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Eleven years ago, Dennis Galucki was struck by the idea of a city where the aesthetic values of Chautauqua Institution existed not just nine weeks a year, but all 52. Galucki attached this idea to his Western New York hometown, which he felt uniquely embodied these values when he established the Institution’s annual Buffalo Day. But as years have passed, Galucki has come to believe that Buffalo Day shouldn’t stop at Buffalo.

“I hope others do explore that connection (of bringing Institution values elsewhere). Why not have an Atlanta Day at Chautauqua? In a digital age, why not think that way?” Galucki said. “It’s not about everybody from Atlanta or San Francisco going to Chautauqua that day — it’s about highlighting a connection (of values), and nurturing it back in your hometown.”

Galucki hopes to inspire Chautauquans to consider these ideas at 12:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 14, on the Virtual Porch in a Buffalo Day panel discussion titled “The Sacred Nature of Art & Democracy: Exploring Life’s Aesthetic Values – Beauty, Truth, Goodness, & Justice.” The panel will be moderated by Galucki and Emily Morris, Institution vice president of marketing and communications.

The panel will feature Stephanie Crockatt, executive director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy; Joe Lin-Hill, deputy director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Michael G. Murphy, the president of Shea’s Performing Art Center; and Adam Zyglis, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at The Buffalo News.

The week’s theme of “Art and Democracy” spoke to Galucki. He first started to recognize the similarities of Buffalo and Chautauqua through art and architecture in Buffalo. When looking at historical landmarks, Galucki found that they spoke of pillars and values that defined Buffalo at the time of their construction: art, architecture, history and nature. 

These four values reminded Galucki of the Institution’s four pillars: arts, education, religion, and recreation. Just like Chautauqua, he saw Buffalo’s potential to foster life-long learning, and this sparked what he called the Buffalo-Chautauqua idea. This idea is further exemplified with the Institution’s theme for Week Three. 

“I can connect Buffalo really legitimately with this theme: ‘Art and Democracy,’” Galucki said. “After 11 years it was, in my mind, the best theme that came along to go ahead and do this.”

Galucki believes that this discussion on “Art and Democracy” also comes at an interesting time in history, because current social justice movements have inspired powerful works of public art. 

“Perhaps the most significant art this year is the three words ‘Black Lives Matter,’” Galucki said. “I could argue that the painting of that (phrase) in front of municipal buildings, including the White House, may be the most profound work of art in a long time.”

Galucki said that the panel’s message of justice — along with truth, goodness and beauty — can be relatable across the country. He hopes that the audience can connect to this panel’s message and inspire similar work in their own regions.

“Hopefully people are entertained and find the experience worth wanting to know more about Chautauqua if they are first-timers, or reinforcing their support of Chautauqua if they are folks that have been around,” Galucki said. “That should be why anybody speaks. Yeah, educational, informative, fine. But I would argue that it better be entertaining.”

This program is made possible by the Buffalo-Chautauqua Idea and Connection: Galucki Family Endowment Fund.

For the Rev. Willie James Jennings, sin — racism, sexism and weapons of mass destruction, to name a few — is defined as a misalignment of gospel.

Jennings represented the perspective of Evangelical Christianity for Week Two’s Interfaith Friday on July 10 for CHQ Assembly. Audience members also participated by submitting questions through the www.questions.chq.org portal and through Twitter with #CHQ2020.

Jennings, associate professor of systematic theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, is the author of several books, including The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. In 2015, he received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his work on race and Christianity, and most recently his written commentary on the Book of Acts won the Reference Book of the Year Award from The Academy of Parish Clergy. His forthcoming book, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, will be published in October 2020.

Citing the Nicene Creed, Jennings said Christianity in all its forms has emphasized the relationship between humans, God and Jesus. Jennings made a point to differentiate Protestant Evangelical Christianity from the sort of Evangelical Christianity that Jennings said had negative interpretations in political and social spheres.

Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion and senior pastor, joined Jennings in the live virtual conversation.

“I consider myself an Evangelical, which makes most Evangelicals’ blood run cold,” said Robinson, the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop.

In Protestant Evangelical Christianity, the good news, or gospel, is directly tied to God creating the world and humans in his image.

“God created us out of love,” Jennings said. “Not out of compulsion, not out of necessity and certainly not out of arbitrariness.”

To maintain God’s creation is to keep a relationship with God. But it’s possible to step outside the bounds of this relationship.

“Of course, the struggle for us is how to live a relationship that aligns with the loving and life-giving reality of God,” Jennings said. “What we call sin … has to do with this misalignment.”

Misalignment, or sin, is using God’s gift of creation for destruction. Jennings said European colonizers were a major example of this.

“(Europeans) looked out into the world and imagined it as a resource given to them by God,” Jennings said.

Jennings said weapons are another high-level form of misalignment.

“(The existence of weapons) reshapes the social landscape of the imagination,” Jennings said. “A world awash with guns is a world already bent toward fear and violence.”

And both guns and weapons of mass destruction are a reckoning not just for the Christian faith — they point “not only to a weakness in our faith traditions, but a crisis in our belief in a god who creates,” Jennings said.

Even without a crisis in belief, Jennings said God and his creation — including humanity — should still be both a mystery and joy that doesn’t need to be solved.

But the concept of flesh in the Bible has been a source of pain for Black and indigenous people. Jennings said in the Gospel of John, the apostle — a subordinate to Jesus — was not the light but gave witness to that light. This introduction to the treatment of people based on status in the New Testament communicated to people of color that perhaps God had ignored them.

But in Genesis in the Old Testament, however, the story of creation placed all people as equal and important in a “profound, society-breaking, oppression-breaking” affirmation.

The concept of flesh in Christianity changed throughout time. Jennings said there are two levels of its understanding: the flesh and body as a symbol of weakness, and the flesh as an indication of how a larger system treats someone.

“It’s an indication of a wider system … in which the body is captured in political, economical and social forms of oppression and subjugation,” Jennings said. “The Gospel comes to free us from this.”

Fundamentalist Christian thought collapses the two definitions. But Jennings said that in the Christian faith, God frees people from the suffering of flesh by entering the world of the flesh through Jesus to free people from subjugation by going through suffering himself.

“Gods (in many religions) with any sense at all certainly didn’t want to become human,” Robinson said. “The fact that God does, and did (through Jesus), is shocking.”

Sin is also often described through a weakness in flesh.

“The way of the flesh is a life out of control, a life enslaved,” Jennings said. “The creation of race would not have been possible without Christianity. People still think it is as natural as biology. For many people, the word ‘race’ can be replaced with ‘culture’ (and vice versa).”

Jennings said much of sin is tied to not being able to exist in a shared world and undermining an innate connectivity.

Police brutality is an example of this sinful disconnect.

“The way whiteness has formed in some people has caused a deep disconnect from their environment and their world and from other people,” Jennings said. “What drives policing is fear of the ‘other.’”

Diving into the history of how lands have been taken on a local and global level is one way to counter this disconnect.

“We tend to operate in what I call harmless history,” Jennings said. “It’s the history of the heroes, the powerful men. ‘They had their warts, they had their weaknesses, but look at what they accomplished.’ That harmless history is always going to thwart the depth of listening.”

For a person to think they know everything about other humans, he said, is also a disservice to this process of listening.

“The danger is to mistake apprehension with comprehension,” Jennings said. “What’s necessary is a lighter touch that most people in the West don’t tend to have.”

Returning to the Nicene Creed, which denoted a shift in how humans’ understanding of the word of God changed, Jennings and Robinson agreed the council meeting that created the creed was evidence of God’s struggle with creation’s inability to comprehend his meaning.

