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Before Kent Nerburn became an author, he was a wood sculptor. He changed his career after being hired in northern Minnesota to help high school students conduct a two-year oral history project interviewing Red Lake Ojibwe elders in 1988.

“I soon realized that I was in the presence of a way of living and believing that had a depth unlike any I had experienced in my typical American way of growing up,” Nerburn said. “And it was a way that perfectly fit my hunger for a spirituality that honored the mystery and life, but did not demand exclusivity or divide people between insiders and outsiders.”

After being struck by the suppressed history and worldview the Ojibwe elders described, he has written 17 books on the Ojibwe, Lakota and Nez Perce tribes. Nerburn’s lecture, “Quiet Voices, Important Truths: Life Lessons from the Native Way,” was released at 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 12, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Nerburn recorded his lecture from his Oregon home, as part of Week Seven’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Spirituality of Us.” He reflected on his career switch and lessons he has learned from listening to and writing about Native American history, culture and spirituality.

When Nerburn was still a wood sculptor, he felt almost guilty for carving his ideas into trees. To him, it felt like he was imposing ideas onto something with a living soul. And for many Native Americans, there is a life force in trees. Nerburn said the Iroquois have carved masks from live trees so the spirit of the tree is imbued in the mask. Some tribes on the northwest coast of British Columbia carve faces in trees and then let the faces change as the tree grows.

Nerburn’s work collecting and sharing Native stories for the past 30 years isn’t done, which means he’s not done learning, either.

“There are so many stories I could tell, and so many stories I am still learning,” Nerburn said.

He first came across the work of Native philosophers and leaders while working with the Ojibwe students in 1988. He quoted Dakota philosopher Ohiyesa, also known as Charles Eastman:

“We have always preferred to believe that the spirit of God is not breathed into humans alone, but that the whole created universe shares in the immortal perfection of its maker,” Eastman wrote. “We believe that the spirit pervades all creation and that every creature possesses a soul of some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. … We see no need for the setting apart of one day and seven as a holy day. For to us, all days belong to God.”

Nerburn found his purpose in listening to and sharing the stories and lessons from Native people, opening a door for the rest of the world to learn with him from Native American perspectives and life lessons he details in his work. In his lecture, he read two sections from his book Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way.

In one section, “Stones for the Sweat: All People Should Be Made to Feel Needed,” he described a Nez Perce man’s account of his ancestor Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph. The man also described responsibilities for children and elders when he was a child. While children were tasked with braiding horse bridles, elders made community decisions based on their breadth of life experiences.

“It granted them an unassailable status and responsibility that belonged to them and no one else,” Nerburn read.

In the second section, “The Old Man in the Café: Spirit is Present in All of Creation,” Nerburn described his chance encounter in a café with a Native man who in his youth had been forcibly sent to the Fort Totten Indian Boarding School, which Nerburn was researching at the time. The U.S. government created schools like Fort Totten to forcibly assimilate Native American children.

“I learned Good English,” the man said to Nerburn. “I learned Good Christian. But I am no longer myself.”

Children who were initially taught to learn from their elders were forced into these schools to learn the ways of the dominant U.S. culture and Christian religion. White teachers told children that their elders would go to hell for their beliefs.

“This man, for all his class and manner and sanguine outlook, was the very embodiment of what we as a nation had done to the Native peoples, who had stood in our path as we pushed our way across the continent,” Nerburn read.

Part of Nerburn’s work requires him to unwind the United States’ systemic damage done to Native Americans and Native values. In his research, Nerburn found out a government leader in charge of Native training and education in the 1870s had said that the Indians need to learn the “exalted egotism of America” — in other words, to think of “I” rather than “we.”

Nerburn said that while Native Americans have worked to uphold this value of “we,” the rest of the United States has yet to learn this, especially in light of some people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

Nerburn sees an opportunity during the pandemic for everyone to reconsider societal priorities and values; to look out for group needs rather than individual needs.

“Every child in America right now is being influenced by (the pandemic),” Nerburn said. “When we get through this — if we don’t sacrifice them all on the altar of normality by sending them back to school or putting them in bad situations — every kid in the world that went through this will have something in common with every other kid. And as their time comes, they’ll remember that and look at themselves as part of the human family.”

Nerburn’s work calls people to pay attention and listen to Native stories. After speaking with Native people for 30 years, there is one phrase that he’s heard over and over again: White people need to listen.

“The first thing we need to do is to stop controlling and start to listen,” Nerburn said. “And that takes away the sense of responsibility for mastery. I think that’s really the key to the Native way of understanding — to accept rather than to master.”

The internet allows anyone to spread information easily — this includes conspiracy theories. Social media has also changed the nature of conspiracy theories, as Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, said different websites incentivize engagement, keeping people’s attention, as well as quick, emotional responses. This is where QAnon enters.

LaFrance said that the premise of QAnon is that “a secret and powerful cabal of evil, high-profile Democrats is running a global child sex ring, and that Donald Trump is the savior figure that will eventually free them.” QAnon started on the internet in October 2017 with posts on 4Chan — one of the most famous theories was that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be arrested soon. She was not arrested, but these posts generated a lot of attention and a following around Q, a figure who drops clues online that disciples or followers attempt to piece together. Clues are sometimes posted multiple times a day.

“There’s a narrative that is evolving, that really lends an air of legitimacy to the conspiracy theory, that a lot of its followers have seized upon,” LaFrance said. “They see these posts and assume that because it’s happening in real time, it must be true.”

The more she talked to people who believed in QAnon, the more she realized they were “deriving a sense of faith and serenity, and almost religious satisfaction, from the conspiracy theory. It’s a belief system, and it looks a lot like a new religion.”

LaFrance wrote The Atlantic’s June cover story about QAnon, and has reported on misinformation and media for more than 15 years. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, LaFrance gave a lecture titled “The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning,” as part of Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, themed “The Science of Us.” The lecture was co-sponsored by the Chautauqua Women’s Club as part of their Contemporary Issues Forum. LaFrance discussed the origins of the internet conspiracy theory and the harms it has caused, her experience talking to theorists, and what society and individuals can do to promote a healthier democracy.

Over her time reporting on QAnon, LaFrance has learned of beliefs that the moon landing was faked, COVID-19 is a bioweapon unleashed on the world by China and the “deep state,” and one man told her that John F. Kennedy Jr. did not die in a plane crash, but was assassinated by Hillary Clinton.

“I asked this gentleman, ‘What evidence do you possibly have to support that such a thing could have happened?’ He didn’t miss a beat. He said, ‘What evidence do you have to say that it didn’t?’” LaFrance said. “We are living through a mass rejection of reasons, a mass rejection of enlightenment values. People are breaking with reality at an alarming scale.”

LaFrance said that conspiracy theories are nothing new; in 1775, Samuel Adams told the Continental Congress that King George III was taxing the colonists to turn them into slaves. 

“This is to say nothing of actual slavery taking place at the time. There’s no evidence to suggest that this plot was actually a part of King George’s taxation attempts,” LaFrance said.
“(But) it gathered a ton of steam, and people believed it.”

Watergate was also considered a conspiracy theory, until that conspiracy was proven true.

“The difference, of course, is that investigative journalism requires the confirmation of facts before publication,” LaFrance said. “Conspiracy theorizing can be referred to as investigating when it’s merely connecting unrelated events, people and ideas, and saying that they have closer ties than they actually do no evidence required.”

LaFrance cited political scientist Joseph Uscinski, who said a person’s likelihood of believing conspiracy theories can be determined how they agree with four statements: Much of society is controlled by secret plots, a few people will always be in charge in American democracy, the people who the country are not known to the voters, and a small, secret group of people determine events like wars, recessions and elections. The more a person agrees with these statements, and how intensely they agree with them, Uscinski says the more prone they are to believing conspiracies.

“When people talk about why a person might believe in conspiracy theories, they often refer to a feeling of being out of control and wanting to impose order on a chaotic world, or wanting to explain away something awful that’s happened,” LaFrance said.

LaFrance said that President Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist and actively promotes these theories. This can be seen 10 years ago, when he said that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. LaFrance said newsrooms debated for a long time on how to cover conspiracy theories, and she thought that people would naturally see conspiracies as a way of getting attention. She believed that if journalists ignore these theories and covered more important topics, truth would prevail. 

“Fast forward to today,” LaFrance said. “Donald Trump is the president of the United States, and he still actively promotes conspiracy theories.”

One example LaFrance gave was of Trump retweeting an image in March from Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, that showed Trump playing a violin. LaFrance said many people saw this image as an “echo of Nero, they thought it was an image of a president fiddling while the world burned;” but the phrase at the top of the image, “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” is a popular reference in the QAnon community. 

“They saw the president tweeting this and saw it as not just a wink or a nod, but a direct acknowledgement of their conspiracy theory and their worldview,” LaFrance said.

LaFrance said she was wrong to think that conspiracy theories would go away if people ignored them, and “to dismiss them today requires a willful blindness at a time when they’re really dangerous.”

She said individuals can help combat conspiracy theories by sharing facts respectfully, not mocking theorists and earnestly asking them questions, such as, “How many people would have to be in on this in order for it to be true?” On a societal level, LaFrance said it is very helpful to have a healthy democracy, which can be achieved by promoting an independent free press, supporting human rights and ensuring people understand how to guard against biases.

LaFrance also said that a handful of tech companies have a “stunning amount of power over our lives.”

“People often treat the internet as fully baked, like it’s finished, like the internet that we have now is the one that we will forever have,” LaFrance said. “That’s just not the case. We could rebuild this thing entirely. Maybe we should.”

LaFrance said while companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon make people’s lives easier, more convenient and sometimes richer, they have a lot of control over their consumers.

