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She’s the first woman rabbi to lead both a Jewish seminary and congregational union, and the first lesbian to have risen to the level of national and professional Jewish leadership she currently enjoys.

Her name is Rabbi Deborah Waxman.

“We’re trying to find the richest possible expressions of the collective experience of the Jewish people,” said Waxman, the Aaron and Marjorie Ziegelman Presidential Professor and president of Reconstructing Judaism, a rabbinical college and the central organization of the Jewish reconstructionist movement. “We are looking to create a sense of wholeness for people. We have a conviction that Jewish wisdom and Jewish living enriches and supports us in our efforts to be human.”

At 2 p.m. Friday, July 19 in the Hall of Philosophy, Waxman will give Chautauqua’s fourth Interfaith Friday lecture on the problem of evil and on progressive expressions of Judaism. Waxman will be joined in conversation by the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Chautauqua’s vice president of religion and senior pastor.

“I have both a rabbinical degree and a doctorate in American Jewish studies,” Waxman said. “I went to rabbinical school because I wanted to be with people in times of joy and in times of sorrow. I wanted to be in a position to help them create meaning in their lives.”

And according to Waxman, becoming a rabbi was her way of helping to “build communities that would support and sustain people.”

“The reconstructionist approach allows me and every individual to bring our own aspirations and our own questions to that rich tradition,” she said. “I thought, when I was in my 20s, I was choosing between becoming a rabbi and getting that Ph.D. In the end, I was just sequencing it. I’m glad I did the rabbinical piece first because I feel like it cracked my heart wide open.”

As president of Reconstructing Judaism, Waxman has spearheaded progressive initiatives like “Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations,” which she said reflect her organization’s tagline: “Deeply rooted. Boldly relevant.”

“It’s a project I feel is really expressive of reconstructionist commitments,” Waxman said. “ ‘Evolve’ is a project of writing and conversation that draws deeply on traditional Jewish teachings and approaches. It looks to bring those insights to pressing issues of the day in a way that promotes civil discourse.”

Waxman said she believes her position as president has enabled her to “draw on the full breadth of (her) interests and capacity.”

“For about two years I’ve been hosting a podcast on Jewish teachings of resilience called ‘Hashivenu,’ ” she said. “That’s one of the ways I get to grow and encounter people in new ways. I interview rabbis, teachers and community leaders about how best to cultivate resilience in their communities and in their own lives.”

In her upcoming lecture, however, Waxman wishes to impart broader lessons on her audience.

“I’d like people to have an understanding of both Judaism and progressive expressions of Judaism,” she said. “I’d like people to know about how some liberal Jews think about divine justice, and about how to have a personal relationship with a non-personal God.”

If you find yourself with no plans tonight, there’s a new hope for you.

The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will perform John Williams’ original score live as “Star Wars: A New Hope” plays overhead. “Star Wars: A New Hope — In Concert” will take place at 8:15 p.m. Friday, July 19 in the Amphitheater.

Stuart Chafetz, CSO timpanist and principal pops conductor for the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the orchestra. He said movies-in-concert offer a unique auditory experience.

“There’s nothing like a live orchestra,” Chafetz said. “I don’t care how loud the speakers are at a movie theater, there’s nothing like that real sound of an orchestra.”

Directed by George Lucas, “Star Wars: A New Hope” launched a global phenomenon when the film premiered in 1977. With a cast of beloved characters — and now a decades-long legacy — the film received six Oscars and a Special Achievement Award from the Academy — among numerous other accolades — including Best Original Score.

Williams’ score for “Star Wars: A New Hope” rocketed to its current iconic status. Parts of the score have hit top charts in multiple countries since the film’s 1977 premiere, and it includes some of the best-known themes in recent history.

Chafetz said Williams’ score is an integral part of the film — and the live orchestra accompaniment will highlight the score’s important role for the audience.

“The thing that ties the movie together is John Williams,” Chafetz said. “Not only is he a good composer, he understands how to help accentuate the story with music. When you see Luke come onto the screen for the first time, you hear his theme. When you see Princess Leia’s first appearance, you hear her theme. And I’m hoping that the audience will cheer every time something like that happens.”

Chafetz, who is known for his lively podium demeanor, has conducted several movies-in-concert. These movies include “Jurassic Park” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” — a concert that drew dozens of costumed fans. Chafetz described such concerts as similar to “a modern ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ ” because of the enthusiastic audience.

The popularity of franchises like “Star Wars,” Chafetz said, make symphonic music more accessible to a broad audience. 