Robinson said Chautauqua Institution itself has its own reckoning to do in how the ratio of diversity among its speakers is greater than the diversity of viewers in its audience.

“Racial segregation is a highly skilled, profoundly cultivated practice of our collective life,” Jennings said. “No all-white community — or predominantly white community — happened by accident. It happened through a relentless cultivation of segregation. Quietly, subtly, but consistently. Which means that it cannot be overcome without an intentionality that presses in the opposite direction of that subtle, relentless cultivation.”

Ori Soltes has been a pass holder to his “grown-up Disneyland” of Chautauqua Institution for the past 23 seasons, and the move to the digital platform was no deterrent. Although he is never sure which ride to pick first, the Interfaith Lecture Series is always a highlight.

This season, he returns to that platform to explore “The Spiritual Soul and Political Body in Art.” 

“You really can’t describe how (Chautauqua is) special if you haven’t been there. It’s just a unique environment (with) the kinds of questions that are being raised and asked,” Soltes said. “The interests that these people have in all these different things, it’s a unique kind of hothouse of sorts — it’s very compelling.” 

Soltes is a professor of art history, theology, philosophy, and political history at Georgetown University, as well as the former director of B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum and a seasoned Chautauqua lecturer. He will speak on the Week Three interfaith theme of “Art: A Glimpse into the Divine” at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, July, 13 on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Soltes is enamored with the subject at hand. In his lecture, he will be speaking on the interwoven nature of art, religion, and politics, as well as how they work together in the context of a democracy. 

There are crisis moments where people, Americans in particular, become much more interested in spirituality and religion than they might otherwise be,” Soltes said. “America has always been a very religious country. We may separate church from state, but I find Americans far more religious than Italians, or French, Spanish or Germans. They all have state religions, but they are much more lowkey about it than we are.”

Soltes said that in the time of ancient Egypt, art was commissioned by those in the ruling class to depict them in a divine light to those beneath them. In the modern day, art is created as a “response,” either positive or negative, to show the artist’s interpretation of political leaders and their actions.

“It’s an angle of an artist who isn’t in the service of whoever is running the state, but rather responding to whoever is running the state to an audience of individuals, some of whom will disagree, some of whom won’t disagree with whatever he or she is depicting in that work of art,” he said. 

In the last few decades, Soltes said he has seen a “reexploration” of religion in America.

“There are crisis moments where people, Americans in particular, become much more interested in spirituality and religion than they might otherwise be,” Soltes said. “America has always been a very religious country. We may separate church from state, but I find Americans far more religious than Italians, or French, Spanish or Germans. They all have state religions, but they are much more lowkey about it than we are.”

Given recent politically charged events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, rising unemployment rates and the Black Lives Matter movement, Soltes believes it is fair to say topics such as race and ethnicity have not been this “front and center” in religion since the 1960s. 

“I would add religion in particular because of the religious aspect of what winds its way around the politics of the moment is particularly acute,” Soltes said. “It couldn’t be more relevant in this moment.”  

As a seasoned lecturer, Soltes said he is excited to be a part of the new virtual experience and Q-and-A session — along with the potential of having a broader Chautauqan audience. 

“The fact that anyone from anywhere can sign in and become a member of the Assembly and listen in to whatever lectures they want, means there’s a possibility of an even broader and more diverse audience than what is ordinarily the case,” Soltes said.

Soltes, like any other Chautauqua lecture speaker, hopes the audience enjoys his lecture, but more than that, he hopes people close the tab with a better understanding of the triangular connection between art, religion, and politics. 

“If they thought about the subject at all, I hope it deepens and broadens the way they think about it,” Soltes said. “If they haven’t thought about it before, I hope it really introduces them to the reality that religion and politics have always been interwoven, that art has always served religion and therefore, by extension, has always served politics.”

Better yet, he is always up for a “challenge.” 

“It really is just a fascinating topic,” Soltes said. “Aside from the challenge of talking to a camera instead of a large audience, there’s always a challenge of, ‘OK what can I squeeze into 40 minutes?’ I like that challenge.” 

This program is made possible by The Myra Baker Low and Katharine Low Hembree Family Fund.

It was a casual affair. 

Dressed in a black Miller High Life tee paired with a blazer and flat cap, Ben Folds sat at his keyboard. Beside him, a table, cluttered with headphones, water and various pens and pieces of paper. Among them, a blue one, where he sketched out a rundown of his program, which was left entirely up to him.

In an attempt to soundproof the room, a mattress stood against the back wall. With a few notes of introduction, Folds began sharing his music with the world via Skype — all the way from Sydney, Australia, where it was 7 a.m. 

For “An Evening with Ben Folds,” Folds, musician, composer and record producer, performed at 5 p.m. EDT Friday, July 10, on CHQ Assembly’s Video Platform hosted by Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Deborah Sunya Moore. The performance is available on-demand. 

Folds’ 2015 album So There consists of eight chamber pop songs in collaboration with yMusic Ensemble and a piano concerto performed with the Nashville Symphony. It’s also his most recent, so he started there with “Capable of Anything,” a pocket symphony of sorts. 

Amid piano riffs and chords, Folds sang “We are capable of anything / But you don’t seem to think / That you are / Capable of anything.” As he hit the last note of the song, Folds thanked and bowed to his metaphorical audience. 

“I made them all up — that’s why I play them,” Folds said as he began the next piece, “Jesusland.”

“Jesusland,” a piece including analytical commentary on America, is from his 2005 Songs for Silverman album. Folds sings about the use of Jesus’ name to push consumerism, lamenting through lyrics such as “Town to town / broadcast to each house / they drop your name but no one knows your face / Billboards quoting things you’d never say / You hang your head and pray for Jesusland.” Folds’ voice, under rolling piano phrases, grew fainter and fainter with each repeated chorus. 

While in quarantine in Australia, Folds’ newfound free time has been spent working on a new album, and the release of his first single in two years, “2020.” Folds said he wrote the ballad using the year’s events, pairing an upbeat tone with somber lyrics. Folds let his keyboard rise and swell with gentle pentatonic chords.

“It is really difficult to write in an era where the news cycle is so fast,” Folds said. “I thought, ‘Waltzes are timeless’ and it should be about this year, but it has to be specific to the middle of the year because the song will be old news in a few days.”

“Don’t it seem like decades ago / Back in 2019 / Back when life was slow,” he sings on the track released on June 25. “We’re just halfway done / 2020, hey are we having fun? / How many years will we try to cram into one?”

The next four songs stretched across the past two decades, weaving in and out of his era in his band, Ben Folds Five. First was “Zak and Sara,” a pop song on his 2001 album Rockin’ the Suburbs, his first solo album after leaving the band. The song’s intricate piano riffs shook his plastic keyboard, mirroring the ethos of the J.D. Salinger short story collection, Franny and Zooey, from which he drew inspiration. Folds’ right hand played bluesy rhythms, while his left anchored the piece with root chords. It was followed by “Don’t Change your Plans,” released in 1999 on his rock album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. “Landed,” the title track of the 2005 Landed album, came next, bringing the energy down, as Folds said the lyrics were written about a friend who went through a bad relationship. The song accentuated beats two and four in each measure, saturating it with a groovy sense of rhythm reminiscent of jazz. The next song was the most recent, 2013’s “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces.” The song was so raucous, Moore and Folds joked that if Folds’ neighbors were not awake before, they were by the time he finished. 

Folds, who has composed original music live with the National Symphony Orchestra, is renowned for his musical improvisation skills, which Moore put to the test with an audience member’s request on Twitter. The request was for an impromptu cover of a popular artist’s song. The example was Post Malone, who Folds admitted he doesn’t listen to, but made up a tune on the spot to honor the pop artist anyway. 