“These companies can control the information you see; they control how that’s different from the information a person sitting right next to you on a different device might see, even if you Google the same thing,” LaFrance said. “They can toy with our emotions, as Facebook’s own research has shown. They can influence the outcomes of elections.”

LaFrance said alongside the large amount of misinformation on the internet, platforms treat facts and fiction neutrally. She said people should acknowledge that the internet and the “democratization of publishing” has allowed for many marginalized voices to be heard.

“I don’t envy these companies. This is a hugely, hugely complicated problem. The scale of this problem, the scale required to fix it, it’s unprecedented in human history,” LaFrance said. “We’re talking about billions of people who use a single publishing platform. It’s like a magazine with 2 billion editors. It’s really a nightmare.”

LaFrance said that the web may change in the 2020s or 2030s through reinvention or regulation, and that the health of institutions that promote democracy may improve.

“Even then, conspiracy theories will be with us and conspiracy theorists will be among us,” LaFrance said. “They will, as they always have, warp and stretch to fit our informational environments or technological realities and our world.”

The lecture then transitioned to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President for Advancement Geof Follansbee. He asked LaFrance about the damage conspiracy theories have caused.

LaFrance talked about Pizzagate, which was a predecessor to QAnon, in which a young man believed a local pizzeria in Washington D.C. was the headquarters of the group of powerful Democrats who were running an underground sex ring. This man did not find what he was looking for and, despite gunshots and an encounter with the police, no one was injured. He was sent to federal jail.

“I think that one gentleman’s case is a really important one, because it shows how well he took a really reckless action,” LaFrance said. “He’s also a victim of conspiracy theorizing himself, and he really believed that this was true, and was surprised to find that it wasn’t.”

LaFrance said that the man regretted endangering people, but still believed in the conspiracy and that the “the intel on that wasn’t 100%.”

Follansbee asked how LaFrance built trust among conspiracy theorists in order to report on them. 

LaFrance said that many QAnon theorists are against the media, so they did not trust her because she was a reporter. She also found that those in a position to profit off the conspiracy, such as YouTubers with large audiences and those selling merchandise, were less likely to talk to her. The ones who were happy to talk to her were the people who earnestly believed in the conspiracy and wanted to spread the message. 

“I interviewed one woman in March, and she suggested … ‘Look at the pandemic. This is proof that the apocalypse has arrived,’” LaFrance said. “The conspiracy theorists will use that to support their worldview, but they will use any data point to support their own view.”

History cannot be erased. It cannot be changed. It is immutable.

But when it comes to erecting statues of problematic historical figures, Petina Gappah said, “we are who we honor.”

Gappah, whose book, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, won the 2020 Chautauqua Prize, is an author and international trade lawyer — and an astute observer of the historically marginalized.

Gappah’s book is the story of the people who transported the body of the explorer David Livingstone across the African continent, all so that his body could be returned to England.

Meanwhile, in 2020, statues of historical figures like Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist founder of Rhodesia, and Edward Colston, a slave trader and member of British parliament, are being removed amid great controversy.  

“Having public commemorations is a form of national myth-making,” said Gappah. “What are we telling the children of slaves if our public streets and parks commemorate those who enslaved their ancestors? What are we telling those whose ancestors died in colonial wars of conquest if we honor those who shared that blood?”

At 3:30 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, after remarks by Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, and Sony Ton-Aime, Chautauqua’s director of literary arts, as well as Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, Gappah was honored with the ninth Chautauqua Prize for Out of Darkness, Shining Light.

Celebrating a book that creates a richly rewarding reading experience, the $7,500 annual Chautauqua Prize honors an author for a significant contribution to the literary arts.

The T.M. Gappah Foundation will give opportunities to the kind of child that my father was, and will provide scholarships for poor rural children who have what it takes to succeed against the odds, and for whom the only thing standing between them and education and a bright future is a want of money,” she said. “So I’m particularly grateful to receive this Prize, as the Prize money will go towards endowing my father’s memorial foundation.”

This year, roughly 80 volunteer readers collectively read more than 220 nominated books, the most nominees the Prize has ever received, to assemble the longlist for the award. That longlist resulted in seven finalists, announced this past spring. 

“One role of the fiction writer or the creative mind is to inquire and imagine a world of complex individuals, and giving voices to those left in the margins,” said Ton-Aime. “And this is what Petina intended and did in this novel.” 

Ton-Aime said that, in giving voices to those left in the margins, authors like Gappah are completing an important function of studying history: shining light on those corners left in the dark.

“Correcting the actions of the past is also a part of history,” he said. “It is important because those of us who look like her and are descended of her kind, too often are ashamed or enraged when we read about her kind.” 

In the past, Ton-Aime said that readers had two ways of dealing with racist caricatures in literature: Either accept them as truth, or separate themselves from those caricatures. 

“There’s a third way,” he said. “And that is what Ms. Gappah has found. And it requires empathy to see (the characters in Gappah’s novel) as one of us: To see (them) as flawed, yet talented and confident as human beings. Out of Darkness, Shining Light is a novel that tries to do things similar to what the Chautauqua Institution’s mission aims to do: Explore the best of human values and enrichment of life, and reach and complete the lives of those who were worthy of their humanity.”

Gappah’s novel seems to act as both a doorway — a significant symbol in the life of one of her main characters, Halima — and a light switch for readers to access a distant, shadowy past, a comparison reflected in this year’s physical representation of the Chautauqua Prize: A door that seems to beckon readers in just as much as it carries them through; once opened, a brilliant golden light emanates from the piece, created by Ryan Laganson.

For Gappah, 2020 has been a particularly difficult year, the pandemic aside — she lost her father in January. 

“(My father) was born in 1940 and he died on Jan. 23, just a month before what would have been his 80th birthday,” she said. “And it gives me some solace that my father read this novel, not once, but twice before he died. And that one of the last long conversations we had was when he subjected me to an intense interrogation as to what was fact and what was fiction in the novel. He was passionate about education, about reading and about books.”

Gappah said that her father “emancipated his mother and his sisters from grinding rural poverty in Rhodesia,” and that her family is planning a memorial foundation in his honor.

“The T.M. Gappah Foundation will give opportunities to the kind of child that my father was, and will provide scholarships for poor rural children who have what it takes to succeed against the odds, and for whom the only thing standing between them and education and a bright future is a want of money,” she said. “So I’m particularly grateful to receive this Prize, as the Prize money will go towards endowing my father’s memorial foundation.”

Though Gappah said she’s mourning the loss of her father, she also said she feels for the thousands of people who have been denied access to their loved ones because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It seemed like such a neat number, 2020, but we’ll always remember just the year in which the world grieved while in a state of suspended animation,” she said. “We’ll remember 2020 as the year of broken hearts. The year of broken dreams. More than 700,000 dead across the world from the COVID-19 virus, many more dying because we’re not able to get treatment for other conditions. Global economies have shuttered to a hold. Companies are closing. Job losses are everywhere. A global recession is looming.”

The supreme irony, Gappah said, is that the very interconnectedness that we celebrate about our age is the “very thing that has endangered the world.”

Gappah said that just over a year ago — “in another life, in another world” — she embarked on a journey on a container ship so as to find time to write in tranquility. 

“As we found ourselves surrounded by an endless field of water, and I became (used) to the repetitive life onboard ship, and as I took daily walks on deck with the Atlantic in every view, I began to reflect on the many Africans who had made this trip to the Caribbean — not from Europe, as I had done, but from Africa and who made this, too, without the tools that I had,” she said.

Above all, Gappah said she had the “freedom and the will to travel,” and that when she arrived in the Caribbean, she had a moment of sudden realization.

“It came to me with a visceral shock that just about everyone I met was here because his or her ancestors were brought here as captives,” she said. “These are people living in what Nathaniel Hawthorne called ‘unaccustomed earth.’ Their ancestors were transplanted as cargo from Africa. Almost every Black person I saw was the descendant of a slave: entire nations, whole nations descended from slaves. There in the Caribbean, it struck me forcibly that what is considered by some to be the past is very much the present.”

At the end of every major Chautauqua Opera Company rehearsal, the production staff gathers together for a meeting. These meetings are a chance to compare notes between departments and make sure everyone is on the same page throughout the breakneck pace of a Chautauqua summer.

This week, for the last event in the Opera Behind-the-Scenes Series, Chautauquans will get a chance to witness the action firsthand.

Chautauqua Opera Behind-the-Scenes: Collaboration will air at noon EDT Thursday, Aug. 13, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch.

With the help of members from each of the Opera’s production teams, 19 people total, General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood will walk Chautauquans through the behind-the-scenes of three different days from last year’s season. An audience Q-and-A will follow.

“These aren’t the three hardest days of the season, they’re just three (days) indicative of how complex the season is,” Osgood said. “We’ll take a look at a day and then we’ll go around, production-meeting style, through the departments and say, ‘OK, what did you see on this day? What did you have to have where and by when for this day to successfully happen?’”

Before the start of this series, Osgood was excited about the opportunity to take some time for in-depth conversations with the Opera’s production staff, conversations that there would never be time for during a typical season.

“I anticipated it would be fun to have some relatively quiet and focused time to talk to all of these colleagues with whom we work so intensely during a normal season,” he said. “There’s never any time to just (step back) and talk about what we do out of the cauldron of doing it.”

Osgood hasn’t been disappointed.

“I (thought) it would be really interesting,” he said. “It’s been five times as interesting as I had anticipated.”

Osgood said that even he has learned new things about his colleagues from this series, although, luckily, there haven’t been any major surprises.

“I truly appreciate (this) 10 times as much as before; how much each of them loves this art form that they’re investing so much energy and time into,” he said. “They love the role that they play in it, and they love the result that goes out to our audiences.”

