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If audience members agreed with something the Rev. John C. Welch said, he wanted them to respond with a bold “Amen!”

Several shouts of affirmation were heard from in and outside the pillars of the Hall of Philosophy during Welch’s Monday lecture, “Unprotected Lives: Fear, Anxiety and the Racial Undercurrents Undermining Police and Community Relations,” the first in Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety.”

As the chief chaplain at City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, Welch is supposed to be “present but not intrusive” to the community of officers. In fact, he must be invited to minister. But in both this position and his position as the dean of students and vice president for student services and community engagement at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Welch must be on the lookout.

“I try to make it a point to let our students see how I carry out my practical ministry and how it is important to be able to exegete the community,” Welch said, “how it’s important to be able to understand the temperature and the pressure and what’s happening in the world around us, particularly if you’re going to become pastors. Because only then can you effectively meet the needs, can you effectively minister to those who are hurting, not just in your respective congregation, but also those who live around the church where you serve. Too often, unfortunately, there’s a disconnect between those who are sitting in the pews and those who are parking across the street.”

But for people of color, racial profiling makes driving down a street, let alone parking, difficult.

“Most of us African Americans develop a sense — and I’ll speak for myself — that if I’m at an intersection, if I’m (in) a situation and particularly if this is at night … and I see a cop out of the corner of my eyes, I’m going to watch that cop through my rearview mirror,” Welch said. “Because too many times, my predictions have come true: that they will come up behind me with their lights on and pull me over and ask me for identification.”

Even in his quiet, bookish moments, officers still assumed the worst of Welch. After a night at Barnes & Noble drinking coffee, Welch exited the bookstore and made his way to his car, making note of a police officer in the parking lot. Immediately after seeing the car, Welch knew this man would be following him that night.

Right as Welch was pulling into his driveway, the policeman stopped him, as he predicted, and asked him for his identification and if he had been drinking — “just coffee,” Welch responded. Additionally, after seeing that his ID was from Pennsylvania, the officer asked him what he was doing in Illinois.

It’s not only in traffic stops that discrimination by the police occurs. Welch said the hiring practices of the Pittsburgh police are unbalanced as well. Qualified black men and women are often overlooked in favor of white men and women related to current officers.

“I’m an individual that if I see something that is not right, I’m going to speak out against it and I’m going to speak out about it, even if it’s unpopular or politically incorrect,” Welch said.

Such is the next situation he referred to — an incident that began with a 911 call on the eve of Palm Sunday in 2009. Two Pittsburgh officers who were wrapping up their morning shift and responded to the call, only to be met at the home in question with a white man and a high-power rifle. One officer was still functioning well enough after being shot to radio in “officer down.”

When a black police officer heard of the trouble, he dropped his daughter off at their home around the corner from the scene and made his way there. Almost immediately, the black officer was shot in the leg, immobilized and, since responding officers could not tell where the shots were coming from, the black officer bled out and died. An estimated 10,000 people came to the funerals of these three officers.

In the shooting’s aftermath, Welch hoped that officers saw there wasn’t so much difference between themselves and chaplains like him.

“Both of us are called to protect and to serve,” he said. “Both of us take an oath. Both of us are only called upon when we’re needed — it’s only a wedding or a funeral, something like that. And both of us are vilified if we do something wrong. I wanted them to understand that in that similarity, they are ministers with a badge, just like I’m a minister with a collar and a cross.”

There’s a certain tension Welch feels in trying to serve both police departments and congregations. But he said he does not tolerate nonsense in either one. That said, it’s important to him that people know of the anxiety law enforcement and minorities alike encounter.

Despite the preparedness training police receive, they are still susceptible to emotional trauma, specifically the feeling of constantly being on alert, leading often to anxiety.

Officers, when considering 2017’s current number of 75 deaths among law enforcement nationwide, remain in a state of “hypervigilance” — what Welch describes as a biological state in which “alertness of surroundings are elevated,” a perpetual anticipation of threats.

Due to this 24/7 apprehension, Welch said, the officer suicide rate is three times the national average. And this rate, Welch said, is small compared to the number of severed spousal and parental relationships.

“As officers lose one family, they gain another family that wear blue, and they protect each other behind the blue wall,” he said. “Police officers are trained to be cynical, and unfortunately this high degree of cynicism erodes into their private lives.”

Although officers receive a mental health screening prior to their service, once they are in the field, they are not often examined until after an incident.

Along with the tensions of the present, Welch said, we must address those of the past. He referenced instances where black people — Rodney King in Los Angeles, Jonny Gammage in Pittsburgh — were not only stopped, but also assaulted or killed by police. Gammage’s death was one incident that led to the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police operating under federal consent decree in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

“It is my humble opinion: In addition to the prevailing dismissal of the institutional racism in this country, the law enforcement in general has not divested itself of the 300-year-old ethos,” Welch said.

Black people are 2.5 times more likely than white people to be shot and killed by the police, according to a Washington Post analysis. Welch’s youngest son, with this statistic in mind, said, “I guess I have to start wearing my driver’s license on my chest.” An officer might assume he is reaching for a weapon rather than ID.

“African-American parents, in addition to telling our children that reading is fundamental, and that you need to watch both ways when you cross the street,” he said, “when they turn 16 and they get their driver’s license, we have to teach them the protocols on how to deal with police encounters: Be respectful, always keep your hands visible, comply, comply, comply.”

A study by the Associated Press NORC-Center for Public Affairs Research showed that while 73 percent of black people declare police violence a “very or extremely serious problem,” 51 percent of Hispanics and 20 percent of white people do.

“The creation of and the effective use of inclusionary zoning policies, where low income and the affluent, where blacks, Latinos, Asians and Hispanics can cohabitate,” Welch said, “where their children can learn together in the same classrooms and families can worship together in houses or in churches and mosques and temples and synagogues — these are the things that can help shape a better perspective.”

Ultimately, the “ugly grip” racism has on the nation can only be loosened by looking to divinity.

“Mean-spirited intentions have spiritual roots, and until we get at those roots, the lynching tree will never die,” he said.

Welch said “faith communities are not immune to the emotional reflux when the subject of race is presented.” But one Sunday, he was asked to preach in three services at an all-white Presbyterian church and was met with some opposition to his ideas.

“Presbyterians are known as being the ‘frozen chosen,’ but I don’t believe that’s the reason why I got a chilly response to my sermon,” Welch said.

Despite this pushback, he said Pittsburgh is still making strides toward understanding — for example, providing opportunities for one-on-one conversation between officers and community residents. In these times, he said, white people must be willing to acknowledge their lens of privilege, and black people must be willing to share their experiences, biases and all.

“But there are risks,” Welch said. “The risk is that blacks will abruptly disengage and will not trust the process if they feel that bearing themselves will only leave them further harmed. The other risk is that whites will give the appearance that they understand privilege, but only allow themselves to examine it superficially or subdurally and not in the core of their spirit.”

In conclusion, Welch encouraged mental health initiatives for law enforcement (because “a healthy officer is a trusted officer”) and interfaith examination of any implicit biases.

“This will, in turn, move us toward building integrated communities,” he said, “where love is embraced and hatred not tolerated, where stress is reduced and where fear is managed.”

For someone speaking about fear, Dame Stella Rimington actually hasn’t had a lot of firsthand exposure to the topic.