“Post Malone / I don’t know / Never heard your goddamn music / I’m sure it’s good / It makes a lot of people happy / Post Malone / here is a song from some old fucker back in Australia,” he said. Using vibrato and deliberatemusical phrasing and placement, Folds carved a Beatles-like tune seemingly out of thin air. 

The music had an intermission with the mention of his memoir A Dream About Lightning Bugs, which was published in 2019. According to Moore, the first 10 pages introduce his philosophy about “light and about a moment,” which she said would be “great to hear right now.” Folds proceeded to read the closing paragraph aloud. 

The last song on the program was “The Luckiest,” a love song originally written for a kissing scene in the 2000 movie “Loser,” directed by Amy Heckerling. Folds struggled to recall the opening chords, which flowed well with the starting lyrics, “I don’t get many things right the first time.” Ratcheting up the drama in this last piece, Folds’ eyes squeezed shut and let his hands roam free across the black and white keys — every muscle in his body appeared to tense with the concentration of a consummate musician.

Each summer, more than 10 million kids in America spend their days at camps or youth programs exploring outside, making friendship bracelets and tie dye T-shirts, playing games with friends or learning new skills and hobbies. 

Typically, days like this might end around a campfire roasting marshmallows, or in a log cabin packed full of friends. Chautauqua Institution, has, for years provided traditional and engaging summer camp and youth programs for children and teenagers on Chautauqua’s grounds. A variety of activities and classes have been available for children for decades through the Children’s School for ages 3 to 5, Group One for students entering first grade and the Boys’ and Girls’ Club, which has programs for grades two through 10.

This season at Chautauqua is full of interesting and educational programs for children of all ages, just like seasons of the past. The only difference? Each of the programs is now online. 

Instead of bug spray and baseball caps, Chautauqua’s youth need an internet connection, an open mind and a sense of creativity. 

Director of Youth and Family Programs Alyssa Porter was adamant that this year’s experience will not be the same — and that it is not meant to be. 

“It was important to me as we started this process that we didn’t try to replicate our youth activity experiences as online programs, because there is the magic of being a young person on Chautauqua’s grounds that you just aren’t going to get through a screen,” Porter said. “However, now family members, siblings and parents can participate in a new way, and that is something I’m excited about.”

The programs themselves will not, for the most part, be broadcast live, but there will be opportunities for live meetings and collaborations. Each different program is hosted on the CHQ Assembly Online Classroom and will allow participants to tune in to a video to learn about the day’s activities or receive prompts, which they will then complete on their own or with family members before returning for a re-cap of the day with their counselors. 

One key concern for Porter and her coworkers is the mental health of children and young adults through the progression of the pandemic. News reports have shown an increase in anxiety levels in children and Porter realized that making connections with friends was now especially difficult. 

“We want our kids to have a sense of normalcy at a time when the world is so chaotic,” Porter said. “I want to make sure that the mental health and well being of our young people was first and foremost in our goals, which is what we are trying to accomplish here.”

In order to help facilitate the transition to online activities while retaining a sense of community, the youth and family programs have stretched into the world of social media, sometimes reposting content from the virtual classroom, and sometimes sharing something completely original via the video app TikTok or the social media site Instagram, both with the handle @chq_clubhouse. 

“This is an important element for me because the Online Classroom is so new for our families that I wanted to make sure that we were in a space that was familiar to young people as well,” Porter said. “We are using it as an additional tool to really connect and bring people together.”

Chautauqua offers an array of unique programming, from nature and art programs to literary classes and STEM camps, each led by counselors who have helped to design the programs. The counselors were given full creative freedom to construct the programs, something that Porter thinks has helped to keep the excitement alive. 

The new classes and programs will appear hand-in-hand with many Chautauqua traditions, such as making friendship bracelets or lanyards; The Boys’ and Girls’ Club tradition of tie-dye events has migrated onto social media, where there is a weekly “Tie-Dye Tuesday” livestream. 

“Beyond the traditions, it was really up to my counselors to decide what they were passionate about and what they thought would work well within this format,” Porter said. “None of us have the roadmap for how this works, so we can’t be afraid to make mistakes or share ideas because that is what helps keep this exciting and interesting.”

Porter hopes the experiences that children have in the youth programs will be ones that they carry with them throughout life, especially in uncertain times.

“Some of what we forget as adults is that those activities and arts and crafts that we learn as kids in youth programs can become great self-care tools and coping skills,” Porter said. “It’s especially important now to take care of yourself.”

“Scarcity, like separation, like us versus them, is an illusion. We need to build a longer table, not a wall,” said Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ, at the 10:45 a.m. EDT Sunday, July 12, service of worship and sermon on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Boyle’s sermon, “A Longer Table,” was pre-recorded. The scripture text was John 6:1-15 (NRSV) —

“After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now th

e Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’ When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”

Boyle grew up in a family of 10 people and “no one was thrilled with leftovers,” he said. “Five loaves and two fish to fill everybody, that is abundance and shows God’s longing to fill all of us.”

He told the congregation that we are living in a time “where we are shattering the narrative of racism, we are choosing to walk together as kin. As writer James Baldwin said, ‘This is us achieving ourselves.’”

Boyle often travels with trainees of Homeboy Industries. On a trip to Chicago he took Germaine and Jose, who together had spent almost half a century in prison. “It was only when we got into the car to go to LAX did I realize that they were from rival gangs. I prepared myself for a long five days.”

As they waited in line at Southwest Airlines, Jose, “in what the homies call a ‘loud-ass voice’ said ‘G, can I use airplane mode?’” Boyle said. He leaned in close and in an almost whisper said, “Once you get on the plane and the doors close, then you can switch to airplane mode.”

Jose turned to a woman, a stranger, and said, “I’ve never used it before.” The stranger looked at him and said, “Oh, OK.”

Boyle said, “Jose was inviting us into an infinite moment of abundance in the here and now; we were just occupied with propriety.”

On their fourth day in Chicago, Boyle dropped Germaine and Jose off at the Navy Pier to get gifts for their families. The next day, they showed him their gifts — bears from Build-A-Bear.

“Jose dressed his bear as a nurse because his lady is a nurse,” Boyle said. Jose had recorded a message in the bear, “I love you with all my heart. Come here and give me a kiss.”

As they all moved through TSA at the airport, they heard the bear say, “I love you with all my heart.” And when Jose put his dufflel into the overhead bin, the bear said “Come here and give me a kiss.” 

Boyle said, “We laughed together. Those who wish to sing will always find a song. This was our song.”

One the way home, Jose told Boyle, “You know what my favorite part of the trip was? Getting to know this guy,” pointing to Germaine, who nodded in agreement, smiling. 

Some weeks later, Jose came in to see Boyle. He had gotten word that his father was dying. Jose had not seen his father in 20 years and only spoke to him five days before his death.

“Jose has a twin brother, and at age 9 they made a pact that when their father came home, drunk, and started whaling on their mother, they would defend her,” Boyle said. “When the father came home, they jumped on his back and he fell over. But in his rage he got free and dragged them out to the street and said, ‘You are dead to me now. You will never enter this house again.’”

Jose and his brother lived in a local park, sleeping in a garbage can until they got into a gang. Boyle said, “They locked arms with other orphans and sold drugs. Jose walked out of prison after 24 years; his twin is still in prison.”

Jose called his father on his deathbed because he needed to forgive him. He did not want to carry the burden anymore.

He told Boyle, “In the six months I have been at Homeboy, I am enjoying the man I have become like I never have before.”

Boyle told the congregation, “Enjoy is an odd word. It is abundance, a word soaked in the resurrection.”

At the feeding of the 5,000 in John, multitudes enjoyed what they became. They were filled, like in Exodus, with supernatural food, with manna from the sky.