Whether a person joins a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program or a social movement, whether they start a family or a nonprofit, whether they speak to people or trees, the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor said that while not everyone believes in a god, it is harder to live without the sacredness found in a group.

Taylor described the spirituality a person can seek in a community in her lecture, “Remember That You Are Stardust, and to Stardust You Shall Return.” The lecture was released on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10. It was the first in the Interfaith Lecture Series theme for Week Seven, “The Spirituality of Us.”

No Q-and-A followed the lecture due to internet connection issues, since Taylor lives in rural Georgia and could not connect to Skype to speak with Vice President and Senior Pastor Gene Robinson. Robinson ended the session by thanking staff who provide upkeep for the virtual lecture experience.

“It was just a living example of how we’re all in this together,” Robinson said.

This was not Taylor’s first time speaking for the Interfaith Lecture Series. Taylor is an Episcopal priest, religions professor, and New York Times bestselling author who has also served as chaplain of the week five times at Chautauqua, and who in 2014 was a recipient of the President’s Medal. Instead of speaking in the Hall of Philosophy this year, Taylor pre-recorded her lecture in the hall of her ironing room.

Her testimony helped me realize that a spirituality of ‘us’ isn’t a luxury item for people who have all their basic needs handled,” Taylor said. “It’s a lifeline for people whose single-propeller modes of being have sputtered at alarming heights, leaving them with nothing but the sound of wind whistling in their ears.”

An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting gave new meaning to “the story of us” for Taylor, who came to celebrate her student’s first year of sobriety. A woman stood up to talk about navigating Step Two — “We came to be aware that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” — as someone who doesn’t believe in a god.

“You are the power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity,” the woman said to the group.

This moment was what first changed Taylor’s view on the spiritual power of a group.

“Her testimony helped me realize that a spirituality of ‘us’ isn’t a luxury item for people who have all their basic needs handled,” Taylor said. “It’s a lifeline for people whose single-propeller modes of being have sputtered at alarming heights, leaving them with nothing but the sound of wind whistling in their ears.”

While Taylor said “the book” in her religion sometimes comes before the people to a fault, it’s also where she and others like her draw from for strength and lessons. The Bible taught her the idea that everyone is made in the image of God.

But meeting and knowing people expands that image in Taylor’s mind and wrecks her idols.

“Without you, my image of God would be way too small and look too much like me,” Taylor said. “Without you, I might be tempted to believe that a single reading of scripture is adequate, or a single view of history complete. I might go on thinking my view is a normal one, that my skin is a neutral color, that I don’t see race, gender, class, religion.”

In the same sentence that grants humans the image of God, people are also tasked to take care of creation, to “lord” over it.

“Not to do whatever the hell they want with it, but to care for it the way the capital ‘L’ Lord would,” Taylor said, “because that’s the image in which they have been made.”

She said humans have abused what they were supposed to protect. Dominion was about making a home in the garden, naming the animals, eating green things and taking responsibility for living things that also had the living breath of God — which Taylor said means that the spirituality of “us” goes beyond humans to plants.

This became clear to Taylor when she and her husband, Ed, who thrives in a garden, moved from the city to the country 30 years ago. While still living in their city lot, Taylor would find her husband’s pole beans growing up the mailbox, a row of corn growing on the curb, broccoli in the flowerbeds and tomato plants in the window boxes. Once, she yanked trumpet squash vines that had overgrown on the front porch railing without telling him.

“You would have thought I drowned kittens,” Taylor said. “Because all those plants, they were people to Ed. They had a history, destiny, the wish to be fruitful and multiply.”

When they had to build a well before their house was built, she realized that the neighboring trees and other life would have to give up water for their cooking and cleaning. She pledged not to waste it.

“To this day, the water that comes out of my faucet is as sacred as air to me, as sacred as blessed bread and wine,” she said. “It’s my daily communion in a ‘spirituality of us.’”

Now, in the country, Ed has plenty of room. Taylor said people often ask her if she gets lonely in the country. While the question revolves around people rather than other kinds of beings, she’s never felt lonely surrounded by nature — by bird voices, the touch of wet grass on her legs and the crowd of honey bees in petunias, but also by raccoons who have killed 12 of her chickens in one night, the dogs that killed a baby rabbit and the owl that carried away one of her cats.

“I guess you could decide that a spirituality of us ought to rise above that somehow, or try to change it,” Taylor said. “Right now, I’m just trying to see my own predation and keep it in check.”

The Bible also states that God loves the stranger as much as the tribe. Deuteronomy calls for not only the orphan and the widow to be taken in and cared for, but also the  able-bodied stranger.

“It’s because the stranger doesn’t have anyone,” Taylor said. “Like the widow and the orphan, the stranger’s kinship bonds are hanging by a thread. … So the divine arm goes out and draws the stranger in, commanding the tribe to see the likeness, not the difference.”

The Bible also calls for people to devote their life to others. Taylor has understood this as life being a relay instead of a marathon, as she realizes she will not finish everything on her to-do list before she passes.

But calls to take care of others are not just found in Taylor’s religion. She said that a spirituality found in taking care of others can be found in the parent who quits everything to care for a disabled child, the poorly paid health aide who continues working in an infected nursing home while people say goodbye to their families on Zoom, and people who have been protesting for months in the face of tear gas.

The spirituality of “us” transcends religions.

“These high calls came to me through my religion, but they stuck with me because they rang bells that were already in me before I ever joined a church or learned the Lord’s Prayer,” Taylor said. “They ring bells … I hear in other places of worship and study, among other people who are so much like me.”

However, Taylor said that religious exclusivity has instilled a fear in some followers and leaders who have sidelined “others” as less than human.

“That’s why I’ve settled for blood and bones as what makes us, ‘us,’” Taylor said.

But to include plants in “us,” she said she settles on “life” as a good definition. While searching years ago for a new creation story that encompassed all others from a scientific view, she found her answer in bone composition. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said that the chemical elements of bones and all life came from literal stardust.

“When I take in this 14-billion-year-old history, which has more good guesses in it than facts, one of the more stunning reveals is that in us, the universe has become conscious of itself,” Taylor said.

There is an almost-universal desire among COVID-19 patients and their families to share their stories. One such person is Rosa Hernandez, a grandmother in her 70s who had a tough battle with the disease. Sheri Fink, an investigative journalist and author, said that Hernandez is a very private person and does not use social media, but wanted to help people by telling her story. She said “show it all. Show me at my worst because I want people to understand.” 

“She’s paying her bills by phone, and she told me yesterday that she’s … engaging the operators in long discussions of what she went through and trying to advise them as a grandma, like, ‘Don’t put yourself at risk. Don’t go to the bars,’” said Fink, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times.

Fink has been able to access and report on places like the Houston Methodist Hospital, the Brooklyn Hospital Center and Long Island Jewish Northwell System. She said the hospitals that allow reporters through their doors are typically the places that are doing a good job, and that they trust the reporter’s work and fairness. Health care workers, Fink said, also know that everyone makes mistakes, including themselves, and typically join the field to help others.

“They go into health care because they want to do good, and they believe that opening the doors, in this case, will help to raise awareness, will help to dispel, to the extent possible, the rumors or misconceptions — like coronavirus doesn’t exist or it doesn’t cause severe illness,” Fink said. “These people who work in the hospitals are so pained by that.”

Fink said that doctors are learning more about COVID-19, like that many patients who had acute symptoms of the virus are still experiencing effects of the virus months after contracting it. Some hospitals are creating clinics for post-COVID syndrome, and she said masks are being found to be increasingly effective at keeping down the reproductive rate of the virus.

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Fink held a conversation with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, titled “Inside the Science of and Response to COVID-19,” as part of Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series themed “The Science of Us.” Fink discussed what she learned through reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic at different hospitals, how personal stories can reflect the statistics of the virus and help people understand different aspects of the crisis, as well as what the general public and lawmakers need to keep in mind with future pandemics. 

Ewalt asked what the public doesn’t understand about the science of a new pathogen.

Fink said that people need to understand that when scientists are researching complex topics, such as COVID-19, they will continually discover new information and disprove claims that were previously widely accepted. 

“Early on we heard, ‘Don’t wear a mask.’ Then we heard, ‘Wear a mask,’” Fink said. “We’ve heard different things that have been tried; that seems promising.”

Fink said that a medicine or practice can only be considered effective when studied and agreed upon by many different scientists. 

“This is normal — we should expect to have some twists and turns in what we learn,” Fink said. “We should expect that something we know today, we might be told tomorrow that, actually, that wasn’t right.”

Ewalt asked why personal stories are important, alongside statistics, to understand the impact COVID-19. 

“I guess it’s just how we’re wired as humans when we would tell stories around the campfire,” Fink said. “Those individual stories are powerful, and they’re emotional and they can communicate a lot more than just a number.”

Fink said journalists have to choose to cover personal stories that reflect the numbers. She also said that the pandemic and individual experiences can be captured in many different mediums.  

“I’m a word person, but there’s something about hearing people’s voices,” Fink said, “(and) seeing what they looked like before they were patients in the hospital that I think is so, so powerful.”

Ewalt then asked about the unequal death tolls of COVID-19, particularly among the most vulnerable in the United States, and how it relates to systemic issues in health care. 

Fink said that there has been a lot of coverage on the disproportionate toll the virus is having on communities of color. The New York Times published an article recently on the high proportion of the Latinx community in Houston in intensive care units, with whole families falling ill. Fink said that there are multiple factors on why some communities are more affected, such as not wanting to go to the hospital immediately, medical bills, historic negative experiences and multi-generational households that cannot social distance. 