“When we have the classical audience, it’s like preaching to the converted — they already know and understand the orchestra,” Chafetz said. “But very often, with these concerts, you’ll have people in the audience who’ve never heard a symphony orchestra. When they see ‘Star Wars’ live in concert, they’re going to come and they’re going to say, ‘Wow, this is what an orchestra sounds like. I had no idea, this is fantastic.’ ”

Reaching that audience is vital, Chafetz said.

“For me, reaching that part of the community is part of our mission — we’re reaching the people who already love classical music, but we’re also reaching out to everyone else,” Chafetz said.

The CSO performs a vast range of music, from 17th-century classical masterpieces to contemporary showtunes and scores. Chafetz said the orchestra’s flexibility is admirable.

“It says a lot about the Chautauqua Symphony — that they can play ‘The Rite of Spring’ the night before and play a movie score and play an opera and play pops,” Chafetz said. “They’re world-class.”

In fact, Chafetz said movies-in-concerts enrapture audiences even more than the original films.

“I think it’s amazing because normally, when the end credits start to play, people leave,” Chafetz said. “With these concerts, so many people stick around for the end credits because music is playing underneath it. It’s an unbelievable experience to be a part of it. It’s an overwhelming sensation to hear a live orchestra with the
movie.”

The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra League aims to connect musicians and their audience at the Institution — both on and off the stage.

The CSOL will host several public events this season — including today’s 90th anniversary celebration, which will take place after the CSO’s 8:15 p.m. concert Thursday, July 18 in the Amphitheater. The celebration is at the Athenaeum Hotel and is open to CSOL members and CSO musicians. Memberships start at $15, and will be available at the door.

CSOL President Suzanne Shull said tonight’s 90th year celebration is more than an anniversary — it is a celebration of the CSO’s legacy.

“It’s a big deal to have an orchestra for that long,” Shull said. “Not many orchestras in the United States can say that they’ve been around for 90 years — even some of the big ones.”

Tonight’s celebration is the CSOL’s largest event of the season, but the organization has also planned several smaller get-togethers, such as Q-and-A sessions after Tuesday night concerts at the Athenaeum and “CSO Friends and Family Fridays” at 12:15 p.m. Friday, and again on July 26 and Aug. 9 in Smith Wilkes Hall.

Last week, the season’s first Friends and Family Friday featured the CSO’s five Diversity Fellows, who participated in a Q-and-A session with attendees. Violinist Arman Nasrinpay, a 2019 fellow, said these social events can create dialogues between different audience members and the often-insular world of classical music.

“A lot of different people go to these concerts, and it’s nice for them to be able to get to know the musicians as people,” Nasrinpay said. “They get to learn what the process is like, how they were able to get there. … Classical music is often its own little bubble.”

Nasrinpay said engagement between musicians and audience members benefits both communities.

“And for us, we get to meet the community that we’re part of,” Nasrinpay said. “I think it’s important to have that collaboration; it keeps the orchestra and the community engaged with each other and relevant to each other.”

CSOL began in 2006, when a small group of orchestra members, their loved ones and their supporters decided to work together to build a community between those onstage and those in the audience. The group’s founders are Cliff Weidner, Hannah Weinberg, Jason and Nancy Weintraub, Pat Dougherty, Joe Prezio, Marge Sterritt, Lenelle Morse, Bernie Lieberman and Judith Claire.

Shull said CSOL encourages meaningful communication between those who play music and those who listen.

“The whole purpose of the organization is so that people on the grounds can get to know the musicians better,” Shull said. “They can have access to them instead of just seeing them onstage.”

According to Shull, the CSO community is like one large, musical family.

“Some of them have been playing up here for years,” Shull said. “They think of themselves as the orchestra family here, and many of them raise their children here; it’s a very important place to them.”

Shull said many of these longtime community members live outside of the grounds, limiting their daily interactions with other Chautauquans.

“There are not so many opportunities to run into them on the grounds, however, because so many of them live off the grounds,” Shull said, adding that the CSOL pioneered their series of social events to help weave the two communities closer together.

Many festival orchestras host a new group of musicians every year. Shull said the CSO is unique in that its members return season after season, building a lifelong community.

“What’s unique about this orchestra is that you can expect to see some of the same faces year after year,” Shull said. “You can watch their kids grow up.”

According to Shull, there’s another benefit to building community with CSO members: a deeper appreciation of classical music.

“I think (interacting with musicians) contributes to the enjoyment of music, of watching people play,” Shull said. “And the more you listen to it and enjoy it, the more you go to the symphony, the more you read program notes, the more you learn.”

Chautauquans and members of the surrounding community will have the chance to get up close and personal with 200 monarch butterflies at Monarchpalooza today.