“Abundance means there is plenty for everyone. If we have more than we need, we build a longer table. Anyone who wants to sing will always find a song. Abundance, kin, us achieving ourselves,” Boyle concluded.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president for religion and senior pastor of Chautauqua Institution, presided at the service, live from the Hall of Christ in Chautauqua. Joshua Stafford, interim organist for Chautauqua Institution, played the Tallman Tracker Organ. Amanda Lynn Bottoms, Chautauqua School of Music Alumna and currently the Washington National Opera Cafritz Young Artist, served as soloist. The organ prelude was “Adagio,” from Sonata No. 1, by Felix Mendolssohn. Bottoms sang the opening hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The anthem, sung by Bottoms, was “Thine, O Savior, is Love Unending,” by Martin Blumner, words by Theodore Baker. The offertory hymn was “My God, Thy Table Now is Spread,” sung by Bottoms. The tune was Rockingham and the words were written by Philip Doddridge and Isaac Watts. Bottoms sang the offertory anthem, “A Simple Song,” by Leonard Bernstein, words from Psalm 121 and 128 and Stephen Schwartz. The choral response was “God be With You Till We Meet Again,” sung by Bottoms. The organ postlude was “Allegro assai vivace,” from Sonata No.1, by Felix Mendelssohn. The program is made possible by the Samuel M. and Mary E. Hazlett Memorial Fund.

Love, Fr. Gregory Boyle said recently, is greater than the virus.

“We know love never fails,” Boyle said earlier this spring in a “Thought for the Day” video on the Homeboy Industries website. “Love is the antidote to fear.” 

Boyle’s message to the world, “Love Never Fails. It Will Always Find A Way To Have Its Way,” sits prominently on the landing page for Homeboy Industries.Boyle “returns” to Chautauqua Institution as chaplain-in-residence for Week Three of the CHQ Assembly. His first sermon, titled “A Longer Table,” will be broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Sunday, July 12, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the service of worship and sermon. His subsequent sermons will be broadcast as part of the 9:15 a.m. EDT morning devotionals on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform Monday, July 13, through Friday, July 17. The titles for his homilies for the week include “Fire All the Other Gods,” “The Thorn Underneath,” “Your Soul Clapping Its Hands,” “Housesitting for God” and “The Place Itself.”

Boyle has been posting 5-minute homilies during the COVID-19 quarantine, which he said is known as “house arrest” to the homeboys and girls. 

“God stands with the powerless to remind them of their power,” he said on March 21. “I get memes and texts that are outsized in their tenderness and humor. The memes and gifs are how we remind each other of our own power.”

His homily for Easter morning was titled “If you feel like you are going to go mad or lose hope — don’t.” The risen life is inside this present life; Easter morning is about right now, he said. “Love wins and always will.”

Homeboy Industries has responded to the COVID-19 virus, with homies at the Homeboy Bakery and Homegirl Café preparing meals for people who are food insecure, funded by online sales of coffee cakes and cookies. 

Boyle marched in the Hollywood Black Lives Matter protest. He wrote, “I was stunned by the diversity of folks and yet, was struck by the fact that I was clearly the oldest person in view. I couldn’t find another geezer. Young people have been galvanized to put first things recognizably first. This was heartening. I was proud to stand with them, to stand with Black Lives Matter and to stand for the radical kinship that has been our hallmark at Homeboy.”

Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles is the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. In 1998, Boyle, parishioners and community members started the work that would lead to Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises

A Jesuit priest, Boyle served from 1986 to 1992 as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. That was where he witnessed the impact of gang violence on the community during the so-called “decade of death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992. While law enforcement and the criminal justice system used policies of suppression and mass incarceration as a means to end gang violence, Boyle and the community both in and outside of his parish adopted a radical approach: treating gang members as human beings. 

Boyle is the author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship. For his work, he has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame, and in 2014, President Barack Obama named him a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics.

This program is made possible by the Samuel M. and Mary E. Hazlett Memorial Fund. 

The song of American urbanization is played on an accordion, “in and out, in and out,” said Derek Thompson, senior writer at The Atlantic. 

“Americans compressed themselves into urban areas in the early 20th century. And then by mid-century, many white families were fanning out to the suburbs,” Thompson said. “Then in the early 21st century, young people rushed back into downtown areas — but the next few years, I think, American cities will exhale more residents who have moved to smaller metros and southern suburbs.” 

American cities will not be the same after the COVID-19 crisis, according to Thompson: fewer tourists, less diverse food, maybe safer and healthier and less nightlife. Many people who moved into expensive downtown areas may also move.

“But then something very interesting will happen — the accordion will constrict again and American cities will have a renaissance of affordability,” Thompson said. “In the decade after the Great Recession, American cities became really popular.” 

Thompson is the author of Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, which explores how blockbuster success is created through a mix of power, networks and other factors, and the host and founder of the podcast “Crazy/Genius.” On July 10, he presented his lecture, “How COVID-19 is Reshaping Our World,” as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series on CHQ Assembly. This was the last presentation in Week Two’s theme of “Forces Unseen: What Shapes Our Daily Lives.” 

Thompson said that large businesses are getting larger due to the pandemic. These big companies, such as Walmart and Amazon, have several advantages over smaller competitors: more cash reserves, a closer relationship with the government and banks that are more likely to bail them out first. Thompson thinks that these big companies will do a disproportionate amount of hiring after the pandemic.

Early in the crisis, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called COVID-19 “the Great Equalizer.” Thompson disagreed: “It is a toxin for the underdogs and a steroid for the big dogs.”

Thompson said that immigrants start companies at much higher rates than people born in the United States, and are twice as likely to create small businesses like restaurants and retail outlets — the “underdogs” in the economy. With many countries closing their borders and barring travelers from different countries, global immigration may decline in the next few months or years.

“American cities in the medium run will just get a lot more boring,” Thompson said.

American consumers are now spending ¼ of their money through online retailers, a rate that was projected to be reached in 10 years, according to Thompson. Oddly, in the 19th century, families who lived on farms would often order all their desired goods by mail from Sears — so now, Thompson said, the American consumer is “both being pulled forward and thrust backward hundreds of years at the same time.”

Restaurants have seen a “reckoning” that is similar to the Prohibition Era in the United States. Without alcohol, hundreds of fine-dining establishments closed down in those years, but the total number of restaurants tripled, according to Thompson, mainly due to diners that appealed to children’s palates with hotdogs, hamburgers and milkshakes. 

“For decades, you could argue prohibition has this fascinating effect on our palates. It infantilized the American palate, making every meal fit for a kid,” Thompson said. “Over the past few decades, U.S. restaurants have emerged from that muck, that doldrum of mediocrity, and become rather relatively world class.”

But COVID-19 has brought on a delivery-first style to every restaurant. Many entrees, especially expensive ones, are not made to sit in a car and then in a microwave. Because of the shift to delivery and take-out, Thompson said “the American diet 100 years ago after prohibition is going to stage a triumphant, or perhaps not so triumphant, recovery. Burgers, pasta and Chinese food are going to take over our palates again.”

The American worker has also experienced a dramatic shift. Since the invention of the personal computer, Thompson said that jobs were predicted to move out of the office. The pandemic forced tens of millions of Americans to work from home, and Thompson said that white collar workers, in fields such as financing, law and marketing, are much more able to work from home. This ability to work from home could mean that many workers move out of cities, and into suburbs.

The lecture then transitioned into a live Q-and-A with Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt. One of the first questions asked was how the pandemic has affected the arts.

Thompson was an actor before he became a writer, and worked in professional theater until he was around 23. 

“I have unbelievable fondness for the arts in general, but theater specifically. And I’m devastated by what I see here,” Thompson said.