“I feel quite uncomfortable about this theme of fear in many ways because … it’s not an emotion I feel very much,” Rimington said.

But what she lacks in personal experience, she makes up for in professional insight. As a former director general of MI5, Rimington’s purview covered a wide array of intelligence initiatives: transparency, counter subversion and counter espionage, to name a few.

Perhaps most relevant to her lecture at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday in the Amphitheater, though, will be her past counter-terrorism work. As part of Week Seven: “The Nature of Fear,” Rimington brings to Chautauqua Institution the knowledge of years spent working to stop those who seek to weaponize fear.

“ISIS’s motive is to dominate the world, basically; they have very ambitious intentions,” Rimington said. “And I suppose they may feel — though they would be wrong in feeling that — that if they can generate enough fear, the West and their (other) opponents would all crumble and it would make it easier for them to dominate the world.”

Whether the fear that such terrorism instills in people is an appropriate response, though, is another question.

“I think it’s probably important to recognize that we are living in a period where a lot of people are afraid about what’s going on in the world,” Rimington said. “So it’s probably a good idea to sort of air some of the things that people might be afraid of, which is what I’m going to be talking about, in order to analyze them and consider whether we actually need to be afraid.”

And fear is only one piece of the puzzle. Rimington also identified terrorist recruitment efforts as a major motivation of attacks.

“Modern means of communication, et cetera, make it comparatively easy for terrorist organizations to recruit young people who are disaffected for various reasons, and governments have not so far been very good at countering those recruitment efforts, and I think they need to get a lot better at it,” Rimington said. “But it’s not easy, and it’s going to take quite a long time.”

Having in the past called the post-9/11 war on terror a “huge overreaction,” Rimington emphasized that counter-terrorist efforts cannot be made at the expense of other democratic ideals. Yet at the same time, governments have a role to play in preventing terror threats.

“It’s the responsibility of governments to remember that there is a balance that has to be always maintained between a government’s responsibility to protect its citizens and its citizens’ rights to their civil liberties,” Rimington said. “And that balance has to be maintained in democracy, and that’s one of the most difficult things, in many ways, for governments to achieve because there’s always pressure after horrendous incidents for more and more regulation, more and more methods of resisting such things.

“But it’s an important thing for governments to achieve that balance,” she added.

Although she discussed the nuances of that security/liberty balance in broad terms, Rimington noted that “fear isn’t universal”; the way one country deals with terrorism might not be the same way another does.

And being British, she had her own take on the nature of fear as it relates to national identity.

“The British are not naturally given to fear — we’re a rather phlegmatic country, and we don’t find ourselves generating a great deal of fear after a horrendous terrorist attack,” Rimington said. “In this country, we just tend to get on with it. ‘Keep calm and carry on’ is one of the slogans which you often see, and I do think that it’s actually a fair representation of the attitude of most people in this country.”

If fear isn’t a useful response, though, then what is?

“A stiff upper lip is a much more sensible reaction to these sorts of things; one has to assess what’s going on and try and work out the most sensible way of dealing with it,” Rimington said. “I don’t think fear, which implies sort of sitting in a corner shaking, is ever a sensible reaction to anything.”

Knowing how best to react to fear has been a big part of her professional career.

Rimington became the director general of MI5 in 1992 — the first woman to do so. Her rise was accompanied by an unprecedented degree of transparency in the intelligence community, as prompted by the changing geopolitics of the time.

“It was effectively the end of the Cold War, and people, certainly in (the U.K.), had always associated our intelligence services with the Cold War or with preventing spying, and people were beginning to say we didn’t need intelligence services anymore because the Cold War was over,” Rimington said. “So we knew that we were needed even more because of the increase in terrorism, which was beginning at that time … (and) I thought it was important to explain what particularly a domestic security service has to do in a democracy, in order to explain why we were still needed.”

That need to validate the intelligence communities’ continued relevance led to shifts in MI5’s degree of openness, with personal implications for Rimington herself.

“I was the first head of any of our intelligence services whose name was made public when I was appointed,” Rimington said. “And that wasn’t my decision, actually, that was a decision of government because they too thought that it was about time to be more open about these things.”

But as the British intelligence community changed, so too did its enemies. Terrorism, which had previously been a largely domestic matter, was going global.

“The IRA (Irish Republican Army) was a highly structured terrorist group, with, you know, members and headquarters and all kinds of things which intelligence services are very good at getting into, at understanding and exploiting,” Rimington said. “I think that the trouble with the international terrorist scene at the moment is that it is not like that, and this is in fact quite difficult to infiltrate it and to get sources within it, et cetera.”

Rimington left MI5 in 1996, so recent shifts in the nature of terror and terrorism have been more a matter of observation than occupation for her.

She still has a hand in intelligence work, though, albeit through a much different avenue.

“(I) write thrillers now,” Rimington said. “I’ve written nine and I’m just working on the 10th, (about) a female MI5 officer who could or couldn’t have been me.”

The appeal is as much about education as it is about entertainment.

“(Readers) like to feel, I think even through fiction, that they are getting some kind of insight into how the secret world works,” she said. “And I think that’s the attraction of spy stories of all kinds, really, is that people feel that they’re learning something about how things are done.”

As Americans have turned away from Christianity in seeking meaning in their lives, people in the Middle East have continued to hold fast to Islam.

This is because Islam is fundamentally different, said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. Hamid will discuss this idea during his lecture, “Islam and Identity: How Religion Provides a Common Language in an Age of Anxiety,” at 2 p.m. Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy.

Hamid will also explain how Islam influences insecurity in the Middle East as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series’ Week Seven theme, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety.”

“We just automatically assume that as history progresses, religion should play less of an overtly political role,” Hamid said. “I think that assumption, which is a very modern assumption, needs to be challenged.”

Hamid’s observations are based in the idea that humanity is living in an age of insecurity. As liberalism grows, so does the belief that we should prioritize individual happiness and autonomy. Hamid said this in itself is fine, but then it becomes increasingly challenging to define a collective identity.

People have begun to try to fill this hole in civil life with identity politics, which Hamid will discuss during his lecture Wednesday. This has become contentious because of the many different ways people define identity and meaning, Hamid said, which can be seen in the last election in the United States.

“It was a question of what you thought America was and what you thought America should be,” Hamid said.

While people in the United States have turned away from Christianity to find these answers — President Donald Trump being the most nonreligious president yet, he said — Hamid’s research has shown that the Middle East is making Islam its defining identity.

“Even if you’re not particularly practicing, there’s still this sense that Islam is a good thing,” Hamid said. “Islam is something that people want in their lives.”

Hamid has been studying Islam’s effects on the Middle East since 9/11, which happened right after he began his freshman year of college. He called the attack a “double tragedy” because he felt pain as an American, but also as a Muslim who didn’t understand how people could commit such atrocities in the name of Islam.

He became a leading scholar of the topic with the publication of his most recent book, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs. He talks about much of these observations in the book, and says that they can help explain the rise of Islamist parties in the Middle East.

In response to their anxiety, people across the Middle East want to bring Islam back into politics and into public, daily life, Hamid said. However, new problems crop up because if someone is not part of the majority, he said, they feel their very identity is threatened, not just their political beliefs.

