The Chautauquan Daily

Dust off your tuba or your tenor sax — Uncle Weintraub wants you! The Chautauqua Community Band welcomes all instrumentalists for its Independence Day concert, which takes place at 12:15 p.m. today on Bestor Plaza. Director Jason Weintraub started the all-inclusive group 21 years ago. It has grown from a few dozen members into a group of more than 70 people of all ages and experience levels.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson will be the chaplain for Week Two at Chautauqua. He will preach today through Friday at the 9:15 a.m. worship service in the Amphitheater. Today, his theme is “God Bless America: Be Careful What You Pray for!”; Tuesday is “Religion and Politics: A Controversial Brew”; Wednesday is “Give me your tired, your poor: ‘Who is My Neighbor?’”; Thursday is “From ‘More’ to ‘Enough’: Moral Economics in the Me-First World”; Friday is “Putting the ‘Common’ Back into the “Common Good”: Critiquing the American Dream.”

There are two Jerusalems, according to James Carroll’s book Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World. At 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, Carroll will begin the second week of the Interfaith Lecture Series with a lecture called “City on a Hill: Jerusalem in the American Imagination.”

Government decision-making can be difficult, especially in an age characterized by perpetual change. For Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, American society faces many challenges, few more pressing than the need for constants.

SLIDESHOW: Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers

Sister Carol Keehan might be one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, but she’s not bragging about it. “Lady Gaga, a couple of dictators — I have to tell you, it is not the communion of saints,” she joked. “It’s not that I’m not grateful to Time, but it’s much nicer to have the Cross for the Church and the (Pontiff) from Pope Benedict.”

The writers-in-residence for Week Two will help writers channel the dead in their poetry and push their fiction characters into danger. Poet-in-residence Andrew Mulvania and prose writer-in-residence Toni Jensen will lead workshops throughout the week, and both will give readings of their work at 3:30 p.m. Sunday on the front porch of Alumni Hall.

When Paul Farmer spoke to a crowded Amphitheater audience earlier this week about global health efforts in Haiti and Rwanda, one audience member was right there in Rwanda with him. When Melissa Driver Beard, executive director and CEO of Engineering World Health, came to Chautauqua’s “Global Health and Development as Foreign Policy” week, she had two goals in mind.

The American Legion Band of the Tonawandas, Post 264, will perform at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in the Amphitheater. The award-winning concert band, established in 1929, draws its membership from various musicians in western New York. “(Chautauquans will) get a chance to hear a band that is a special band, really,” said Jim Scott, personnel manager and 50-year member of the band. “We have a handful of professional musicians, and we have some good band music that you’re never going to hear from any other band at Chautauqua.”

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church in the United States, will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday worship service. Jefferts Schori will also speak on her faith journey at the 5 p.m. Sunday Vespers Service at the Hall of Philosophy. Her sermon title is “Applied Ethics: Government and the Search for the Common Good.” Her text is Deuteronomy 10:17–21.

Guest Review Such the wonder of a new way of being in the world: the proposals that remake our visions, rare celebrations like the turn toward abstraction in art during the last century. Humankind at its best suggests new worldviews — that our ground is round instead of flat, for instance, and it is a shared amazement, like the suggestion that a star is at the center of things rather than us. And with these understandings, we are transformed.

Brian Mertes, well-known theater and television director, looks at things differently than traditional directors. This might be evident to audience members who come to see the Chautauqua Theater Company’s 2011 Season production of “Three Sisters” that Mertes is directing. The play, which takes place in a provincial town in Russia, follows the search for meaning and happiness in life by three sisters — Irina, Olga and Masha — as they long to go back to their hometown of Moscow.

Maybe you think you understood it and could even situate it within the dance vocabulary of traditional poses, moves, couplings. Perhaps that charge of Sarah Hayes Watson onto the Amphitheater stage seemed like a violation by some primal creature. Maybe you felt comfortable with that association.

When pianist John Milbauer first came to the School of Music in 1989, he was on the verge of giving up music forever. Playing the piano was a physical struggle. He was frustrated with the technical aspect of the piano, and he just didn’t have the right teacher — until Chautauqua changed all that.

Daily file photo. Guest conductor Mester, violinist Gomyo open CSO season Lauren Hutchison | Staff Writer Jorge Mester When the members of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra reunite after their 10-month break, they will also welcome

David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of “NOW” on PBS, is a self-described “wiseacre.” But he is also described in the 2000 Kirkus review of his book, Squandering Aimlessly, as providing “surprisingly shrewd instruction and sound financial advice, all embedded in appealing reportage.”