He said that a person cannot have a normal theater or movie experience when there is a live outbreak in the area, but two positive caveats exist. One, people can practice social distancing in a theater, and two, people are not talking like they would in bars, which are some of the most dangerous places to be in. 

Live theaters for the actors pose a unique problem; they are intimate.

“What is Romeo and Juliet without kissing?’ What is Oklahoma! without dancing and people hooking arms? It’s very difficult to imagine a really, really safe way that you can rehearse complex plays with lots and lots of people,” Thompson said.

The next question was if there was a reason — other than leadership or preparedness — for why America has been especially susceptible to COVID-19.

“I think this has been a rather vast institutional failure and then you have the institutional failures in the individual states,” Thompson said, and his working theory is that the U.S. is in a bad position because “we thought we escaped history.”

In the last 15 years, countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan experienced SARS, H1N1 and MERS, and rewrote their laws, changed regulations and taught citizens what to expect. This is part of the reason, Thompson said, that no one in Vietnam, a country with 80 million that borders China, has died of COVID-19.

“It might sound unsatisfying, but I do think it’s a huge part of it. We stopped learning. We are obsessed with, for a variety of reasons, the anxieties of the late 20th century,” Thompson said. “Police (are policing) the streets, as if we’re experiencing the kind of urban crime that existed in 1990. That no longer exists, but there still are way too many police murders.”

The last question from Ewalt was what questions are keeping Thompson inspired, and what he may work on in the near future.

Thompson is most interested in what makes some communities so ready to respond to crises, and others unable. After the Chicago fires in 1871, the U.S. built back its second-biggest city and invented skyscrapers. When New York City was hit with a blizzard in 1888, it was rebuilt with a subway.

“We weren’t hamstrung by the inability to build in the past. That is a muscle,” Thompson said. “That is atrophied in modern leadership, and I’m interested in what is that muscle? What does it take to build it back and why is it atrophied?”

Sony Ton-Aime’s dream is for the new online iteration of Chautauqua’s Poetry Makerspace to be a place where people can simply sit for a moment in peace and interact with poetry. 

The new microsite, which operates concurrently with the physical Poetry Makerspace located in the Hultquist Center near the Amphitheater, acts as a portal to Chautauqua’s various online literary arts endeavors. 

The CHQ Assembly platform, literary arts workshops and the Emerge Poetry feature — the latter of which allows visitors to the site to create their own poetry using poems from their favorite writers — are just a few of the facets of poetry.chq.org. 

“This microsite will not only be a portal to the literary arts, but a portal that will aim to bring people together and open to new places where we can, through creative means and collaboration, find solace in our lives,” said Ton-Aime, Chautauqua’s director of literary arts. 

Though Ton-Aime said the COVID-19 pandemic “forced our hand” when it came to closing the physical Poetry Makerspace for the season and creating the microsite, he also said the idea for making an online literary arts portal had been around for some time.

“With the pandemic, it became not only something to think about, but something we needed to do,” he said. “The idea was for us to be able to coordinate with people in an online space, and to show that Chautauqua has been thinking about long-term goals when it comes to literary arts.”

One of those long-term goals, according to Ton-Aime, is to make the new poetry microsite into a place where teachers from all over the world can bring their classes and interact with the Makerspace in a virtual setting.

“In the future, we’d like there to be a classroom feature where people can come and everyone can interact, so that the creative writing process can happen on that website,” he said. 

Ton-Aime said that a key aspect of the microsite is its Thread Poetry feature, which will seek to patch together thousands of stanzas submitted to the site by ordinary people, as a way of memorializing the upheaval of the 2020 season.

“People can write about their favorite Chautauqua experiences, and at the end of the season, we’re going to collect all of those stanzas and make a seamless poem out of them,” he said. “This poem will be a way for us to remember this extraordinary season that we’re getting through right now.”

The microsite also plays host to the Traveling Stanzas project, which pairs poems generated in community writing workshops with graphic designs and disseminates the artwork on public transportation, in partnership with the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas at Kent State University. 

“This is just the start of the microsite,” Ton-Aime said. “We’ll be working to monitor the enthusiasm of the way people respond to it. We’ll have this microsite for a long time, and hopefully in 40 years we won’t even be able to recognize this first step. We’re going to make it something bigger, something collaborative with other institutions and with the world.”

Despite the name of Gretta Vosper’s lecture, “Falling in Love with Being Together, Because We Can’t Afford to Fall Apart,” she and the audience were not physically together.

“There is one sadness I have today: that we cannot actually be together,” said Vosper, an atheist and ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. “We don’t get the chance to fall in love with being together as I know we would have done, had we been sheltered under that soaring roof of the Hall of Philosophy, surrounded by the mosaics of years gone by.”

Instead, she connected to her audience through the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, where Vosper said the highest value that religious networks can offer is to supplement the lives of individuals — not just within a congregation, but an entire community — in her lecture broadcast at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, July 9.

The lecture was part of Week Two’s theme for the Interfaith Lecture Series, “Forces that Shape Our Daily Lives: The Contemporary Search for Spirituality.”

Vosper is a minister who first described herself as a “non-theist” in 2001 while delivering a sermon at West Hill United Church. When she realized some of her peers also called themselves non-theists but still believed in a theistic supreme being, she began to question the label she had given herself.

In 2013, she felt it was the perfect time to announce herself as an atheist, in solidarity with atheist bloggers facing violence in Bangladesh. The Toronto Conference chapter of the United Church of Canada investigated her due to public controversy, but ultimately approved her continued ministry.

She spoke to her Chautauqua audience from her vantage point as a minister who — prompted by her congregation at West Hill Church — has replaced the Lord’s Prayer with a similar set of words without mentioning a personified God, and the church welcomes anyone, including Buddhists and atheists. Vosper said those who no longer consider themselves to be religious often still crave the benefits of religion and spirituality. Most of all, they need a contact point for human connection.

Vosper said that stress, like any external force, could act as both a positive and negative force on a person’s life, and that many people turn to spiritual practices that have been distanced from their original religious source to soothe the burden of outside forces that shape daily life. Vosper herself starts and ends her day with martial arts movements intended for meditation and lists what she is grateful for.

“(Spiritual practices) help us cope with the challenges that seem to mount around us at every instance,” she said.

Vosper based her point on a 2017 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) study.

“Spiritual people — regardless of whether they are religious or not — report higher levels of satisfaction with their relationships, communities, and life in general than do nonspiritual people,” the study said.

The same study found that those who were religious but not spiritual were less happy than those who were spiritual, while people who were neither religious nor spiritual reported the lowest levels of happiness. But for people who were spiritual without religion, solitary ritual practices lacked the sense of community that religion often provides.

Through revisions of its statement of faith every five years, the West Hill United Church has gradually broken down “barriers (to) inclusivity we didn’t know we had,” Vosper said. The church has put in writing that it does not accept the Bible as the final word of God and “the way we lived was a greater testament of faith” than religious text. 

As a result of these changes, people with diverse beliefs have joined the West Hill Church, including — but not limited to — atheists and Buddhists.

Vosper said that studies charting declines in religion also show a decrease in social capital that would otherwise be accessed through religious groups. People in religious networks donate, volunteer and vote more often than their nonreligious counterparts. This is not dependent on belief, but on the numbers of social connections that people accessed through their religious network.

Vosper also cited philosopher Loyal D. Rue’s idea that the world needs a new “noble lie,” or a story that allows for self-reflection, which religion previously provided.

But she disagrees with Rue on religion being outdated.

“I think we have a noble truth that can pull all of us together,” Vosper said.

This year has given Ben Folds plenty to sing about. 