Now, in his writings for The Atlantic, Hamid has been advocating for stronger democratic processes to maintain peace. People must learn to coexist and accept that some identities may dominate now, but won’t necessarily forever. Otherwise, he said, systems may face collapse.

“That’s what democracy ultimately is. It’s a way to coexist peacefully,” Hamid said. “It’s sort of war by other means.”

Can music paint a picture?

The question, expressed in different ways, concerns the age-old debate over whether music does and can mean anything definite. Critics, program annotators, professional musicians and even composers themselves can’t seem to agree.

Felix Mendelssohn said music isn’t too vague for words, “but rather too definite.” Aaron Copland famously told the story of a concertgoer who, after seeing a performance of “Appalachian Spring,” told him she could see the rolling hills of Appalachia and hear spring in the music. But Copland penned the whole score with only the drab working title “Ballet for Martha” as inspiration.

“How close should the intelligent music lover wish to come to pinning a definite meaning to any particular work?” Copland asks in his book, What to Listen for in Music. “No closer than a general concept, I should say.”

Yet composers love to drop visual hints across the tops of their scores, with titles like “Fountains of Rome” and “The Hebrides” and “Godzilla Eats Las Vegas!” (a cheeky farewell to Sin City for wind band by Eric Whitacre). Musicians often talk about sounds in terms of their “color”: a section of double basses sounds dark, while a chorus of muted trumpets sounds bright.

At 8:15 p.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will welcome guest conductor Daniel Boico and cello soloist Harriet Krijgh to present a diverse palette of orchestral images and colors, starting with Ottorino Respighi’s “Trittico botticelliano.”

“Trittico” is Respighi’s attempt to express three paintings by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli in musical form.

Each of the three movements corresponds to a different painting. The triptych is conceptually and musically very similar to Respighi’s Roman trilogy, his most famous work.

The first movement, inspired by a large panel called “Primavera” (“Spring”), begins with florid trills and brass fanfares that sound almost identical to the opening of “Pines of Rome.”

“(Respighi’s) use of color is quite stunning and you can see that in all of his pieces,” Boico said. “This is what I love about him.”

According to Boico, Respighi tends to be eclipsed in the minds of music lovers by another exemplar of imaginative orchestration, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose treatise on the craft is the standard text for student composers at conservatories and music departments everywhere.

“I would say Respighi is way better than Rimsky-Korsakov,” Boico said. “I find him much more imaginative in his orchestration, in his ways of connecting sounds.”

According to Boico, Respighi wasn’t afraid to go against what he heard in other composers’ music.

“He had to imagine this according to his memories of other composers’ sounds,” Boico said. “I’m sure he heard all of Rimsky-Korsakov’s stuff and said, ‘OK, that’s what it sounds like, but I think I’ll go this other route.’ ”

Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose “Symphonic Dances” will close out Tuesday’s program, was among those who took notice of Respighi’s skill. Rachmaninoff gave Respighi permission to orchestrate five of his “Études-tableaux” at the urging of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky.

“Rachmaninoff didn’t have any problem orchestrating his own works, but he said to Respighi, ‘Sure, go for it,’” Boico said. “For Rachmaninoff to believe Respighi can do justice to his own piano works in the orchestral realm is fantastic.”

The “Symphonic Dances” are the last pieces of music Rachmaninoff ever wrote. Boico said that like Respighi, Rachmaninoff was a master of imagining fresh orchestral colors.

“Rachmaninoff was a pianist, but pianists talk as if they hear the music symphonically,” Boico said. “They can imagine an orchestra playing these notes that are being played on the piano.”

Both Respighi and Rachmaninoff lived well into the 20th century, yet their musical styles and tastes remained decidedly old-fashioned.

“Respighi has a harmonic language that’s typical for Romantic composers who were stuck in the turn of the 20th century and were searching for new paths but chose to remain tonal,” Boico said.

When he’s conducting, Boico considers it essential to have some sort of mental image or scenario to help guide the music.

“I can decide on certain emotions and atmospheres, and all of that contributes to the musicality of it all,” Boico said.

But as far as deriving meaning from the music, Boico leaves that up to the listener.

“It doesn’t have to be right. It can be super individual,” Boico said. “But it’s something we are able to do and it makes me happy.”

There’s no favorite performance or audience for storyteller David Gonzalez. He stopped keeping track once he realized he had performed 5,000 times.

“I love it all,” Gonzalez said. “I’ve been doing this professionally for 35 years, and the joy is in the connection of whoever is there.”

Gonzalez will connect with Chautauquans when he performs his show “Cuentos: Tales from the Latino World” at 5 and 7 p.m. Tuesday in Smith Wilkes Hall as part of the Family Entertainment Series. Storytelling is for all ages, Gonzalez said, although there is something special about being a child’s first theatrical experience.

“That’s a tremendous privilege and honor; it’s very precious,” he said.

While Gonzalez is a native of the Bronx, his family hails from Cuba and Puerto Rico. “Cuentos” is a collection of stories — some from his own life, some that were told to him, and some that he read in anthologies of Caribbean folk literature. The performance will include audience interaction, comedy, guitar music and song, and “quite a bit of Spanish.”

“It’s a very active, bilingual, participatory show with a lot of humor,” Gonzalez said.

A professional storyteller, poet, playwright, musician and public speaker, Gonzalez came to performing by way of music therapy, for which he earned a doctorate from New York University.

While working with children whom he described as having emotional troubles and learning disabilities, Gonzalez encountered the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell. In turn, Gonzalez began to incorporate stories into his work with children.

“I found that it enriched not only my relationships with them, but the whole creative space around us, and I found great joy and pleasure in telling stories,” Gonzalez said.

It wasn’t until his mid-20s that Gonzalez met a professional storyteller, and he began accompanying her as a musician. Eventually, he became confident enough to perform as a storyteller himself.

The move toward storytelling created a rich career beyond his “wildest dreams,” Gonzalez said. In 2010, the Joseph Campbell Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to honoring and continuing Campbell’s vision, named Gonzalez their fellow of the year.

Other career highlights include being nominated for a 2006 Drama Desk Award for his production of The Frog Bride at Broadway’s New Victory Theater; taking his Sleeping Beauty on a national tour and to the Kennedy Center; and being a featured performer at the National Storytelling Festival. Also a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, he has performed internationally.

Human beings are “storytelling creatures,” Gonzalez said, and a professional storyteller can “hone that innate ability to a very fine level.” Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg are among the storytellers Gonzalez counts as inspirations for their crafted solo performances.

“Our craft requires us to be excellent communicators, and our craft requires us to probe into the meaning of what does it mean to be a human being,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez sees himself as “an artist who entertains and who educates.” What he is not is an actor, although there are similarities. Theater and storytelling are “like different shades of the same color,” he said, with storytelling being more text-oriented.

“When a great storyteller is performing, it really creates another world before our eyes and ears, so it’s transporting in the same exact way that great theater can be,” Gonzalez said.

Fairy tales, myths, historical stories and personal recollections all provide source material for Gonzalez, who described his inspirations as “eclectic.” Not too long ago, he even did a piece about the environment, drawing upon verbatim interviews and performance poetry.

Gonzalez said he loves to have fun and “share imagination,” and is looking forward to performing at Chautauqua for the first time.