“Sometimes it takes a crisis to really make all of us more aware of things that were very inequitable for a long time,” Fink said. “We’re seeing that sort of magnifying impact of health care problems in certain communities.”

At a hospital during a week in July, employees found that 60% of the patients in the Coronavirus ICU were Hispanic, whereas the overall hospital population was 16% Hispanic. 

Ewalt asked about the science of a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the general public can better understand what’s to come.

Fink has reported more on hospitals than clinical trials and vaccine development, but she said all the experts she has spoken to have been “pretty optimistic that we could have an effective vaccine.” She also said that there are important ethical questions around who gets priority for a vaccine on a global, national and local scale. Fink said there are many options of who to give the vaccine to first, such as the most vulnerable populations, younger generations in order to reduce the prevalence of the virus in multiple communities, or health care workers who are on the frontlines. 

“Many public health officials are thinking about how to ensure that there is trust and that people will actually accept that vaccine at a level that will help protect the population,” Fink said.

Some experts call COVID-19 a “starter pandemic” that is not as deadly as many other potential pathogens. Ewalt asked what has been learned about the American government’s — and the world’s — ability to combat a crisis, and what can be done better in the future.

Fink said other pandemics will happen in the future, and that it would be very smart to make investments to combat them. In the past with outbreaks of SARS, MERS and other types of coronaviruses, which are viruses that spread from animals to people, investments tend to stagnate after the immediate emergency ends.

“We hear over and over again about how when that emergency passes people, understandably, want to get back to their daily priorities,” Fink said. “It would really make sense to learn as much as we can, and to capitalize on those investments, because we will almost certainly have other pandemics in the future.”

Entropy, in physics, is essentially a measure of the amount of disorder in a physical system — this means that if a system has a low number of rearrangements, it has low entropy, and if it has a high number of rearrangements, it has high entropy. Brian Greene, one of the foremost theoretical physicists in the world, compared entropy to a messy desk with papers and pens randomly scattered about. 

“When the desk is messy, it has high entropy, high disorder, because there are many rearrangements that you would completely not notice if someone were to do them behind your back,” Greene said. “But if you have a very orderly, very clean desk, … if you go over to that desktop and start to rearrange the ingredients, you do notice.”

Another example of high entropy is how sand on a beach can be configured into almost countless variations. A sand castle, however, has low entropy because it is highly organized and changing any part will make the whole castle look different. 

Greene said that the entropy of one system can affect others, such as with stars, and systems effectively release disorder into their surroundings and keep order within themselves. He said that steam engines of the 17th and 18th centuries burnt “orderly” fuel and released some of that heat into the environment.

“The steam engine must expel the entropy to the environment in order to maintain its orderly form. How does it expel that entropy?” Greene said. “It emits heat to the surroundings, allowing it to maintain its order. While the environment soaks up the disorder, it soaks up in toxic waste.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Greene delivered a lecture titled “Mind, Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” opening Week Seven of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, themed “The Science of Us.” Greene discussed how the universe was created through both a process toward greater order and complex structures such as living creatures, as well as progressing to more disorderly systems.

Greene also discussed evolution. He said some scientists tend to view evolution and entropy as “embattled characters fighting it out for dominance.” Evolution is viewed as building evermore complex structures, while entropy is seen as causing more and more disorder. 

“But that is too simplistic a description,” Greene said. “There’s a lot of truth to it, but it’s not the full story.”

While many people associate evolution with living organisms and parents passing down their genes, evolution occurs even down to the level of an atom.

“Over time, interesting, complex, molecular configurations can naturally emerge. No guiding intelligence necessary, just the laws of physics acting themselves out on the ingredients,” Greene said. “The ingredients have this capacity to make copies of themselves and every replication process has some degree of imperfection.”

These imperfections, or modifications to the molecules, Greene said, eventually created systems better suited to their environment.

“Over time,” Greene said, “we get the kinds of molecules able to carry out processes that look like they require some kind of guiding intelligence.”

Greene then talked about the fate of different astrological bodies, such as the sun and black holes. He said in 5 billion years, the sun will use up all of its fuel in its core, imploding inward and rising in temperature. Greene said the sun’s “hydrogen will burn with such intensity that it will force the sun to swell outwards” and become 150-200 times its size, swallowing up the planets Mercury and Venus. 

Black holes, which are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that anything that falls in cannot escape, were thought to be stable and orderly for a long time, he said, as scientists thought black holes could only get bigger. Greene said physicist Stephen Hawking showed in the 1970s that light, which is a form of energy, “streams outward from the edge of a black hole. It’s sort of like burning a piece of charcoal.”

“When you take energy away from the black hole itself, it shrinks. It gets smaller and smaller. We do not yet know what happens at the very end of a black hole when it shrinks all the way down to nothingness,” Greene said. “All that will be left in the cosmos are these particles … wafting through the darkness.”

When some people hear Greene talking about how the universe and its origins can be broken down into equations which have “no evidence of anything like meaning or value or purpose,” they often think he is unfairly criticizing everything they hold dear. 

Greene said he is doing the opposite. “Against all odds,” he said, “we are so spectacularly ordered.”

“We can experience wondering. I’m thinking about everything from building the pyramids to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the Mona Lisa to King Lear to quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity,” Greene said. “The very fact that collections of particles can do all that fills me with a deep sense of gratitude that really verges upon reverence.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Chautauqua Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt. Ewalt asked Greene what he thought about the concept of a multiverse. 

He said the idea of a multiverse is worthwhile in “our metaphorical toolkit,” something for people to turn to if scientists cannot find any other answers. Greene gave the example of scientists being able to measure the amount of dark energy in space, but unable to explain why that amount exists. Some people say that the value of dark energy changes from universe to universe. 

“The idea that we are one universe of many is highly speculative,” Greene said. “By no means do we have any evidence for it, but it is an idea that’s worthwhile to have at our disposal.”

Ewalt then asked about the emerging narrative in society of distrust in scientists and the need for teaching science, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I don’t sense the mistrust for science surrounding COVID-19. As I sense the growing distrust of the way our leaders have responded to the scientific insights surrounding COVID-19, we see a dance playing out in the world in real time that juxtaposes economic viability with personal safety,” Greene said. 

Every challenge people face has science at its core, and scientists need to play a bigger role in government. 

“If you don’t have leaders that really understand and respect the science, we are going to make wrong decisions left and right going forward,” Greene said. “This is one test case, and it’s a vital one, but it’s a much larger issue of the role that scientific insight will play in the decision-making process going forward.”

As beautiful as Beethoven’s music is, violist Nick Revel has never been able to find himself in the notes. 

“I will never feel a personal connection while performing Beethoven’s music,” Revel said. “He had his set of ideas and his set of feelings, and the most we can do is relate to them. Playing music that is our creation gets rid of that barrier. We are no longer relating to it — we are it.”

As a part of the world-renowned PUBLIQuartet, Revel, joined by violinist Curtis Stewart, violinist Jannina Norpoth and cellist Hamilton Berry, has dedicated his career to presenting new works for string quartet, breaking the mold for “accepted string repertoire.”  

“I have learned, and learned to love, that the only rules in place are made up, they are fabrications that have been acquired,” he said. “It feels really freeing to be able to play music beyond that. It’s my own personal statement.”

The PUBLIQuartet rose in the music scene after winning the 2013 Concert Artists Guild’s New Music/New Places award. In 2019, they garnered Chamber Music America’s prestigious Visionary Award for outstanding and innovative approaches to contemporary classical, jazz and world chamber music. The quartet will perform their program “Freedom and Faith” at 4 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 10, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

We have been picking these composers based on who has been kicking ass, going against the grain and not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Revel said.

PUBLIQuartet’s genre-bending programs range from 20th-century masterworks to newly commissioned pieces, alongside re-imaginations of classical works featuring open-form improvisations that expand the techniques and aesthetic of the traditional string quartet. 

“It’s really effective as a program to make a concept and to have a line through all of the pieces that bring them together,” Revel said. “Sometimes it’s literal storytelling and sometimes it’s just references to certain eras or genres in history. Both bring meaning to an audience.” 

“Freedom and Faith” highlights works written by female composers whose music represents “resilience, resistance, and subversion,” including Jessie Montgomery’s 2008 “Voodoo Dolls,” Jessica Meyer’s 2017 “Get into the Now” and two PUBLIQuartet compositions including their 2017 “Sancta Femina” and 2018 “Nina!”

“We have been picking these composers based on who has been kicking ass, going against the grain and not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Revel said.

Montgomery is a founding member of the PUBLIQuartet and Revel said her 2008 “Voodoo Dolls” has been a “staple” in their sets for more than 10 years. The piece was commissioned and choreographed by the JUMP! Dance Company in Rhode Island — the choreography is a suite of dances, each one representing a different traditional children’s doll: marionettes, Russian dolls, rag dolls, Barbie dolls and voodoo dolls. The piece is influenced by west African drumming patterns and lyrical chant motives, all of which feature highlights of improvisation within the ensemble.

“We literally play it from memory,” he said. “When we put the music out for it, it’s almost distracting.” 

Meyer dedicated her 2017 “Get into the NOW” to the PUBLIQuartet. According to Stewart, the piece was inspired by the rhythms of funk, tango and bluegrass music, in addition to the expressive ways of playing that are “inherent to each of these genres.” 

“Her music is very groove- and loop-oriented,” Stewart said. “Jess uses extended techniques to emulate electronics and to expand the feeling a string quartet can create. She filled this work with moments that allow all of us to put our own personal twist on it.” 

“Nina!” and “Sancta Femina” are both part of PUBLIQuartet’s “MIND THE GAP” series in which the quartet takes music of different styles, genres and eras and “reimagines” them with group improvisation and composition. 