Folds, American singer-songwriter, recorded his latest single “2020” in Sydney, Australia, where he has been since early March. Folds was in the middle of an Australian orchestral tour when COVID-19 reached the continent. 

In just under two-and-a-half minutes, Folds put the events of the year to a tune. 

“Don’t it seem like decades ago / Back in 2019 / Back when life was slow,” he sings on the track released on June 25. “We’re just halfway done / 2020, hey are we having fun? / How many years will we try to cram into one?”

Folds, musician, composer and record producer, will perform “An Evening with Ben Folds” at 5 p.m. EDT Friday, July 10, on CHQ Assembly’s Video Platform. 

“We seem to be currently reliving and cramming a number of historically tumultuous years into one,” Folds told Rolling Stone. “For a moment it was all about the 1918 pandemic. Then we began seeing hints of the Great Depression before flipping the calendar forward to the Civil Rights protests of the Sixties. Running beneath this is the feeling that we’re in the Cold War, while seeing elements that brought us to the Civil War rearing their head, making us wonder if we’ve learned a damn thing at all.”

Since the release of his first album in 1995, Folds has become the musical Everyman. He has released pop and alternative rock albums with his band, Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, a classical piano concerto and collaborations with artists ranging from Regina Spektor to “Weird Al” Yankovic. 

He has many roles outside of music, but even within music, he has a band, he tours with other musicians and he’s also one of the most popular performers with orchestras right now. He is just so versatile in everything that he does.”

But wait, there’s more. 

He is also an author, photographer, a judge on NBC’s a capella show “The Sing-Off,” the first-ever artistic adviser of the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and an advocate for arts education and music therapy, serving on the distinguished Artist Committee of Americans for the Arts, and as chairman of the national ArtsVote 2020 initiative.

Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Deborah Sunya Moore gave his versatility the benefit of the doubt, telling Folds he can play “whatever he wants” in his virtual Chautauqua performance.

“I have always been so interested in him because he is such a multifaceted artist,” Moore said. “He has many roles outside of music, but even within music, he has a band, he tours with other musicians and he’s also one of the most popular performers with orchestras right now. He is just so versatile in everything that he does.”

Folds started his orchestral run after the release of his latest album in 2015, So There, which features eight chamber rock songs with the Brooklyn-based orchestra yMusic, as well as Folds’ “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra,” performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. It reached No. 1 on both the Billboard classical and classical crossover charts. 

In 2016, Folds told the Aquarian the album was his way of changing his sound without losing his voice.

“If someone becomes famous for something that they do, they have command over that,” Folds said. “Then it comes to writing a classical piece, and they start to imitate Chopin, or they imitate whomever, and they suddenly lose their own voice. I think my audience recognizes that they can hear all my melodies in the piece, so it does have my voice in it.”

After his performance, Moore will host a 20-minute Q-and-A where audience members can submit questions for Folds at www.questions.chq.org, or on Twitter using #CHQ2020.

This program was made possible by The Watters Family.

To Jon Schmitz, historian and archivist for Chautauqua Institution, a tradition cannot be spontaneous, it cannot be mandated, and it cannot be declared on a whim. 

“I don’t feel comfortable with the term ‘new traditions.’ I think that is trying to assume legitimacy that (a practice) hasn’t earned yet,” Schmitz said. “The key (to a tradition) is to be accepted by those practicing (it) as what should be done.”

Schmitz will further explore what constitutes a tradition at 3:30 p.m. EDT Friday, July 10, on CHQ Assembly in a lecture titled “Traditions of Chautauqua.” As part of the Heritage Lecture Series, Schmitz’s presentation will explore the archive’s most-inquired-about Institution traditions.

Notable traditions include Chautauqua Salutes, Recognition Day, and the Opening Three Taps of the Gavel. Schmitz said that this lecture topic was chosen to, in some way, continue acknowledging these traditions despite remote programming preventing them from being practiced in person. 

“I thought it would be a good idea to review some of the traditions to see what they are, how they came about, when did they start, (and) was there a reason for them,” Schmitz said.

Although the community cannot physically participate in some of these traditions, the Institution is working to keep them intact. Schmitz said he is aware of efforts to organize a virtual Recognition Day, an all-day annual celebration of Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle graduates. The Institution has worked to virtually maintain traditions by ushering in the 2020 season by premiering Three Taps on CHQ Assembly. 

(Our traditions) accumulate meaning over time for Chautauqua, and also for individual Chautauquans,” Schmitz said. “It’s a way of remembering the past. It’s also the way of bringing the past into the present, so that we can put things into the perspective of past, present, and future.”

In his opening Three Taps of the Gavel, Institution President Michael E. Hill formally launched the virtual season from the Amphitheater, where a traditional, in-person season would begin. In his Three Taps, Hill spoke about Chautauquan traditions as reflections of programming, values, and the Institution’s place in the world. 

“Tradition is important at Chautauqua. It’s the reason we’re here on this stage today. The same space which almost every assembly has been ushered in, and where we hold our principle worship service,” Hill said. “Our traditions are replete with important symbols that tell stories about our history and our present role in the world.”

For the Institution, Schmitz said that traditions allow the history to be passed down and kept alive through the years. Even as the Institution and its audience evolves, the history is still kept alive. 

“(Our traditions) accumulate meaning over time for Chautauqua, and also for individual Chautauquans,” Schmitz said. “It’s a way of remembering the past. It’s also the way of bringing the past into the present, so that we can put things into the perspective of past, present, and future.”

The Oliver Archives Heritage Lecture Series is made possible with a gift from Jeff Lutz and Cathy Nowosielski.

Uncle Sam is a meme, “an idea, that’s sort of like a piece of DNA,” said Joan Donovan. “It gets transmitted, usually through people, but also through media, and it spreads between people.”

A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture, but usually refers to online images. Uncle Sam is one meme that has been around since 1917, on posters with the words “I want you for the U.S. Army.” Donovan said Uncle Sam was based on a similar poster in London, and has since been through many different iterations for military recruitment campaigns.

Donovan is the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and leads The Technology and Social Change Project in examining the internet, online extremism and disinformation. On July 9, she presented her lecture, “On Media Manipulation and Online Extremism,” as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series on CHQ Assembly, and discussed the nature of memes and their role in the U.S. political conversation, particularly in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. This was the fourth presentation in Week Two’s theme of “Forces Unseen: What Shapes Our Daily Lives.” 

With the internet, memes have moved online, creating what Donovan and many news sites call a “meme war.” There are four characteristics to understand specific memes and how they travel across the internet and world: Memes tend to be authorless; every profession has memes; they tend to stick with people; and they promote participation with the audience.

One such meme that was important in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was Pepe the Frog, which became a symbol for the alt-right and white supremacists. Pepe is a frogman and started as a character in a comic online. Donovan said the frog is very easy to draw and make changes to, so many people started to draw their own Pepes, until the internet had thousands of different iterations of the frog. In 2016, certain versions of Pepe became very popular, particularly ones drawn as Hilter, according to Donovan.

“I’m not making the claim that online meme culture voted (President Donald Trump) into office. What I am making is the claim that their participation in political communication online, really amped up and created the energy needed to meme Trump into existence, and to give him relevancy amongst younger populations,” Donovan said. “Even if they didn’t go vote for him en masse … it helped create an environment where people would share these memes and then talk about Trump’s political platform.”

By 2016, politicians began to realize the power of social media, and Donovan said social media and memes helped candidates like Bernie Sanders and Trump become popular and discussed among younger generations. An example of a less popular meme from Sanders’ campaign came from when he was giving a speech. 

“A little bird just kind of sat down on the podium,” Donovan said, “and it looked at him and he looked at the bird and, in a very Snow White way, the bird flew away. Instantly his social media team was like, ‘That’s it.’”