“Being a storyteller, you’re very much aware of the audience; there’s no fourth wall,” Gonzalez said. “We’re very present with whomever is there, and in a place like Chautauqua, where there’s a cultivated audience, where there’s a sense of community and shared values, I will feel that and I will be able to ride on the strength of that intelligence and that love.”

Shaun King fights every day.

Using social media, his position as senior justice writer at New York Daily News, and his role as a political commentator for “The Young Turks,” King remains at the forefront of the battle for racial equality; for an end to what he identifies as the injustice of racial profiling and police brutality.

“We are currently in what I call a dip in the quality of humanity,” King said in a speech at the College of the Holy Cross earlier this year.

At 10:45 a.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater, King, a leading activist within the Black Lives Matter movement, will present a lecture to Chautauquans that shares his insights on and experiences with racial realities in America and the fear of the “other” that drives hate, bigotry and extremism.

“Shaun King, both as an activist and a journalist with a keen understanding of social media’s impact, has become a uniquely powerful voice on civil rights and social justice issues in this country,” said Matt Ewalt, associate director of education and Youth Services.

King, 37, is no stranger to these realities himself. He has been at the center of a number of inquiries into his own racial identity.

Born and raised in Kentucky, King’s birth certificate allegedly identifies both his mother and father as white, a fact that news media outlets such as Breitbart News and The Daily Beast have seized on in an attempt to, according to King, discredit the work he is doing to increase social awareness of racial inequality.

“This attack isn’t about me so much, but is about derailing Black Lives Matter and the movement against police brutality,” King said in a 2015 Twitter exchange with CNN’s Don Lemon.

King, for as long as he could, abstained from engaging in any sort of back and forth about what he described as his “private past and pain.”

That past has been used “as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America,” King wrote in a 2015 blog post on the Daily Kos.

Eventually, and not without embarrassment, King did address his racial identity.

“I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man,” King wrote in his Daily Kos post.

King wrote in that blog that by the time he’d reached middle school, he identified himself “not even as biracial, but just as black.” This self-identification was not without its consequences in the small town of Versailles, Kentucky, where King lived.

At the end of the school year in 1995, King was the victim of what he described in his Daily Kos post as a racially motivated mob attack in which “nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides, then, when I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds.”

It was that moment that King said changed the trajectory of his life.

During recovery, he became a Christian, preached sermons as a teenage minister and enrolled in Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta. King graduated from Morehouse in 2002 and spent time as a teacher, speaker, pastor and social activist, starting sites like TwitChange.com and HopeMob.org.

In 2015, he was named senior justice writer at the New York Daily News, where he focuses on social justice, race relations and police brutality. Which is exactly what he wants to focus on.

“My work has never been about me and I’ve never made a big deal about my race,” King wrote for the Daily Kos. “I’ve actually tried hard to avoid ever making a big deal out of it and have, instead, simply tried to do good work that matters.”

In doing so, King shares some ideas with a guest lecturer from last week, W. Kamau Bell.

In his discussion with Kelly Carlin on Thursday, Bell said that those in the audience, by virtue of being able to come to a place like Chautauqua, have “won life.” Bell encouraged the audience to stop being a “bunch of Clark Kents pretending not to be Superman.”

“ … it’s time to cape up, and get out there, and save the world,” Bell said.

King’s own attitudes are not dissimilar.

On his website, King writes that “it’s not enough to be just a little bit better. In fact, that’s never been enough. We must each ask ourselves, ‘what’s my best contribution to this world today?’ ”

Aiming at that lull he’s noticed in the quality of humanity, King reiterated this call in his speech at the College of the Holy Cross.

“Find the issue that motivates you and that you’re dedicated to and then go for it. It will take that motivation and that dedication to get us out of the dip,” King said.

The key to reducing anxiety is not less stress and more yoga, but rather liberating the human spirit.

This liberation can be found, according to Artemis Joukowsky III, in serving others and the community. Joukowsky will be discussing this idea, and how he developed it, during his lecture, “The Liberation of the Human Spirit,” at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Hall of Philosophy. Speaking as part of Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety,” he will discuss how he has found meaning in his life.

“The biggest ego is not the one who gets the most attention or takes the most from others, but it is the one that gives the most love,” Joukowsky said.

Joukowsky was born into a legacy of caring for others, although he didn’t realize it until he was a teenager. His grandparents are Waitstill and Martha Sharp, an American minister and his wife, who helped save hundreds of endangered Jews and refugees fleeing the Nazi occupation across Europe. Joukowsky said his grandparents viewed serving others as the most natural extension of their humanity.

In an attempt to honor that selflessness, Joukowsky partnered with director Ken Burns to create the acclaimed PBS documentary “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War.” Joukowsky said he didn’t just create a film about what his grandparents did, but more about what they stood for, which he will talk about Tuesday.

Joukowsky said his grandfather used the term “liberation of the human spirit” a lot in his own writings as a minister.

“He believed that every person needed to be liberated in their own way, not with one dogma or one view of reality, but with their own view of themselves at the center,” Joukowsky said.

In his own life, Joukowsky has worked to honor his grandparents’ legacy. He works on refugee issues, as seen in another film he co-produced, HBO’s “Cries From Syria.”

Joukowsky is also trying to make a difference on an issue that hits closer to home. He has dedicated the last few years to raising money for a cure for spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA. That effort has led to a drug, Spinraza, which has been hailed as a miracle.

When he was diagnosed with the disease at age 14, Joukowsky said it was something that gave him deep anxiety and insecurity. At the time, though, his grandmother told him that, instead of feeling sorry for himself, he should put his effort into giving to others because that is when you receive the most.

Part of Joukowsky’s lecture Tuesday will address both his disease and his faith, Unitarian Universalism, and how they have both guided him to do good for others as his grandmother advised.

“Most of us live our lives day in and day out,” Joukowsky said. “And what I think the Unitarians invite you to do is to see the liberation of the human spirit as all of the things, if you were not afraid of failing, that you would try to do for others or for the world.”

Chautauquans can hear their favorite operas like never before as the Music School Festival Orchestra and Voice Program students join together to perform opera scenes.

At 8:15 p.m. Monday in the Amphitheater, Voice Program Chair Marlena Malas said the audience will hear bits and pieces of the operas they’ve grown to love over the years.

While the varied song selection is an additional perk for the audience, it’s not the main reason Malas chose to do a program of opera scenes this year as opposed to the full-length opera the voice students have performed with the MSFO in the past.

“I wanted everyone, as much as possible, to have the experience of singing in a big space with an orchestra,” Malas said. “(It’s) an educational experience.”

It’s not only a learning experience for the singers. According to MSFO Music Director Timothy Muffitt, the young instrumentalists are learning by performing with their vocalist colleagues. Although the MSFO has been playing in the Amphitheater all season long, this is the first time they will be joined by voice students, which changes the playing experience. Just as the MSFO needed to play differently when they performed with the Chautauqua Festival Dancers in Week Five, the orchestra will have to adjust to accommodate for the vocalists.

Performing with the vocalists helps the instrumentalists in two ways, Muffitt said. Firstly, it offers the students the chance to hone in on the skills needed for accompanying vocalists. But Muffitt said playing with vocalists is not new for most of the musicians in the MSFO. He said that “for players of this high skill level,” the collaboration is not about learning how to play with singers but rather about enhancing their artistic growth.

