The Mirror Project has a purposefully simple construction: the Institution, in collaboration with AAHH, poses prompts to the community online as a way of sparking discussion and personal reflection. Any Chautauquan who feels compelled to share their thoughts can do so through the website, or on social media. 

“Hopefully, an individual may gain confidence to put their thoughts and vulnerabilities out online. They also may get comfort from seeing the thoughts and vulnerabilities of others,” Davis said. “We want a dialogue around the issue of racism and systemic racism, and we want people to understand history.”

Posts and comments will be monitored for major themes. The issues that commonly discussed or inquired on will be addressed. Two times throughout the season the Institution will welcome someone with experience on that particular issue to host a discussion with community-submitted questions. That first discussion is set for 3:30 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 3, and will be led by the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, former director of religion at Chautauqua Institution and senior advisor to the president and James T. and Berta R. Laney Chair in Moral Leadership at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. 

The responses to The Mirror Project will also drive what prompts are proposed. Davis and Rozner said they strived to create a democratic platform. 

“People don’t just want to be talked at. People want to take what they hear and do more with it,” Rozner said. “That is universally true across the Chautauqua experience, and we’ve been hearing that for years. We are making a concerted effort across the organization to help create opportunities for people to do more with what they learn here. This is one example.”

This project was in part inspired by the “cross-cutting imperative” of decisive action on issues of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA), as outlined in the Institution’s strategic plan, 150 Forward. Rozner said that in this case, diversity means more than demographic. Institution leadership wants to see diversity of ideas in the project. 

“There’s a concern that we won’t get a diverse set of thoughts and opinions. We really want diversity of thought here. We want it to be a dialogue and a conversation,” Rozner said. “Sometimes people see a trend and they’re afraid to say something that is sealed outside the trendline. I don’t want people to feel that fear. I want people to feel comfortable engaging from where they are in this journey.”