This meme did not become popular, as Donovan said, because it felt forced. On the other side of the political spectrum, Trump’s social media presence often confuses people, and Donovan said this is because he is targeting five to six separate audiences, including younger audiences. One of his social media strategies is “dropping a thing into the world without much context, and then watch people try to sort it out.”

For example, a few months ago, the president tweeted a picture of himself as fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, without any words. Thousands of people commented and made their own versions, including ones where “Nancy Pelosi or Sanders were knocking Trump out.”

In the 2016 campaign, Donovan said the alt-right largely ignored Hillary Clinton, until the former U.S. Secretary of State made statements about them and called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables.”

“She had really kicked this hornet’s nest of people that may have largely ignored her and focused most of their energy on creating messaging for Trump,” Donovan said. “But because she had entered into a political conversation about the alt-right, they had felt attacked and swarmed back.”

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. The first question was how people who do not know they are spreading lies fit into a disinformation campaign.

Donovan shared a recent example of disinformation being spread about COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, people shared on social media that if someone drinks water every 15 minutes, they can protect themselves from COVID-19. Oftentimes, disinformation will have an appealing headline that confirms a person’s point of view. 

We do need to begin to devise systems where these corporations are acting more in the service of the public, and less in the service of the bottom line,” Donovan said. “That needs to be our bottom line.”

Donovan said that in the online world, confirmations of any point of view can be found, including that the earth is flat. While she said it is probably not dangerous to believe in a flat earth, this issue comes down to if the internet is supposed to enhance knowledge, or to share information of any kind.

The last question from Rozner: If Donovan could design the way that the internet and regulations would work, what would it look like?

“I think we need a lot more at the front end of our information ecosystem. We need curation,” Donovan said.

In an article she wrote for Wired last week, she said content moderation has to have systems that are reactive to what people post, especially when it comes to issues that involve money and lives — such as posts about the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, Donovan said that more than 100,000 new web domains have been registered dedicated to COVID-19 and coronavirus, many completely empty and some that are scams selling fake products. 

Social media companies have had to adapt. To try to lessen the amount of people sharing false headlines, Twitter has made a notification that warns users if they are sharing a link that they themselves haven’t clicked on. Facebook in recent weeks has changed the way it operates in an attempt to lessen the amount of civil rights violations on its platform. 

“We do need to begin to devise systems where these corporations are acting more in the service of the public, and less in the service of the bottom line,” Donovan said. “That needs to be our bottom line.”

The greatest abolitionist believed in the power of images, leading a descendant of slaves to believe in the power of imagery in motion. 

Even though nearly 168 years separate Franklin Leonard’s 2020 Chautauqua lecture from Frederick Douglass and his 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Leonard finds the parallels between them “inescapable.” 

But there is one thing that doesn’t overlap. Leonard is using his words to give a voice to the unseen, something Douglass never was — Douglass, who was born roughly 20 years before the first person was photographed, was the most photographed American of the 19th century, more than Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Abraham Lincoln or any other president of the era. 

Leonard, CEO and founder of the Black List, spoke Wednesday, July 8, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, delivering his lecture, “How the Black List Revives Dead Scripts,” as part of Week Two’s theme, “Forces Unseen: What Shapes Our Daily Lives.”

“Douglass believed deeply in the power of photographs to define the reality outside their frames,” Leonard said. “If Douglass believed so deeply in the power of a single frame, one can only imagine what potential he would have seen in a motion picture — stories projected high and wide and transmitted around the world with a single keystroke.”  

Motion pictures are Leonard’s “thing.” He grew up in West Central Georgia, where his adolescence was defined by a few basic facts: he’s Black, from the Deep South and extremely good at math. Those factors, when combined, meant one thing: “I didn’t have much of a social life,” he said. 

Instead, he split his time between school and the movie theater. 

“It is reasonably safe to assume that I saw every major studio release between ‘Jurassic Park,’ which was the first time I was allowed to go to the movie theater by myself, to ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau,’ the last movie I saw in the theater before heading to Harvard as an undergrad,” he said.

Four years after graduating from Harvard University, Leonard landed a job on Sunset Boulevard as a script reader and junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way Productions.

The easiest way to distinguish a good script from a bad one is fairly simple: Read them. But the volume of material makes that “impossible.” According to Leonard, the Writer’s Guild of America registers around 50,000 pieces of material every year. About 200 will become films.

“Fundamentally, it’s triage, and when you are in triage, you tend to default to conventional wisdom about what works and what doesn’t,” Leonard said. 

Leonard is embarrassed to say he found himself in triage, but proud to have found a way out. In 2005, he sent an anonymous email to friends in the industry asking for a list of up to 10 of their favorite unproduced screenplays of the past year.

“I was looking for the scripts that people loved, untouched by the unseen market forces that, more often than not, determine their value in Hollywood,” Leonard said. “It was an opportunity for people to speak their mind about what they love.”

Leonard compiled the results and emailed the spreadsheet to everyone who submitted scripts. He called it the “Black List” — “a tribute to those who had lost their careers during the anticommunist hysteria of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, and the conscious inversion of the assumption that black, somehow, has a negative connotation,” he said. 

The list went viral in the only way something could in 2005 — via email. Leonard was so scared he would get fired, he vowed to keep his decision a secret and never do it again. But six months later, he received a phone call from an agent who changed his mind. After pitching a movie, the agent tried to “sell” Leonard by saying he was certain that script would be No. 1 on next year’s Black List, not knowing that Leonard himself was the creator of that list.

“This agent was exactly right about this list being evidence of a good script’s value, and that a great script has even greater value than people may have previously assumed,” he said. “To put it another way, the unseen forces that govern a script’s value were wrong.” 

Since its inception, just over 1,200 screenplays have been added to the Black List. A third of them have been produced, earning nearly 300 Oscar nominations and winning 50.

In November 2016, Harvard Business School released a study stating Black List scripts were twice as likely to be made into films, and those films would make 90% more revenue than movies made with similar budgets.

“The conventional wisdom — the unseen, even within the industry, (the) forces that determine what has value in Hollywood and what doesn’t — is wrong,” he said. “It is all conventional and no wisdom.”

Because it’s “all conventional,” the young Leonard who adored movies never saw a place for himself in the business. But the success of the Black List forced him to consider a question: If the industry was wrong about the talent that was already in the system, what about the talent that wasn’t? 

Seven years after the first Black List, Leonard turned the list into a website that allows anyone who has written an English-language screenplay to have it evaluated and available to industry professionals. He has also launched three screenwriter’s labs. 

“Much is right, with me, of this effect: If you can see it in life or in fiction, you can be it,” Leonard said. “Less, I think, is made of its corollary: If you see it enough, it is going to affect how you see the world.”  

The trends Leonard sees in films worry him. Girls aged 13 to 20 are just as likely as women aged 21 to 30 to be shown on various screens in “sexy attire with some nudity and referenced as attractive.” Despite studies challenging the likelihood of these notions, half of Latinx immigrants are shown to be engaged in criminal activity and 64% of gang members in films are Black, he said. 

“Should we be surprised then that an estimated 1 woman in 6 in America have been the victim of rape in some form?” Leonard said. “Or that 3 in 5 have experienced gender-based harassment in the workplace? Or that Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as their fellow citizens?”

As startling as those statistics are, Leonard said they still don’t match the unquantifiable realities many face daily. It is the confusion when a job interview ends before it begins; the boss or coworker who takes an after-hours interest in someone that has nothing to do with professional pursuits. It is the panic when a county sheriff raises his voice when one asks permission to remove their hands from the steering wheel, a reality Leonard lived only two years ago. It is the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that George Floyd couldn’t breathe because a police officer was kneeling on his neck, ultimately killing him. 