“The more instrumentalists have the opportunity to work with singers, the more they translate that form of expression into their own instrumental playing,” Muffitt said. “The human voice is the original musical instrument. It’s at the foundation of everything that we do.”

Muffitt said that working with vocalists helps orchestral players learn to “translate the black and white ink on the page into human, musical expression.” Since singing is a more natural way of making music, Muffitt said that by playing with vocalists, the instrumentalists learn to approach their own playing in the same way.

The opera scenes program also exposes the MSFO to composers they might not have otherwise explored.

“If they’re going to play (Giacomo) Puccini, it’s going to be here,” Muffitt said.

Monday’s performance will feature 13 pieces. In addition to Puccini’s La Rondine, the students will perform works by Giuseppe Verdi, Georges Bizet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Gioachino Rossini, Richard Strauss, Gustave Charpentier, Gaetano Donizetti and Leonard Bernstein.

Performing scenes isn’t the only change to this year’s performance. The new Amphitheater offers its own set of challenges and adjustments to the performance. As opposed to the old Amphitheater, where everyone was on the stage together or the orchestra sat on the raked floor, the new Amp has a pit.

As with any new program, Malas said everyone is feeling a mix of excitement and fear, but the students are “responding to the (challenge) beautifully.” Malas said she’s seen the students develop over the course of the season, both as vocalists and professionals. She said the level of camaraderie among them is remarkable. When the students are not performing in recitals, they often attend them to support their friends and colleagues.

“There’s no judgment in the air,” Malas said. “You can feel the love and support, it’s terrific. It has created a family with these kids. It’s quite wonderful to see.”

Perhaps no relationship in the United States has been as tense and divisive in the past few years as the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement.

The result of these tensions has been pervasive anxiety among both people of color and police officers, according to the Rev. John Welch, dean of students and vice president for student services and community engagement at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He also serves as chief chaplain at City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.

Welch will talk about this anxiety and how to calm it during his lecture, “Unprotected Lives: Fear, Anxiety and the Racial Undercurrents Undermining Police & Community Relations.” The lecture at 2 p.m. Monday in Hall of Philosophy will kick off Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety.”

“The racial dynamics in this country – which has really never been appropriately addressed, historically — is really part of the underpinnings of why we have these tensions between communities and law enforcement,” Welch said.

Welch, who has been actively working toward racial justice in the Pittsburgh area, said he will discuss in the lecture how tension between the two groups has historical roots. Law enforcement has its origins in catching runaway slaves, he explained, and the country has never truly recognized the injustices committed against African-Americans.

There are other additional sources of anxiety for communities of color, Welch said, stemming from a lack of stability. He has seen these issues firsthand as a member of numerous boards and advisory committees, and said the main issues are changes in housing and pervasive violence. Law enforcement wants to police that violence, but they are not getting to the root of the issues.

“There is a lack of trust in the community toward law enforcement, just as there is lack of trust in law enforcement toward the community,” Welch said.

This two-way lack of communication hurts the ability to move beyond the contention, Welch said. He explained that both sides need to recognize the other’s trauma and issues. As chief chaplain for the Pittsburgh police since 2008, Welch has seen how the strains and unpredictability of police work affects cops.

“Anytime they leave their homes, there’s no guarantee they’re going to return,” Welch said. “And there’s no prediction of what they are going to face on any given day.”

Welch said that, on a board for police and community relations that the district attorney organized, they didn’t develop solid relationships and agreements for two years. His goal, on boards like these, is to promote interfaith dialogue and to move beyond dialogue into action. He said religion needs to play a more active role in solving these issues in the years to come, which he will talk about Monday.

Although there is a long way to go, Welch said he will talk about the ways that the country can move forward and help heal this divide.

Welch said numerous recent studies have show that the most effective way for creating trust between law enforcement and communities is not just cracking down on crime, but rather using a “psychologically based, legitimacy-based approach when looking at procedural justice.” He has also seen mindfulness and meditation used to calm down and focus police officers.

“There is fear on both sides, and coming to terms with that is important,” Welch said.

If you don’t know JACK, here’s your chance.

At 4 p.m. Monday in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall, the JACK Quartet will present an eclectic program of modern and contemporary works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, John Luther Adams, Iannis Xenakis and others as part of the Logan Chamber Music Series.

The string quartet was originally named by combining the four first initials of its founding members. The acronym doesn’t really work now, as violinist Austin Wulliman and cellist Jay Campbell joined violinist Christopher Otto and violist John Pickford Richards last year.

JACK is turning 10 years old, and it’s continuing to tackle repertoire that is either too dry or too terrifying for the myriad other classical chamber groups on the scene. Seeger’s String Quartet is a good example.

“She’s a really interesting figure in American musical history,” Wulliman said.

Seeger was born at the turn of the century in rural Ohio. Her Methodist upbringing had all the trappings of small-town, Midwestern Americana. Yet her music, with its gnarly, expressionist flair, stands toe-to-toe with pieces by big-city — and, typically, male — composers.

“Her music proved to be very influential on a lot of composers that followed in the U.S., although her name doesn’t ring as loudly as, say, Aaron Copland’s,” Wulliman said.

The string quartet has become Seeger’s most well-known work, partially because of its conceptual tightness and cohesiveness.

“It has a really clear concept to it,” Wulliman said. “The first movement is really about duos within the quartet, where one person is playing really expressively while another is playing really roughly at the same time. The second movement is a really offbeat, accented scherzo.”

The quartet’s fourth movement is a remarkable musical palindrome in which the players converge at a central axis halfway through the movement, and then perform the same music backward (albeit a half step higher) until the end.

“A lot of groups don’t program Xenakis and Seeger,” Wulliman said. “Those are really challenging works. But in the context of a well-balanced program, those works can speak to audiences.”

While JACK performs 20th-century music that has historically represented a special level of intellectual rigor, they believe a successful performance doesn’t need to be dry and lifeless.

“We try to bring a real virtuosic interpretation to those works, not just an abstract ‘playing the notes’ kind of interpretation,” Wulliman said.

JACK also tries to strike a balance between difficult, thorny pieces and more easily digestible works.

“John Luther Adams’ music is very triadic and consonant,” Wulliman said. “We’ve also worked with composers like Caroline Shaw who straddle that line between the popular and the classical in a really interesting way.”

Shaw famously won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 at the age of 30. She is the youngest recipient of the prize and also one of a handful of female composers to earn the honor.

In addition to programming lesser-known 20th-century masterworks, the quartet makes a point of replenishing its 21st-century repertoire by participating in festivals and visiting universities to work with up-and-coming composers.

“We have these intensive periods where we try out pieces and sometimes those pieces don’t happen again, and sometimes they happen many, many more times,” Wulliman said. “That experimentation where we don’t know what the outcome is going to be is part of what makes us a little different.”

Sometimes, the outcome is less than ideal.

“There’s the ‘piles of quarter tones’ approach that happens sometimes,” Wulliman said. “Sometimes young graduate student composers want to prove they can write a lot of notes and haven’t thought through exactly how it all sounds.”

But when the group finds a new piece that really works, Wulliman said the feeling of introducing it to an audience for the first time is incomparable.

“It’s why I chose to move into performing almost all contemporary and 20th-century music,” Wulliman said. “It’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of effort that has an incredible result.”

New York Times best-selling author Dan Ariely’s mission in life is to figure out when humans make decisions outside of their best interest, what causes them to do so and how they can fix it.

Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, will explore how some emotions dictate our decisions at 10:45 a.m. Monday in the Amphitheater, when he dives into the emotion of fear.

His path to exploring humanity’s decision-making process started from a dark place.

After being caught in an explosion when he was 18, Ariely spent three years in the hospital recovering from third-degree burns. He didn’t agree with how the nurses handled his treatment: specifically, how fast they changed his bandages in his daily bathing, which caused him severe pain.

Once recovered, Ariely researched other ways to handle burn victims, finding better treatment methods. However, he doesn’t blame the nurses for going with their gut.

“The nurses weren’t doing it because they were evil; they just had the wrong gut intuition,” Ariely said. “There’s many times in life where we base decisions on our gut and what we think is correct, but we don’t actually know.”

Ariely said people often make irrational decisions because we go with our gut and let our emotions take over.

One of the most powerful emotions is fear.

When Ariely thinks of fear, he pictures a snake. According to Ariely, a bird is born with a cell in their brain that tells them that snakes are dangerous, meaning they don’t learn to avoid snakes, it’s just instinct.   

“Their brain reacts when they see snakes and it gets them to run away,” Ariely said. “Fear is this incredibly basic reaction that tells you something is negative and to either run away or do something about it.”

Ariely’s main fascination with fear is how it takes over our thinking.

“We don’t feel fear and think at the same time,” Ariely said. “It’s an automated response we’ve acquired to deal with our world.”

Of course, Ariely said, the fact that  we’ve been programmed to act in a certain way doesn’t make it correct or rational.

To demonstrate this, Ariely will talk about the case of Jessica McClure, who captured the nation’s attention in the late ’80s when, as a baby, she fell down a well and was stuck there for 58 hours until rescuers could pull her out.

Ariely said that the amount of money and gifts sent to “Baby Jessica” showed how emotions can tamper with rational thinking.   

“It was wonderful in many ways, but we also have to recognize that by the time she was out of the well, she was out,” Ariely said. “She didn’t need all that money or media coverage. CNN spent more time on ‘Baby Jessica’ than they did on the conflict in Darfur.”

Ariely also sees irrational thinking in our fears, particularly terrorism.

“It’s disproportional to the amount of damage it creates,” Ariely said. “After 9/11, people were afraid of flying, so they reverted to driving. More people died because they started driving than the people who were on those planes. Eventually, driving is much more dangerous.”

But Ariely understands why people think this way.

“Terrorism has this element of somebody being out to hurt you; it’s completely out of your control and it’s a very frightening thought,” Ariely said. “With driving, you get behind the wheel and think you’re in control, but at any moment, someone can just bang into you.”

Ariely understands some of these forms of thinking can’t be changed, but he hopes the audience learns how fear and other emotions factor into our decision-making.

“It’s interesting that emotions being evoked determines our actions to a large degree,” Ariely said. “I want people to understand emotions in a better way and how they get us to behave for better or worse.”    

Forget about going out with a bang.

Instead, the Chautauqua Opera Company is capping its season with some pops … Opera Pops, that is.

“I’ve been here for 22 summers, and the audience longs for it,” said Teddy Kern. “A lot of this music is their music, familiar to them like their bones, their skin.”

The music that Kern, a guest instructor and choreographer with Chautauqua Opera, is referring to is a repertoire of musical theater tunes. Performing selections from such well-known productions as Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady and Oklahoma!, Chautauqua Opera’s Apprentice Artists will join the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra at 8:15 p.m. Saturday on the Amphitheater stage to present their final performance of the season, the Opera Pops Concert.

Carol Rausch, Chautauqua Opera’s music administrator and chorus master, was one of the parties integral in choosing the selections to be performed. Much like Kern, she thinks the event is a tremendous way for Chautauqua Opera to close its season.

“I think going out with music theater is a great feel,” Rausch said. “People can really connect with the material.”

But as is so important to Chautauqua Opera, the concert isn’t just about making sure the audience has a fantastic time. It’s also an opportunity for the Apprentice Artists to continue to learn and develop professionally.

In fact, the chance to perform musical theater — a genre that, according to stage director Andy Gale, is approached a bit differently than opera — is a chance for those artists to better prepare themselves for their professional futures.

Gale said classical singers need to know how to sing “popular music” for several reasons, one being that opera companies will occasionally perform musicals.

Rausch concurred, saying that if a well-known company like the Lyric Opera of Chicago decides to do a Rodgers & Hammerstein series, a singer better know musical theater.

“In today’s market, you really should be able to do this,” she said. “It’s as simple as the more versatile you are, the greater chance (you have) of being hired.”

The second reason Gale feels performing musical theater is important for classical singers is that it inherently influences and affects how they approach operatic roles.

Whereas classical training can establish parameters inside which performers feel they must stay, musical theater, by its very nature, affords a bit more freedom of interpretation. Even though it can be difficult for classically trained performers to make this artistic transition, the results when they do, Rausch said, are nothing but beneficial.

“After time in musical theater, they bring that freedom and all that kind of connecting so easily with the material on a vocal and physical level, they bring that to opera,” she said.

In Saturday’s performance, part of that freedom includes Kern’s choreography. While the Apprentice Artists won’t be “dancing all over the stage,” Rausch said, there will be touches of the Broadway style to which musical theater is so closely akin. And which Rausch absolutely loves.

It is this love that was part of what made picking the selections for the concert such a joy for Rausch. The other part was the Week Six theme, to which she and the rest of the music staff tried to adhere.

“Comedy and the Human Condition,” could mean a million different things, Rausch said. She stayed in touch with Gale, as well as her colleagues on the music staff, throughout the process in a collaborative effort she said was “free and loose, like the material.”

The resulting program doesn’t hit on every single human condition, but what they did land on is ripe for the picking when it comes to comedy.

“We mostly picked (songs about) falling in love, or out of love, or relationships,” Rausch said.

With selections like “To Keep My Love Alive” (from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee), “Marry the Man Today” (from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls) and “Send in the Clowns” (from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music), the Apprentice Artists will deliver a program that Rausch and Gale both agree is a lot of fun.

In fact, Gale feels they could have kept going. And going. And going.

“We could have done six concerts and still not have done all the songs that might have fit that theme,” he said.

There’s always next year, of course. But for this year, Rausch was focused on the things that matter to her most.

“I want to make sure every (Apprentice Artist) gets to shine as equitably as I can make it, and I want everybody in the audience to have a good time with it,” she said.

Whether accompanied by a bang or a pop, Chautauqua Opera’s 2017 season will absolutely close with an awful lot of smiles and even more laughs.

A band, Glenn Miller once famously quipped, “ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.”

His eponymous orchestra had personality and style to spare; in short, “he was doing something new,” said Nick Hilscher, current band director of the orchestra. “If you heard it played on the jukebox, you knew it was Glenn. It definitely did have a sound all its own.”

Miller created a distinct reed arrangement — adding in a fifth saxophone and having a clarinet lead the melody line resulted in a “special sound,” Hilscher said, and it’s a sound that endures.

It has endured wars, shifting cultural trends and even Miller’s own death, and it’s a legacy and tradition that continue to this day, when the Glenn Miller Orchestra takes the Amphitheater stage at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

In fact, Hilscher said, the band’s makeup is “the same as what it was when Glenn stood in front of it,” and barring a few weeklong breaks here and there, the orchestra has been touring nonstop since 1956.