“Nina!” honors Nina Simone, a Black musician who aspired to be a concert pianist. In 1950, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City before applying for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well-received audition. Stewart said she attributed the rejection to racial discrimination.

In 1963, Simone’s solo debut at Carnegie Hall took place the same day Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed with a group of protestors in Birmingham — and 1963 was the year Simone began to craft protest songs in earnest, spurred by the March on Washington for civil rights, and persistent violence against Black citizens in the South. 

Growing up, I always had to wonder if my musical feelings were valid, but when I hear someone play the blues on a string instrument I feel a way that is more than, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’” Stewart said. “It’s also, ‘Wow, I am beautiful, and I am powerful, and I am worth being on that stage.’”

Stewart said Simone’s only regret about her Carnegie Hall performance was she was “billed as a jazz singer” instead of a classical musician. PUBLIQuartet made it their mission to honor both sides. 

“We really connected with her as an artist, as she was using the techniques of both a jazz and classical idiom and was making money while doing it,” he said. “Let’s be real, a ton of people were doing it, but those you hear about, you hear about for a reason. Artistically, Nina is a hero of this music.” 

Revel can’t find himself in Beethoven’s notes; he can only relate to them. But Stewart, a Black musician, finds himself in both the image of Simone and the sounds of her strains. It’s a “lofty goal, that reimagining,” but they strive for it in every composition, not only for themselves, but for the next generation of string players.

“Growing up, I always had to wonder if my musical feelings were valid, but when I hear someone play the blues on a string instrument I feel a way that is more than, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’” Stewart said. “It’s also, ‘Wow, I am beautiful, and I am powerful, and I am worth being on that stage.’”

This series is made possible by Bruce W. and Sarah Hagen McWilliams.

Chautauqua Institution’s CVA Members, previously known as VACI Partners, spend every summer appreciating, supporting and promoting Chautauqua Visual Arts, from the exhibitions in the Strohl and Fowler Kellogg Art Centers to the Chautauqua School of Art. In the last month of each season, they get the chance to show off some works of their own.

This year’s Members Exhibition, “Places We Have Never Been: New Works by CVA Members,” features 36 pieces from 24 members. In accordance with the Institution’s virtual season, the show will be held exclusively online and will be available to view starting at 10 a.m. EDT on Monday, Aug. 10, through the CVA website. The exhibition will run until Sept. 30.

Pam Spremulli’s family has been coming to Chautauqua for generations. She grew up in the village of Lakewood, about 10 miles from the Institution, and now lives in Cleveland and visits every summer with her own family.

“We just bought a place on the grounds so I’m super thrilled; my dream has come true,” she said. “Now we’re really all in.”

For this year’s exhibition, Spremulli decided to take the theme, “Places We Have Never Been” literally. Her two pieces “Lake Aitlan, Guatemala – Sunset Blues” and “Aurora Shores, Tranquility,” are landscapes of two places she’s never been, inspired by photos from friends.

“During the pandemic I started doing these landscapes,” she said. “I never thought my style would work with landscapes so much, but I (wanted) to do something new and test my boundaries. … I really like the way they turned out.”

Spremulli is a graphic illustrator and art teacher. She uses Adobe Illustrator to create her pieces, specializing in architectural drawings and animal portraits, all in her signature, playful style.

“I tell people the mouse is my brush and the computer screen is my canvas,” she said. “I take the ordinary and make it a little something extra.”

Spremulli has been a member of CVA Partners for years. She remembers when exhibitions were held in the gallery on Bestor Plaza that is now The Chautauquan Daily’s offices.

“I was in there one year, they didn’t have air conditioning (then), and some of the paintings were sweating — they had to take the watercolors down because it was so hot,” she said. “It’s very different now.”

Spremulli’s two favorite shows every year are the Membership Exhibition and the School of Art’s showcase.

“(They’re) always so eclectic and different,” she said.

When Rita Argen Auerbach heard about the exhibition’s theme, she decided to take it in an unconventional direction. While her piece, “Memorial,” shows a place she has been — the veterans section of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York — the painting has had a life of its own separate from Auerbach.

Auerbach is a Buffalo-based artist who has been visiting Chautauqua for the last 50 years. She specializes in watercolor and, in 1980, helped form the Niagara Frontier Watercolor Society.

“I have been passionate about exploring and teaching and exhibiting in this medium all these years,” she said.

In 1986 Auerbach was part of the Chautauqua Soviet Council on Cultural Affairs, a delegation of Chautauquans who were invited by the U.S. State Department to travel to Riga, Latvia, for a cultural conference. Following the trip, she was invited to exhibit her work at the Art Academy of Latvia, making her the first American woman to do so. 

“Memorial” was one piece in the exhibition. It was Auerbach’s way of making a statement about American patriotism and military sacrifice.

“(During my visit), I learned that the Soviet teaching was that America doesn’t really know war, that we were mentally warring, but we had not known (real) war,” she said. “When I decided what work I would take to the exhibition, I made certain that I represented that first-hand knowledge of war.”

After its international journey, “Memorial” was bought by Buffalo art collector Charles Rand Penney, who owned it until his death in 2010, when it was willed back to Auerbach.

“It has quite a providence,” she said. “It has been exhibited (across Western New York), but never in Chautauqua.”

Aurbach said what she misses most during the pandemic shutdown has been the ability to visit art museums and galleries.

“From the get-go, the one thing I missed, and still miss, is seeing wonderful, quality art shows,” she said. “I just have not been into a full-range, wonderful gallery in ever so long.”

Helen Power is an art therapist and former art teacher living in Falls Church, Virginia. She has been visiting Chautauqua for more than 10 years and has been making art all her life.

“We really miss (the Institution) this year,” she said.

Her pieces, “Continental Divide” and “On the High Seas,” are abstract acrylic paintings. Power enjoys experimenting with color and texture in her work and incorporating mixed media collages into her paintings.

“My creative process represents a search for balance and rhythm in the elements of each artwork,” she wrote in her artist’s statement for the exhibition. “I thoroughly enjoy the journey.”

While she has made realistic work as well, she loves the freedom of abstract painting.

“I don’t always know how it’s going to turn out, but I keep going until I’m happy with it,” she said. “Sometimes that involves lots of layers of paint, and decision and indecision. … It’s more of an internal thing, rather than external.”

During a typical season, Power would be visiting the CVA galleries and the School of Art, riding her bike around the grounds and painting on her front porch.

“I love painting; I paint every day,” she said. “I just think it’s a wonderful experience, and I hope (my work) gives other people as much joy as it does me when they look at it.”

One of the questions asked of Chautauquans who live here all year (sometimes called Winter Chautauquans or year rounders) is “What do you do the rest of the year?” Children go to school and adults volunteer to tutor students. People go to the library to play games or read, to the post office to see the friendly staff. We go to church and synagogue or other religious activities. There are at least three book clubs, a bowling league, and a play reading group. Chautauqua County in the fall is beautiful, and there are numerous harvest festivals around the area. 

We are not untouched by the events of the world beyond the gates. As many Chautauquans return to the centers of commerce and government, we follow the news of the day as much as others do. 

When New York State “paused” to slow the spread of COVID-19, we paused. But there were many, as elsewhere, who went beyond staying physically distant and quarantined and tried to make life better — and in Chautauqua, youth and young adults stepped up to make life a little better for everyone.

Acts of Kindness
The stones began to appear about the same time that residents of Chautauqua began to shut themselves inside during New York State’s pause to combat the novel coronavirus. Left around the grounds or on people’s doorstep, the stones were painted with messages like “Faith,” “Believe,” and “We are in this together.”

These acts of kindness were the idea of the Taliercio triplets — Landon, Fynn and Ethan. When their school closed in Cleveland, they came to Chautauqua to stay with their grandparents, Mike and Marg Metzger. 

The triplets’ parents are doctors. Their regular caregivers were not available so the boys spent the weekdays on the grounds and would go home on weekends. “It was kind of annoying to have to switch houses. We were not used to going back and forth,” said Fynn.

Ethan said, “Grandma suggested we do something to help seniors who were at home and did not have much to do and might be feeling down. We all decided to paint rocks.”

Fynn had seen an article about a rock painting club in Ohio. Landon came up with an emoji for circular rocks. He would draw the faces. 

“We got the rocks at Barcelona Beach,” Landon added. They liked the rocks that washed up on the beach, as they have a smooth surface to paint on.

They painted many “doctor” rocks, with the face of a doctor on them. Their parents would take them to work and give them to colleagues.

The triplets walked around Chautauqua, putting rocks by people’s doors, on Bestor Plaza, in trees. One rock even got to the top of the fountain in Bestor Plaza, although they never figured out who put it there.

While they have been playing baseball, sailing and exploring the ravine by Boys’ and Girls’ Club, they said they miss Club — especially the Club Carnival.

In all, the boys think that they painted between 50 and 75 rocks. Ethan used the stones as part of his final fourth grade project and called the project “Acts of Kindness.” They also included their cousins, Michael and Reagan, in the project.

“It was a way to make people feel joyous,” Ethan said. “It was like giving them a candle in a dark room.”

Community Service
The day after school finished on June 11, Josie Dawson and Eve Kushmaul, who live in Chautauqua year round, decided to do some community service — cleaning up the dog park near the Turner Community Center.

Josie and Eve had been walking a neighbor’s dog up to the park and noticed that “it was overgrown with plants on the fence,” Eve said. So they decided to fix it up.

“It took a while to make some progress,” she said. “We worked every other day for about two weeks.”

Asked if there was any poison ivy, Josie said that “there was, mostly up in the corner where the dogs like to hang out. We had to wear long sleeves and gloves and long pants to protect ourselves.”

