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Light is a part of everyone’s daily life, regardless of age, religion or location. Noah Craft sees the beauty and inspiration in this universality of light. This is what led him to enter and become a finalist in the Philips 2011 Light World Tour, a competition that allows one person with a passion for lighting to travel for three months finding new lighting inspirations.

Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent his final hour before his execution in the Hall of Philosophy. Clad in a makeshift striped prison uniform, the Rev. Al Staggs portrayed Bonhoeffer at the Interfaith Lecture at 2 p.m. Friday in his presentation, “A View from the Underside: The Legacy of One of the Spies for God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

Along with performing finished Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare productions, Chautauqua Theater Company keeps busy taking an active role in new play development. This will be evident beginning July 21 with the start of the New Play Workshop Festival.

The Athenaeum Hotel general manager kept calling, but Michele “Mickey” Murray wouldn’t return his calls. This went on for several weeks in 1993, the GM calling, Murray suspecting he wanted to offer her a job at the Institution. For her, having a summer vacation that year was more important.

The works of John Adams, Leonard Bernstein, Jonathan Dove, Benjamin Britten and Lee Hoiby, among many others, will be featured in the Opera Highlights concert, held at 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater. The performance will feature eight Apprentice Artists from the opera company’s Young Artists program and members of the CSO, under the baton of Steven Osgood.

During a summer storm in Cleveland a few years back, the conditions knocked branches from their trees — much like many storms nationwide. The result of this one was very different. Branches struck power lines, making a regular storm into something much worse. Fifty million people were left without power, some of them for days. By the end, the economies of the U.S. and Canada lost almost $10 billion.

Benjamin Elijah Mays’ earliest memory was his father pleading for his life before a lynch mob. His formative experience with race relations would affect the path of the rest of his life.

The buzz around the young conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya is that he’s in the running to succeed the departed Stefan Sanderling as the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s music director.

When David Ignatius was trying to get his first novel, Agents of Innocence, published, he found himself rejected by a dozen companies. The book started as nonfiction, but it became fictionalized as he wrote. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., finally approved the novel, but only on the basis that they wanted a nonfiction book next.

The Rev. Frank Chikane pays the salaries of his former torturers because of the influence of anti-apartheid leaders like Beyers Naudé. Chikane is the president of the Apostolic Faith Mission International and a member of the African National Congress. His 2 p.m. lecture, “Daring Death to Save a Nation,” was the third in the Week Three Interfaith Lecture Series “Spies for God.”

SLIDESHOW: Scenes of The North Carolina Dance Theatre in Residence performance with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.

The good news is that Chautauqua Theater Company is staging Anton Chekhov’s 1901 “Three Sisters,” one of the greatest plays ever written, through July 17. Further, good reports can be made of the chosen translation: by the late Slavic academic-turned-actor Paul Schmidt, it renders Chekhov’s then-contemporary idiom (the play is set in a stultifying provincial city in 1900) into plausible, listenable and unstilted American English, with only a few questionable decisions.