There’s a key distinction between “Glenn Miller and His Orchestra” and the “Glenn Miller Orchestra” —  namely, Miller himself.

Miller started his band in 1938, creating that distinctive sound and becoming, essentially, the defining big band of the swing era. Leading up to World War II, the band experienced incredible success — 1940 alone saw 31 Top 10 hits and a record eight No. 1 songs; Miller’s hits included “In the Mood,” “Moonlight Serenade,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Tuxedo Junction” and “Little Brown Jug.”

“He was The Beatles of his day,” Hilscher said. “It was so popular, and it’s still in the minds of many fans, not just in America but throughout the world. It was great music.”

But in 1942, Miller joined the war effort. Too old for the draft, he convinced the U.S. Army to accept him so he could, according to the Glenn Miller Birthplace Society, “be placed in charge of a modernized Army band.” Miller disbanded his civilian orchestra and played with several outfits before forming the 50-piece Army Air Forces Band, which, according to historian Jeffrey C. Benton, gave 800 performances in England during the summer of 1944.

“America means freedom,” Miller said in a radio interview that summer, “and there’s no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music.”

Hilscher thinks he had plans to reconvene the band after World War II, but Miller never came home; on Dec. 15, 1944, his plane disappeared over the English Channel.

His widow, Helen, accepted a posthumously awarded Bronze Star Medal on his behalf.

“Major Miller, through excellent judgment and professional skill, conspicuously blended the abilities of the outstanding musicians, comprising the group, into a harmonious orchestra whose noteworthy contribution to the morale of the armed forces has been little less than sensational,” the citation read.

Helen Miller authorized the re-formation of her husband’s civilian orchestra, and several iterations of the “ghost band” followed until 1956, when Miller’s principal drummer in the Army Air Force Band, Ray McKinley, took the reins. McKinley’s Glenn Miller Orchestra — the same band Hilscher now leads —  appeared at Chautauqua Institution in 1964.

“There is a line that is drawn all the way from (Miller’s) original civilian band,” Hilscher said.

Hilscher said Sunday’s performance will continue that throughline all the way back to the original orchestra. The afternoon will include solo and group vocals from Hilscher, Maria Schafer and other members of the orchestra, along with “the major hits that Glenn was known for, and some things that aren’t as well known. We’ll provide a real variety throughout the afternoon.”

Hearing Miller’s work performed, Hilscher said, means that his music is kept fresh in the minds of an audience.

“It’s so exciting to hear that presented live,” he said. “The band just keeps going; we’re still having an impact.”

“The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectable way.” –

—La Comédie humaine by Honoré de Balzac, 1900 translation

Internationally recognized trial lawyer Thomas Ajamie has made a career of prying the shield of respectability from trusted bankers and financial advisers who are, in fact, corrupt. For more than 30 years, he has taken on high-profile, complex and often controversial commercial litigation and arbitration, as well as employment and estate litigation, and cross-border disputes. He also regularly provided legal analyses to television news outlets such as ABC, CNN, CNBC, NPR and BBC.

As Chautauqua Institution’s weekly theme transitions from comedy to fear, Ajamie will speak at 3 p.m. Saturday in the Hall of Philosophy on “Protecting Your Wealth From Financial Serial Killers.”

“Anyone who is handling money has a very important obligation and duty to handle it with care,” Ajamie said.

“Anyone who mishandles it should fear me. I work with attorney generals’ offices around the country and help put them in jail. If you’re on my radar, I think you should fear me.”

Ajamie LLP, the small firm that he founded in Houston in 1997 and expanded to New York in 2011, was selected as the Houston Super Bowl Host Committee’s outside counsel for this year’s game. Although this legal work covers 10 days of celebrity-filled events and activities preceding it and the follow-up financial accounting, the commercial cases Ajamie LLP typically tackles are more consequential.

“One that made the front page of The New York Times (in January 2013) was the case I brought against Wells Fargo,” Ajamie said. “It was controversial because nobody could believe the Beverly Hills branch would scam people.”

In response to a call from a wealthy family, he discovered that some of the bank’s financial advisers were pulling money out of profitable client accounts and putting it into their own accounts.

“Then it was a year or two ago that Wells Fargo was found to have falsified two million accounts,“ Ajamie said. “We had seen this being done, right out in the open, and we were clearly vindicated. It makes me proud that we took on a case that controversial against the status quo, challenging a blue chip company.”

With InvestmentNews senior columnist Bruce Kelly, Ajamie co-wrote Financial Serial Killers: Inside the World of Wall Street Money Hustlers, Swindlers, and Con Men to expose examples and patterns of fraud and pathology, and to share “lessons and takeaways” one chapter at a time.

In a November 2015 interview with John Ryan of the legal media company Lawdragon, Ajamie said he wants “to try to educate the public about the many different ways that they can be scammed of their savings. The companies we represent, the wealthy individuals we represent, the pension funds — they can all afford lawyers.

“I’m especially concerned for the average person who might have a savings of $50,000 or $100,000, and falls victim to a scam,” Ajamie continued. “It’s hard for that person to find a lawyer because these are expensive cases to pursue. … You can’t take them all, and … we are literally inundated with requests for representation. That was another reason I wanted to write the book — there are not enough hours in the day for me to take every case we get a call about.”

Nevertheless, Ajamie said that he does do pro bono work. He will often take a smaller case that is not profitable.

“Our rates are very, very high because we’re good, … (but) I’ll look at it and say, ‘This is outrageous,’ ” he said.

For instance, an 80-year-old former flight attendant had entrusted her savings to a New York broker who put 100 percent of it in gold and gold stocks before the price of gold tumbled. In a short time, she had lost half of her investment.

“I got her money back for her,” Ajamie said.

Ajamie did not set out to be a fearsome trial lawyer representing victims of fraud. In Scottsdale, Arizona, where he grew up in a middle-class family, his father established a pizza delivery business. He said that as a kid, the lawyers he knew were intelligent, had a wide variety of interests and could speak about and teach many topics. For him, “law school was a long-term interest.”

First, there was college at Arizona State University, with study abroad at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Ajamie was the first in his family to attend college and earn an undergraduate degree. He focused on political science and foreign languages, and served as student body president during his junior year.

In recognition of the support he received as a student, he established the Ajamie Scholarship Fund 15 years ago. He said that once a year, while he was in school, he had to put on a suit and see his benefactors.

“I decided to do the same,” he said. “Money should not be an impediment to college; I’ll provide the resources.”

Displaying “respect and support (for) diversity initiatives in our society” is a scholarship prerequisite, as his fund is also intended to promote tolerance and equality among youth.

“I didn’t want to educate someone I thought was a bigot or racist or prejudiced,” Ajamie said. “I’d be very upset. I want students who are progressive. … When I (established) it, it was somewhat cutting-edge, or novel. The (students) have to show in their application what they’ve done to reach out to minorities, gays and others.”   

About the time Ajamie set up his scholarship fund, he became an individual supporter of the Sundance Institute.

“I’m a big fan of documentaries,” he said in the 2015 interview with Ryan. “The documentary film is another way to educate people, which in turn can change society in a positive way.”