Mostly there were vines wrapped around the fence and thorns on a lot of the plants. The girls found some holes that dogs were digging under the fence and they worked to refill the holes.

“It makes me proud that dogs can come here more safely. I was disappointed to find a pile of rotting tennis balls and dog poop in one corner,” Josie said.

Another added amenity is a treat bucket. “We would run out of treats, so we got a canister and filled it with dog treats,” Eve said. 

They said that the dog park should be a priority for Chautauqua. “The dogs need a place to go and play,” Josie said. “It needs more work, but it is still a very fun place, and will become better.”

Eve likes to come to the park and sit on the large pipe with some water when she is bored. This summer she has taken a break from violin lessons and is studying piano. Josie decided to “just wing it and go with the flow.”

The girls made another addition to the park — a stone, painted purple with “BLM,” for Black Lives Matter, painted in gold on it. The idea came from both of them. “We thought it would be a good spot because a lot of people come here and we made it big so they will see it,” they said. They used a rickety old wagon to get it to the park. 

Black Lives Matter
Regan Sims is a theater actor, trying to figure out what to do next. “I want to continue the work to be bold and brave and reflect the times I am in, like Nina Simone (did). I want to be bold and rock the world. As an artist and person, she reflected her times,” Sims said.

Sims is part of a mime troupe that does virtual content for kids and is teaching a high school summer camp class on acting via Zoom. She is finding her voice in this time of a pandemic and civil rights protests.

She led a protest for Black Lives Matter on June 19 in Bestor Plaza. Over 200 people came, masked and physically distant, to lend their support to the movement. 

A life-long Chautauquan, Sims’ family has owned the Rose Cottage for several generations. 

The family moved here permanently in June. 

“It was a joyous protest,” she said. “With COVID-19, we think about staying inside. Life goes on and it can be tragic, but it is also invigorating, New things are happening that I did not know I could be a part of. I am finding my voice. 

Sims talked with her sister, PJ, and they decided they had to do something. Regan was the speaker. PJ did the groundwork of getting the message out.

“There are not a lot of people here who look like us, and that was the reason we needed to do this action,” Sims said. “We have felt on the outside looking in. And we stand out. I have a voice and want to be heard where I stick out.”

PJ came up with the idea of chalk messages on Chautauqua’s streets and sidewalks to get the word out about the gathering. 

On the day of the protest, there were thunderstorms all around the lake, booming in the distance, but the rain held off at Chautauqua. 

Sims had bullet points she wanted to make in her speech, but it turned into a heart-felt, slightly rambling talk as she said what she needed to. She thought five people would show up and the whole thing would last five minutes.

“I was leading from love but there were some points I wanted to make. First, we were meeting to protest the death of George Floyd and others. Second was to say the names of those others killed. And third, was to protest police brutality and the lack of systemic empathy and love,” she said. 

She continued, “It is our job to be out in the streets and the desire of everybody to show up for their neighbor and love their neighbor as themselves. I can’t imagine how mothers feel — parents, sisters, brothers, children.”

Sims said reactions to her, PJ and their brother Joey have been different since the protest. “The conversation has changed. People say, “I know you,’ and start talking to me,” she said. 

“People can talk all day, but what are you doing?”

Her dream for Chautauqua is that it would be more of a reflection of the world. She would like changes to systems “that have oppressed people since the dawning of America.”

“I am not afraid of the work and the tough conversations. I want hearts to be open and to chip away at collective insensitivity,” she said. “I don’t want to be scared anymore. I don’t want to fear. I want to push through the feelings. That is the work.”Her latest project, A Kid’s Play About Racism, streamed on Broadway on Demand, Zoom and Theater for Young Audiences/USA the first weekend in August. The play was adapted by Khalia Davis from Jelani Memory’s book A Kid’s Book About Racism.

Columbia University’s Ari Goldman thinks that without religious literacy, a journalist runs the risk of misinforming the public.

“When done right, journalism can educate and inform the public,” Goldman said. “When done wrong, it can spread falsehoods and reinforce stereotypes.”

Goldman recorded his lecture, “From Church Stories to Obituaries, Journalists Need Religious Literacy,” on the lawn of his bungalow in the Catskill Mountains on July 26. 

The lecture was released at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Six Interfaith Lecture Series theme “Lessons in the School House.” Audience members submitted questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal or on Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Religion news isn’t for the religion pages anymore,” Goldman said. “A sophisticated reporter knows that religion has a role in many of the great debates in our society, from abortion, to gay marriage, to healthcare, to housing, to education.”

Goldman had a consistent byline in The New York Times before he began teaching his Covering Religions course at Columbia University. He said that journalists often struggle with understanding the diversity within religions, much less the difference between them.

“People know about their own religion — well, sometimes — but people rarely know about others,” Goldman said.

In 2010, British TV host Kay Burley confused Joe Biden’s Ash Wednesday ashes for a bruise on his forehead.

“I’m a bad Catholic,” Burley said after producers informed her while she was still on air.

It’s just one example of why journalists need to understand religions to do full reporting. Goldman’s students have gone on to report on religion for the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and other publications. For 12 years, his student Maria-Paz López covered the Vatican for La Vanguardia in Spain and is now the publication’s Berlin correspondent.

Goldman’s students have also gone on to cover other topics, including economics, health care, foreign policy, the White House and education, but he said they do so knowing the importance of religion in all parts of life.

“Religion news isn’t for the religion pages anymore,” Goldman said. “A sophisticated reporter knows that religion has a role in many of the great debates in our society, from abortion, to gay marriage, to healthcare, to housing, to education.”

Goldman referred to Harvard University’s Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, who he studied with at Harvard Divinity School. She repeats this phrase often: “If you know one religion, you don’t know any.”

“She is telling us not to make assumptions about one religion based on our own,” Goldman said. 

Catholic Confirmation is not the same as a Jewish Bar Mitzvah. While some religions consider hands joined together as prayerful, Buddhists consider them to represent the meeting of the finite and infinite.

The former cornerstone of journalism, Goldman said, was objectivity — but he teaches empathetic objectivity in his courses. Communion reported objectively is people eating wafers. With empathetic objectivity reporting, the journalist communicates that for the believer, this is a sacred act of taking the body of Christ.

The Scripps Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio, has funded his class trips to Israel, Palestine, Russia, and Ukraine, where his students cover beat topics that center on different religious groups. His students have covered the last three Popes.

His spring 2020 class had planned to visit Louisiana and Mississippi to cover the diversity of religion in the U.S. South. But Columbia University shut everything down a few days before they were slated to leave on March 13.

The class pivoted to instead cover religious groups coping with the pandemic. His favorite story that came out of the course was a story on virtual water baptisms.

“The news changes, and we have to change, too,” Goldman said.

Goldman noted the increase of obituaries written worldwide with the onset of COVID-19. When deaths in the United States hit 100,000, The New York Times published 1,000 names of those who had died by coronavirus in the United States on the front page and started a new section, “Those We’ve Lost to the Coronavirus,” which is similar to the “Portraits of Grief” obituary section they published after 9/11.

And in China, independent blogs and news sites covered the deaths of workers on the front lines of the virus. Italy published between 10 and 12 pages of obituaries per day, and papers in Brazil and South Africa followed suit.

Along with empathetic objectivity, there was one last lesson Goldman said he imparts on his students.

“Every life is a story worth telling,” Goldman said.

Some people claim that the first Jew to spend the whole summer at Chautauqua was George Gershwin. There were at least two Jews in the very first Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle class in 1882. In 1891, Bishop John Heyl Vincent introduced the first rabbi to speak at Chautauqua, Rabbi Gustav Gottheil, saying that Chautauquans had long been acquainted with dead Hebrews, but would now hear from a living one.

These and other fascinating stories are part of Shalom Chautauqua, the newest book from Arthur and Betty Salz, which tells the story of the Hebrew Congregation and the Jewish presence in Chautauqua.

“We wanted to stress the gradual embrace of the Hebrew Congregation and the general presence of Jews in Chautauqua,” Arthur said. 

They got the title, Shalom Chautauqua, from a speech given by former Chautauqua President Daniel Bratton. 

“He used the phrase 12 times in one speech,” Arthur said. 

Chautauquans had learned about Biblical Hebrews in education classes and lectures in the Amphitheater. There were lectures on Jewish immigration, especially New York City, near the end of the 19th century, and about sweatshops. 

The Hebrew Congregation first met in 1959 after two junior orchestra students, Barbara Wolfson and Betty Shine from Buffalo, wanted to go to services in Jamestown. Their house mother, Mrs. Weber, called Rabbi Julius Kerman of Temple Hesed Abraham to see if it was possible. He said it was too far to come for the very short Friday night service and there were no Saturday services in the summer. 

Mrs. Weber suggested the rabbi come to Chautauqua from Jamestown on Saturday, and obtained permission to use the Hall of Missions. The girls put out flyers and about 35 people came. Chautauqua’s administration did not want the group to use the Hall of Missions, so Kerman turned to his friend, the Rev. Charles Aldrich at Hurlbut Church, for help. 

The church gave permission for the Hebrew Congregation to meet there, and there they have been ever since. 

In 2017, the congregation was four years away from celebrating its 60th anniversary. Betty had the idea for a book. She was serving as the archivist for the congregation and knew there was material going back to 1959.

“The Hebrew Congregation was one of the first religious groups to house its archives with Chautauqua Institution,” she said.

At the time, Arthur had just finished three years as Hebrew Congregation co-president with Len Katz. The Salzes are among the longest-participating members of the congregation, and they knew some history that others did not. They knew some of the people who were among the first members of the congregation, like Arthur’s teacher, Mrs. Goldstein. 

They started interviewing people and then took the idea to the governing board of the congregation. 