There has not been a year in this decade when women have accounted for more than one-third of the speaking roles in major Hollywood movies, Leonard said. In 2014, only 28.3% of all speaking roles went to people of color. Only 2% went to LGBTQ characters. Less than 9% of Hollywood films directed between the years 2013 and 2017 were directed by women. 

“The list of people who directed a feature sanctioned by the Directors Guild of America in 2013 and 2014 is roughly as diverse as Donald Trump’s cabinet,” he said. “It should come as no surprise that talent is in no way connected to race, gender or anything else — and yet, our hiring in Hollywood would suggest that we believe that it does.” 

Almost 20 years to the day after Douglass died, Hollywood held the premiere of its first-ever blockbuster, “The Birth of a Nation,” based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman. Months later, 15 men gathered in Georgia and refounded the Ku Klux Klan, which led to the lynching of Black Americans throughout the United States. 

Douglass knew the power of a single image; had he been here to see it, Leonard said, he knows Douglass would have recognized the power of a moving one, too. 

“There are unseen forces that create the images that we see and stories we consume, and those images and stories set in motion unseen forces that define how we see the world and, as a consequence, how we live in it,” Leonard said. “I don’t know how to change (the world), but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody’s going to clean it up, let’s hope. Since the better part of optimism is action, let’s act.”

During a typical Chautauqua Opera season, Mark A. Boley would be up to his eyeballs in hair right about now.

“These wigs don’t come in styled; they come in looking like something your dog dragged in,” said Boley, the wig and makeup assistant supervisor for Chautauqua Opera Company. “If you have a cast of 40 people, all in period hairstyles, that’s days on end of washing, shampooing, conditioning, (setting) them on blocks, putting them in rollers, combing them out, brushing them out, setting and styling.”

For the last four years, Boley and designer Martha Ruskai have comprised the Operas’ wig and makeup team. This week, the duo will join General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood for Chautauqua Opera’s Behind-the-Scenes series, which will take place at noon EDT, Thursday July 9, on the Virtual Porch. Boley and Ruskai will discuss the work they do for a regular season, share Chautauqua Opera stories and answer audience questions.

Boley and Ruskai met through opera 40 years ago, and have been working together ever since. The two have done hair and makeup for Opera Carolina, the Toledo Opera, Opera Grand Rapids and more.

“I tend to partner with her a lot,” Boley said.

At Chautauqua, with three operas a season all requiring vastly different wigs and makeup, the team keeps to a tight schedule. Most of the wigs are re-styled for each show, but Boley and Ruskai set aside time to custom-make a few for each production.

“You break out the season and look at which characters you really want to have a special look, how much time you have, when it appears in the schedule that year, and decide which wigs you want to go ahead and build,” he said.

Hand-tying a human hair wig from scratch is a meticulous process that can take several weeks. To save time, Boley often “jury-rigs” pre-made human hair wigs by cutting off the front and hand-tying a new lace hairline.

“To do it the way we do it, you can usually get a wig front in a day or two,” he said. “(Then you have) a stage-quality, natural hairline, gorgeous wig you can’t tell is a wig.”

Some productions, like last year’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini, require more extensive projects. Boley and Ruskai made the wig for the character Basilio completely from scratch.

“That was a certain look,” he said. “It had (this) beautiful center part all the way down from the top of his head, and we wanted it to look kind of greasy and slimy looking. That was a full build.”

For Boley, the most nerve-wracking productions are those performed in the Amphitheater, because there’s only one full hair and makeup rehearsal in the space before the big day.

“It takes a lot of pre-planning. You have to really know which characters are coming off and on stage, and when, how much time you have for each change (and) where you have to be located,” he said. “You spend a lot of time thinking, ‘What could go wrong, how do I fix it now?’ … Then you just have to do the show and hope it all goes well.”

Besides delivering great hair and makeup, Boley’s goal for each season is that the Young Artists he and Ruskai work with leave with skills they can take into their next job.

“We’re doing the work in a very short period of time, but we’re also trying to teach,” he said. “Hopefully everyone goes through that program knowing a little more about different protocols in the makeup room and how to do it themselves if they need to.”

Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill and Board of Trustees Chair Candy Maxwell will host a discussion regarding updates to the strategic plan, 150 Forward, during the season’s second Weekly Conversation. 

This conversation will begin at 1 p.m. EDT, Thursday, July 9, on the Virtual Porch. Audience members can join in the conversation live by submitting their questions for Hill and Maxwell. The presentation will be made available on demand the same day. 

During Week One’s conversation, which provided general updates on the summer and CHQ Assembly, Hill and Maxwell said the weekly conversations were designed as a way for the audience to join into Institution conversations, despite geographic separation. Maxwell noted that this virtual conversation may be more efficient than traditional, in-person conversations. 

In the past, weekly conversations tended to cover similar subjects because the audience would vary from week-to-week, so Institution administration could not continue the thread from preceding topics. Maxwell said that now, since people across the country can tune in and watch conversations even after they are live-streamed, they can build upon topics previously covered. 

“Because we are able to conduct these sessions virtually this year, I think we have a unique opportunity to cover a lot of different topics,” Maxwell said. “You have access to this webinar at any point during the season. Whether or not you are physically on the grounds, you are participating via an online experience.”

Hill later said that not only will the overall CHQ Assembly platform allow more complex conversation, it will facilitate more diverse perspectives. The Institution can now draw in people who would normally be limited by finances, interest, and location. 

In an effort to attract this new audience, the Institution partnered with Mather, a not-for-profit organization that provides senior living residence and community-based programming for adults 55 and up. Mather provides CHQ Assembly access to its communities so that they can learn and engage with the Institution. 

“There’s some fairly significant racial diversity in some of the communities that Mather supports that allows us to hopefully expand the representation of folks participating from a different racial background than has (traditionally) been a homogenous Chautauqua audience,” Hill said. “We’re also hoping that because price is not a barrier that we break through some socioeconomic diversity issues.”

Hill said he hopes that by reaching these new audiences, new perspectives will help shape conversations at Chautauqua.

During the conversation, Hill and Maxwell also explained the technical aspects of transitioning the Institution online. When the Board of Trustees unanimously voted to suspend in-person programming this season in May, Institution leaders quickly worked to move nine weeks of programming online — an amount of planning that is typically done over the course of several months to a year. 

Financing this new endeavor was one of many obstacles they had to quickly maneuver through. Hill said that the Institution had about $10 million in cash reserves at the start of the pandemic, and spent about $7.5 million to shore up the Institution’s annual budget and make a virtual season possible. Community donations and Paycheck Protection Program funds have softened the blow. 

A 2019 donation from Ted and Betsy Merchant to equip the grounds with technology had already spurred major infrastructure, equipment and software improvements that continued through the CHQ Assembly planning. The investments made it possible for popular event spaces to be redeployed as studios, in some cases providing familiar backgrounds.

“That gift has paid off in spades. What you can’t see on CHQ Assembly is that Lenna Hall, the Hall of Christ, the Amphitheater, the Becker Room, sometimes the Amphitheater stage, and other areas have been linked together like television studios. That gift has allowed us to talk between those buildings,” Hill said. “And we have also hardwired in camera devices in places like the Hall of Philosophy, which was our intent to use this summer for better livestreaming.” Those Hall of Philosophy cameras are temporarily being used in the Hall of Christ studio space.

In upcoming years, Hill said, the Institution plans to utilize CHQ Assembly and other online platforms as an amplifier for its content, even as programming reverts back to its traditional, in-person format. 

Chautauquans can join the Weekly Conversation at 1 p.m. EDT every Thursday this season on the Virtual Porch. Upcoming topics will include diversifying revenue, Chautauqua Lake and more.