After ASU, Ajamie went on to law school at the University of Notre Dame and spent one of his three law school years taking U.S., international and comparative law courses at Notre Dame’s program in London.

During the next 12 years, Ajamie worked at Baker Botts LLP, which he joined in 1985. As he trained in finance, he witnessed firsthand the havoc that financial fraud wreaks on innocent victims, including children, families and the elderly.

“I started as a young lawyer at 24 years old,” Ajamie said. “I went to a big law firm that defended T. Boone Pickens and (other) corporate raiders. So I got into high finance and had my eyes opened at a very high level in the 1980s. I learned the intricacies. Over time, people came to me with questions and with contracts and asked if they had been conned or scammed and whether they were losing money.”

Ajamie left Baker Botts and opened his own firm after he was directed to drop a case. His clients had lost money investing in the Canadian gold mining company Bre-X Minerals, and wanted to sue the company whose analysts had falsely issued an enthusiastic report about Bre-X — Lehman Brothers Holdings, (Financial Serial Killers includes a chapter on this “fool’s gold” fiasco.)

“I wasn’t going to abandon my clients,” Ajamie said. “The suit was successful. We found that Lehman Brothers was riddled with fraud.”

Among the numerous distinctions and honors that Ajamie has received are the following: The National Law Journal’s Top 50 “Litigation Trailblazers & Pioneers,” Chambers and Partners USA’s “Leading Lawyer in Commercial Litigation,” Benchmark Litigation’s “Litigation Star — Commercial” and Lawdragon’s “Top 100 Lawyers You Need to Know in Securities Litigation.”

Regarding Lawdragon’s list, Ajamie said he “looked at the list of the top 100 securities lawyers and there are only about six who represent clients who are investors who lost money. We’re the ones who take on the underdog.”

At Chautauqua, Ajamie said that he “will talk about monsters, scam artists and people who are trying to trick or steal money — the ‘reputable’ firms like Wells Fargo, Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase.”

“I’d like (people) to be better equipped to protect their savings, and not to be prey to fraud; to keep their money safe,” he said.

If you looked at the Rev. Robert Allan Hill’s annual report of his activities on his blog, you would think that ministry is all about the numbers.

Hill is the dean of Marsh Chapel and a professor of New Testament and pastoral theology at Boston University. In 2016 he preached 51 times, sermons that are broadcast live on WBUR in Boston to a listenership of 50,000 to 100,000. There were 21 special services, 15 guest speaking events, 918 pastoral visits (not including his daily, 45-minute walk across campus), five baptisms, five weddings, seven funerals, and oversight of six university chaplains, 25 campus ministers and 26 religious life groups. He also taught courses on the New Testament, served on doctoral committees and found time to write.

Yet, behind those numbers is a minister and preacher who dreams, hopes and works for a better world. Hill will serve as the chaplain-in-residence at Chautauqua Institution for Week Seven. His theme is “Toward a Common Hope.”

Hill will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. His sermon title is “The Sermon on the Mound.” At 5 p.m. Sunday, he will share his faith journey at Vespers in the Hall of Philosophy. He will preach at 9:15 a.m. Monday through Friday at the morning worship service in the Amphitheater. His sermon titles include “Marks of the New Age,” “Exit or Voice?,” “Sweet Chariot,” “Forgiven” and “Theological Temptations.”

His preaching is supported by funding provided by Chautauquans Gary and Willow Brost.

In May 2017, he posted excerpts from sermons he had preached in Marsh Chapel on The Huffington Post. One of them, “A Common Dream,” outlined his hopes for the world, a world where issues like climate change, nuclear proliferation, health care, hooliganism, family strife and calling in life could be resolved by the “spirit of the better angels of our nature.”

It also outlined a “dream not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.”

As dean of the Marsh Chapel, Hill preaches most Sundays in addition to overseeing all university religious life and guiding pastoral care for the communities. Hill also works with the administration, meeting with the Deans’ Council and the University Leadership Group.

According to his Boston University webpage, his “passionate interest lies at the intersection of Scripture and life, especially in the work of preaching.” His pastoral theological perspective focuses on “the special needs of the church” in the 21st century, with an emphasis on the northeastern United States. His views regarding the present condition of the church and future prospects for ministry have provided a “complementary perspective” for recent northeastern leadership of the United Methodist Church.

Hill is the author of 13 books and numerous articles, sermons and essays. He has written three collections of sermons and a book on Methodism, along with his latest book, Pastoral Preaching.

Hill has been preaching since 1976. An elder in the Upper New York Conference of the United Methodist Church, he has served in 10 local churches, various conferences and held membership on the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry.

He serves on numerous conferences and boards, including the board of visitors of Harvard Memorial Church, and the board of ministry of Harvard College. He is an active member of the Boston Ministers’ Club and the New Haven Theological Discussion Group, and attends annual and regional meetings of Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion.

A myriad of instruments, voices and genres will converge on the Amphitheater stage Friday, all in the name of acoustic collaboration.

“It feels very fluid to all of us,” said Sara Watkins, one third of the trio I’m With Her. “It’s been a really natural and fun process to dig a little deeper into some songs we’re all familiar with and learn some new ones as well.”

I’m With Her, along with the Grammy-nominated band Punch Brothers and jazz guitarist Julian Lage, will perform at 8:15 p.m. Friday as part of the American Acoustic tour, bringing together some of the best talents in bluegrass and other genres.

The tour, which kicked off last Saturday, was conceived by Punch Brothers mandolinist and “A Prairie Home Companion” host Chris Thile. The groups were inspired to collaborate again after performing together at a Kennedy Center concert last summer that Thile curated, dubbed American Acoustic.

“There was talk at that point of incorporating the kind of collaborations that happened that night and just bringing it on the road,” Watkins said. “And here we are, a little while later, it’s actually happening.”

I’m With Her, made up of singers Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan, was conceived through an impromptu performance at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado in 2014.

“We found ourselves onstage together for a workshop and truly enjoyed the collaboration and decided it was something we wanted to keep doing,” said Watkins, who also plays fiddle in the trio.

Punch Brothers, formed by Thile in 2006, is a bluegrass group that melds acoustic instruments with different genres such as jazz, classical and rock. The band also includes Chris Eldridge (guitar), Paul Kowert (bass), Noam Pikelny (banjo) and Gabe Witcher (fiddle).

Watkins and Thile aren’t new to performing together. They, along with Watkins’ brother Sean, formed the widely acclaimed bluegrass group Nickel Creek in 1989 as preteens, which went on to release six albums and win a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.

The concert will also feature Lage, a guitarist with “roots tangled up in jazz, folk, classical and country music,” according to a New York Times review. Much of the concert will involve collaboration between Lage and the two groups.

“There’ll just get to be a point in the show when everyone’s on the stage doing things,” Thile said in a video promoting the tour.

For Watkins, her music and songwriting are influenced both by her roots and current experiences, she said.

“I think everything that any of us go through and listen to, has a whole lot of influence of things we write about, things that we play,” Watkins said. “I can be influenced by everyone onstage at this tour.”

Through the tour, she and the other members of I’m With Her are working on writing new songs, after releasing tracks and recording an EP titled Little Lies.

“It’s been really enjoyable to dig in and to play through a lot of that original material that we’ve been writing,” Watkins said. “It’s just continuing to be a project, or a band, that we are all really passionate about.”