“There was no objection and general enthusiasm,” Arthur said. “We can’t stress how much we learned writing this book and the joy of writing it.”

One of the people responsible for bringing many Jews to Chautauqua was Mischa Mischakoff, concertmaster of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra for many years. He encouraged musicians to come and play for the symphony and to bring their families. 

“But the New York City school teachers were the real Jewish presence on the grounds in the beginning,” Arthur said

The Salzes praised the leadership of Ralph Loew, head of the Department of Religion in the 1970s; former Chautauqua president Bratton; J. Ross Mackenzie and Joan Brown Campbell, former heads of the Department of Religion; and Maureen Rovegno, current director of the department, for creating an open and comfortable atmosphere for all religions at Chautauqua.

The invitation by Gene Robinson, vice president for religion and senior pastor at Chautauqua, to Rabbi Sharon Bros to be a chaplain of the week in 2019 — the first rabbi in Chautauqua’s history to preach from the Amp stage — was another high point.

“Rabbi Spong also opened doors with his knowledge of the Bible,” Betty said. Rabbi Spong? She was speaking about Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a staple of the Interfaith Lecture Series in the Hall of Philosophy for many years.

She laughed. “He was like a rabbi opening doors,” she clarified. “My Orthodox Jewish father loved listening to him. My father never would have heard him if it weren’t for Chautauqua. Not many places have grown this way. I think the founders would be thrilled.”

The Abrahamic Initiative, the building of the Everett Jewish Life Center and the opening of the Zigdon Chabad House show the growth and variety of the Jewish presence at Chautauqua.

The book itself is divided into eras, with several chapters in each era detailing the speakers, events and challenges of each era. The book ends with letters from the congregation’s presidents, reflecting on “My Jewish Journey.”

Because of the novel coronavirus, the celebration for the 60th anniversary of the Hebrew Congregation and the book will be held in 2021. It is available through the Chautauqua Bookstore, online or in the store.

Children will routinely meet the expectations set by adults and nothing further, said Carey Wright, state superintendent of education for Mississippi — and the expectations in Mississippi have been low for decades. 

“Mississippi’s reputation and public education has been linked to its overall reputation,” Wright said, “bringing in mind issues such as segregation, poverty, and some of the lowest-performing indicators in both health and education.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 7, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Wright delivered a lecture titled “What Has Worked in Reforming Mississippi’s Education System.” She talked about how Mississippi’s education system was routinely ranked as one of the worst in the United States, and how better equipping students and teachers has given the state some of the most momentum in the nation around education.

Wright started her career as a teacher, then an elementary school principal before taking on leadership roles at district and state levels. She has worked in suburban and urban districts, and with students and families across all socio-economic statuses.

“Throughout my career, my guiding principle as an educator has been one, firm belief that all children can learn and succeed,” Wright said.

When Wright arrived in Mississippi in 2013, Quality Counts, an annual analysis of American education systems by Education Week, ranked the state’s education system 50th in the nation, and its high school graduation rate was 75 percent. Currently, Mississippi’s graduation rate is 85 percent, an all-time high for the state, and has improved in K-12 achievement, students’ chances for success, and equity of education.

Wright said that Mississippi is no longer at the bottom and the state has a lot of momentum going into the future. Despite these achievements, Wright said that there are still skeptics within the state.

“I think the story has been told for so long about us always being at the bottom, that they don’t really understand what our schools and our teachers have achieved in the recent years,” Wright said. 

Mississippi adopted a variety of policies to change their education system, such as the Common Core State Standards in 2010. Wright said that one of Mississippi’s previous standards was that kindergarteners were only expected to count to 10; now their new standard is children counting to 100.

“We desperately needed higher academic standards. So we adopted those standards and they gave us the foundation to raise the bar for children in Mississippi,” Wright said. “We have since reviewed, revised our standards, and we have even renamed them.”

These higher standards for students required teachers to be able to teach at a higher level with new methods, and Wright said Mississippi passed legislation to help students and educators, including the Early Learning Collaborative Act the Literacy Based Promotion Act.

In 2013, The Early Learning Collaborative Act gave pre-kindergarten classes public money for the first time in Mississippi history, creating 1,500 programs, which Wright said has since doubled, in the most underserved areas of the state. She also said each year educators press Mississippi legislators to make kindergarten mandatory.

“So many children start behind their peers when they enter school. By age 3, children coming from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than their counterparts in affluent families,” Wright said. “That is a significant difference, and this difference has been linked to deficiencies in third-grade reading.”

The Literacy Based Promotion Act focused on reading from pre-K through third grade, requiring that students pass a reading test to be promoted to fourth grade, as well as better training for teachers. 

“When we started this, the Department of Education here in Mississippi didn’t have an Office for Literacy and didn’t have an Office for Early Childhood,” Wright said. “That is something that we have right now.”

Wright said the most important decision a principal makes is who they hire as teachers, because a teacher’s effectiveness is the most important factor for students’ success. She said that children that spend four to five years with highly effective teachers can have the potential to “totally eradicate (poverty’s effect) on student achievement.” This importance of teachers is part of the reason why Wright has focused on the development of educators and shifted the mindset of the Department of Education in Mississippi from trying to make schools and districts comply with their orders, to providing support and resources. 

Once the resources in place and the door to success in education is opened, Wright said students naturally walk though.

“Mississippi students are changing this culture of low expectations,” Wright said. “I am an eternal, eternal optimist. I believe so deeply in the capacity of all children to learn and grow. We all must believe this is possible. We’ve got to believe that the impossible is possible.”

The lecture then shifted to a Q-and-A session with Shannon Rozner, chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives for Chautauqua Institution. Rozner asked if Wright always wanted to be an educator. 

Wright said she always had a passion for teaching, and she gained even more motivation when she first taught in Maryland in the 1970s.

“Watching … fifth graders and sixth graders that were reading at a first- and second-grade level, it just broke my heart.” Wright said, “It was from that moment that I thought, ‘Regardless of who comes through that door and regardless of where they are, (we need) to make sure that they leave in a much better place than they arrived.’”

Rozner then asked about generational shifts, especially with students learning virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic and not interacting in person. 

Wright said that part of Mississippi’s digital plan for school is expanding tele-health and tele-therapy, or health care that does not have to be in person. She also said that they are working on ensuring that more people have access to pediatricians and mental-health therapists.

“This is a community. It’s got to come together and we can’t ignore the fact that children are struggling, but so are parents, so are teachers,” Wright said.

The words “groovy” and “jazzy” are not usually used to describe the classical works of giants like Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin. But Andrew Chen, a student from the Eastman School of Music, said Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin is helping him pick up the pace for the last piano recital of the season. 

“This piece is really upbeat and happy and just makes you want to dance,” Chen said. “Classical music has more versatility than we give it credit for.” 

First up for Chen is Kapustin’s “Variations,” Op. 41. Kapustin frequently mixed jazz influences with classical compositions, breaking boundaries for “that realm of the arts,” according to Chen.  

“All of his chords are different from Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin — all of them,” he said. “It’s unique technically, as well, as it is mostly played on all black keys. It is so rewarding to play.”

Chen, along with five other students from the Chautauqua School of Music Piano Program, will perform in their fourth and final recital of the season at 4 p.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 7, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch. Joining him are pianists Hyeseon Jin, Alexander Lo, Kerry Waller, Sheena Hui and ShunFu Chang.  

Chen will also play Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in D major, K. 576. It’s considered Mozart’s last sonata and originated during his trip to Berlin and Potsdam in 1789. Mozart was commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II to write a set of six easy sonatas for his daughter. 

“It is very lighthearted and joyous,” Chen said. “During the pandemic, it has been easy for our lives to begin to feel gloomy and repetitive, but Mozart brings a brighter spirit into the room with this piece.”

The selection by Mozart is “pleasing to the ears,” while the piece by Kapustin may be harder to digest for most listeners, Chen said. 

“For Kapustin, his sound isn’t heard much in a classical setting, so it’s nice to bring it to this platform knowing it won’t be expected and familiar to everyone in the room,” he said. 

Hyeseon Jin, a student from Indiana University, will play Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s “Sonetto 104 del Petrarch,” from a set of three “Petrarch Sonnets.” The pieces are inspired by the poetry of Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca and are all concerned with love.

Liszt published the “Petrarch Sonnets” in a score containing several other piano pieces, the second set of his “Années de Pèlerinage,” meaning “Years of Pilgrimage,” written during a two-year stay in Italy.

“I wanted to travel to Europe through Liszt’s music, since we can’t physically go anywhere during the pandemic,” Jin said. 

Originally conceived as songs for piano and tenor voice, Liszt later reinvented them as solo piano works. 

“There are actually quite complex lyrics assigned to this music,” Jin said. “As I am just playing the keyboard and not using the text, I have to convey the content of the poem through the keys. That’s something I have never taken on before.” 

“Sonetto 104” is the most passionate, agitated and dramatic of the three, based on the sonnet “I Find no Peace” by Sir Thomas Wyatt. In it, the Wyatt ponders the confused state love has put him in. Enthralled by his lover, he feels imprisoned, yet free, and “burns with love.”

“The poem is about love, but it uses a lot of contrasting stories to convey it,” Jin said. “For example, it talks about wanting to touch the sky, even though you are laying on the ground. There is a space between where you are, and where you want to be, which is ultimately with this person you are singing about being in love with.” 

Alexander Lo, another student from the Eastman School of Music, will perform Polish composer Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52. Chopin composed four ballades for solo piano between 1835 and 1842. His inspiration for the fourth was Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s poem, “The Three Budrys,” which tells the story of three brothers sent away by their father to seek treasures and their return with three Polish brides.

“Most people consider this one to be the most difficult of his four ballades,” Lo said. “It is extremely intense and profound from start to finish.”

Lo was a School of Music student in 2019 and said the “main bulk” of his time learning the Chopin piece took place on the grounds. The following school year, he set it aside, but brought it back during quarantine for “polishing.” 

“I wanted to bring this piece full circle,” Lo said. “So much of my progress with this piece took place at Chautauqua, so to have my first real performance of it happen at Chautauqua as well gave me that extra motivation to make it something special.”

In addition to his one-on-one lessons and coachings, Lo said he found himself working on his selection in “all aspects of the (School of Music) programming.”

“I would take what I learned from the master classes and lectures and ask myself what those lessons could add to the meaning of my music,” he said. “It was enriching to look at this piece for so long and so in-depth — I feel like I know it from the inside-out now.”

After working in the Department of Education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, Diane Ravitch joined several conservative think tanks and advocated for school choice and charter schools. However, in 2006, she said, she became very skeptical of her own views. 

“I began writing and speaking against the things that I had believed in for many years. I basically said, ‘I’ve been wrong for a number of years, and I want to set the record straight,’” Ravitch said. “As the tests are mostly a reflection of family background, you could look at any test results you want. … They all show the richest kids at the top and the poorest kids at the bottom.” 

Ravitch is a research professor of education at New York University and the president of Network for Public Education. At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Ravitch held a conversation with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, titled “The History of Education and Where It’s Going.” Ravitch discussed the privatization of education in the United States, the failings of charter schools and action that needs to be taken to help students, teachers and communities, especially during the age of COVID-19.

Ravitch said that the push for privatization first came from Republicans, but President Bill Clinton was one of the first Democratic politicians to support charter schools, creating a federal program in 1994 that used $5 million to make charter startups. 

“It was unusual for Democrats to support charter schools at that time, because it meant handing money over to private entrepreneurs,” Ravitch said. “What the private entrepreneurs have done with the charter money since then is create a charter sector, which enrolls 6% of American schoolchildren, and there are about 6,000 charter schools overall.”

Ravitch said these 6,000 charter schools attract immense public attention because they are presented as “miracle cures.” Over the past 20 years, she said, people have learned that these schools are very unstable, as they are part of the free market.

“The free market has a lot of casualties. If you look at whether it’s shoe stores or restaurants, they come and go,” Ravitch said. “Some of them persist, some of them don’t. The same is true of charter schools.”

She said there are corporate chains of charter schools, including non-profits and for-profits. 

“When they are for-profit, they obviously make money. When they’re non-profit, instead of making money, they pay huge salaries,” Ravitch said. “In some cases, the CEO may be earning a million dollars a year, which in public education is ridiculous.”

Ravitch said that in American legislation, charter schools are called public charter schools, but are “actually not public schools; they’re privately managed schools that receive public money. You might call them contract schools.”

President George W. Bush became a major supporter of charter schools, and Ravitch said while many people thought President Barack Obama would be opposed, his administration built on education programs created during the Bush administration.

During the economic crisis in 2008, the Obama administration sent out $100 billion in aid to help the education system, but Ravitch said Congress gave around $5 billion of that aid to Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan — a charter school supporter — to distribute.

Duncan helped create the “Race to the Top” program, and told states that to receive part of that $5 billion, they would have to agree to create more charter schools, adopt the Common Core Standards and evaluate teachers on the scores of their students, as well as close schools that produced very low scores. 

“All these were really bad ideas because there was no evidence behind any of them. None. The Common Core had never been tried … so no one knew whether it would make a difference or not. Ten years later we can say it made no difference,” Ravitch said. “Opening more charter schools didn’t solve any problems because the charter schools we already had were not solving any problems.”

Ravitch said evaluating teachers based on the test scores of their students was demoralizing for the teachers. Individual teachers may teach students with disabilities who make very small progress — progress that Ravitch said should be celebrated — while others may have classes of gifted students. 

Almost half of all charter schools ever created have closed, and Ravitch said some collect money from the federal government and never open. 

“So it’s a very volatile sector. Arnie Duncan’s administration was really a series of bad policies, and his emphasis on charter schools and his tremendous support for them paved the way for Betsy DeVos,” Ravitch said. “Then Trump was elected, and he brought in Betsy DeVos who had no background in education, other than as an opponent of public schools.”

Ewalt asked Ravitch about why she wrote her recent book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.

Ravitch said she first laid out steps that society should be taking in terms of public education, such as opposing the closures of schools. She wrote about a civil rights leader named Jeetu Brown, who organized a dozen people to fight the closure of the last open-enrollment high school in the south side of Chicago.

“I wanted to tell their stories and many more about parents, teachers, and students who said, ‘No,’ and who fought back,” Ravitch said. “So that’s the story of slaying Goliath, and then the other half of the story is who is Goliath.”

Ravitch said that the “Goliath” in terms of public education and charter schools are the very few, wealthy individuals who are supporting the privatization of education — “a very small number of people are imposing privatization against the wishes of communities, who are losing their right to choose their school, for the right to have a say in what happens to their community, and who are being turned from citizens into consumers. None of which helps education. None of which helps kids.”

Ravitch said if the leaders of the movement were to hold a convention and not invite anyone who was paid by them, there would be no one there.

“This is a movement that is not fueled by passion, or by volunteers,” she said. “It’s fueled by money, and only by money.”

Ewalt then asked Ravitch to discuss the weakness in the U.S. education system exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ravitch said the pandemic has exposed inequities in schools, such as resources in affluent suburbs versus resources in cities. She said districts with many resources are able to take greater care of the health of their students and staff, with some schools able to cover each student desk with plastic.

“In the impoverished urban districts, even when there’s a lot of money being spent, it’s still not enough for the incredible needs of kids who are exposed every day to trauma, and to hunger and to lack of medical care,” Ravitch said.

The pandemic also showed disparities in access to the internet, and each district has had to find funding to provide some sort of access to their students. 

“This is harder where students don’t have a computer at home,” Ravitch said. “I’ve heard about students who are getting their online lessons on the one cell phone that their family has.”

For the final instrumental recital of the season, Ellé Crowhurst is attempting to complete a jigsaw puzzle in under 10 minutes. 

Crowhurst will play the first three movements of “Sonatine” by Zenobia Powell Perry. Alone, Perry’s tonal shifts may sound out of place, unjustifiably incomplete. The hard part then, Crowhurst said, is putting the pieces together.

“In the musical aspects of the piece itself, Zenobia wrote in tonal contexts,” Crowhurst said. “She always tried to stay in that realm, which was different from her colleagues at the time in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s all placed unexpectedly, but comes together in the end.”

I think it’s important to discover new repertoire during this time when we are trying to address the lack of diversity that is in our society at large, which includes the fine arts where we stick to our same favorite composers,” Crowhurst said. “I was excited to find a piece that was representing a different side of music.”

Crowhurst, a clarinetist from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, will take the virtual stage with five other students from the Chautauqua School of Music Instrumental Program at 7 p.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Porch. Joining her is violist Alexis Mitrushi, cellist Carl Eckert, and violinists Olivia Taylor, Masayoshi Arakawa and Emma Reader-Lee. 

Perry’s colleagues, Crowhurst said, were homogeneous: white men from Western European traditions. Perry, however, was not only a female composer, but a composer of African-American and Creek Indian descent, bringing a “diverse and cultural” perspective to an otherwise analogous industry.  

“I think it’s important to discover new repertoire during this time when we are trying to address the lack of diversity that is in our society at large, which includes the fine arts where we stick to our same favorite composers,” she said. “I was excited to find a piece that was representing a different side of music.”

Listening for the “vocal influences” amid the tonality will guide the audience in understanding the piece, she said. 

“It is incredibly virtuosic,” Crowhurst said. “Sometimes it becomes a bit thinner in texture or is merely centripetal instead of forming a formal melody and accompaniment. You have to pay close attention.” 

Karl Eckert, a student from Vanderbilt University, will play the first movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Sinfonia Concertante” in E minor, Op. 125. The 40-minute movement is a large-scale work initially composed for cello and orchestra. Prokofiev dedicated the composition to Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who premiered it in 1952. 

“It’s really high in register for the cello, which is on par for all Prokofiev’s compositions,” Eckert said. “He was always pushing the envelope, especially in terms of range.”

Before writing “Sinfonia Concertante,” Op. 125, Prokofiev wrote Cello Concerto, Op. 58, which was considered to be a “soulless” concerto. That composition renewed Prokofiev’s interest in mastering the cello and he rewrote the concerto into the current Op. 125.

“Prokofiev turned it into a free-flowing, cadenza-like piece in the end, which means you have to build your own character when you perform something of his — he didn’t just hand it to you,” he said.

Emma Reader-Lee, a student from the University of Ottawa, will perform the first movement of Robert Schumann’s 1851 Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Op. 105. The movement, “Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck,” meaning “with passionate expression,” is a “beautiful, but haunting conveyance.” 

“It’s quite an emotional event,” Reader-Lee said. “It starts minor, in a sad and restless sense and then it jumps back and forth into major. The melodies are beautiful because of that variety.”

Instead of explosive notes, the movement is filled with passionate tones, sporadically relieved by moments of “lighthearted delicacy.” Reader-Lee said there are also drastic fluctuations in the tempo, something the performer must anticipate ahead of time. In that, the selection takes a lot of preparation, a luxury she didn’t have. “It’s actually quite new,” Reader-Lee said, as she had her first lesson for the piece in the first week of April. 

“It’s gratifying to be able to play a new piece and get it to performance level in this brand new platform,” she said. “Putting my all into this helped me push past what I thought would be limitations. Turns out, they weren’t limiting at all.”