This is the third time the Bird, Tree & Garden Club is hosting the event, which will take place from noon to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, July 18 in Lincoln Park. In addition to meeting the butterflies, attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about the species and ways they can support them.

“This is really an awareness of the plight of the monarch butterfly,” said event organizer Lynda Acker. “Because of various factors like pesticide and herbicide overuse, we have lost upwards of 95% of the population.”

The event, which is free to all, will feature a tent where visitors can watch and interact with 200 monarch butterflies. On display will be examples of butterflies in every phase of their life cycle. They begin as an egg, grow into a caterpillar and then create a cocoon where they embark on their transformative process.

A number of experts — including representatives from the Audubon Community Nature Center and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute — will be on hand to answer questions.

Julie Holland, who has spoken for BTG in the past, will demonstrate tagging monarchs before their migratory flight to Mexico.

BTG master gardeners will be available to provide guidance about how to plant and maintain a monarch-friendly garden. Adrienne Ploss of Hickory Hurst Farm will sell native nectar and host plants that people can take home to make their home gardens more conducive to butterflies’ needs.

People will be able to go to eight stations to learn about the life cycle of a butterfly, as well as some of the modern challenges facing the creatures. They will get their Monarch Passport stamped at each station. Once the passport is completed, they will be able to enter the butterfly tent.  There will also be a lemonade stand, crafts and face painting.

The butterflies will be provided by Lori Stralow Harris of Salt Creek Butterfly Farm in Western Springs, Illinois.

“That’s really where learning happens and bridges are built,” Harris said. “We are really  letting the monarchs work their magic and let us fall in love with them. If you have a personal connection with something, you’re more likely to become a steward of them.”

At the last Monarchpalooza event, Harris said, a father came up to her and said that this event would be one his son would never forget.

“We have tiny kids who love this event,” Acker said. “We have 90-year-olds who won’t get out of the tent.”

This year, BTG received a grant for the event from the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation, which will help support some of the costs of the educational aspects of the event.

BTG hopes the event inspires people to do what they can to help monarch butterflies, which are experiencing a dramatic decline in population.

Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles to Mexico at the end of every summer.

When the monarchs return from Mexico, they go through the Midwest before fanning out throughout the rest of the country. In the Midwest, monoculture agriculture has reduced the amount of milkweed and butterfly-friendly habitat. Additionally, many of the crops grown on large swaths of land in the Midwest are genetically modified to be resistant to insecticides, so large amounts of the chemicals can be sprayed across the crops. Butterflies are an unintentional victim of the insecticides.

“There are a lot of things that people can do just in the community, like practice responsible gardening with no pesticides and no herbicides,” Acker said.

BTG encourages people to register their gardens as Monarch Waystations through Monarch Watch by planting native plants and milkweed, which is the only egg-laying host to monarch butterflies. At its events each week, BTG recognizes those who have registered their gardens as waystations and pins the location of their garden — whether on the grounds or elsewhere in the country — on a map.

“We’re helping a specific pollinator here by raising awareness and education in the community,” Acker said. “But by virtue of that, we’re raising awareness for pollinators in general. So it’s much broader than just one butterfly, as magnificent as it is.”

Though life span increases bring improved medical care and advanced social systems, gaps and disparities still plague the human population. By looking at the history and science of longevity, Linda P. Fried dispelled several old-age myths that hold society back from tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues — including health care inequalities and climate change.

Fried, dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Wednesday in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Four, “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World — In Collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity.”

Fried began thinking about longevity in 1986. She was working as a physician intern at The John Hopkins Hospital when the new chief of geriatric medicine asked if she would join his department. That night, Fried started looking at the data backing geriatric advancements and said what she found “blew her away.”

The data showed an increase in life expectancy over time. In the beginning of human existence, life expectancy ranged from 18 to 25 years. By 1900, it had increased to 47 years. By 1960, it was 70. Now, it is 79. Throughout all of those increases, African Americans had shorter life expectancies than any other group.

“There has been a huge improvement, but huge gaps still, in race differences, in opportunities for longer lives,” Fried said.

Now, there are more people over the age of 65 in the world than there have been at any point in  human history, combined.

“This year we are at a crossing point, both in the U.S. and in the world, that we are about to have as many older adults in our country as we have children,” she said. “What a shift — we have never seen this before.”

The day after reviewing the data, Fried committed to becoming a geriatrician. Throughout her career, she has come to understand that life expectancy did not increase by chance.

“It wasn’t by chance, it was intentional,” she said. “(It was through) society-scaled investments in the things that create opportunity, ideally for everybody, that raise both the floor and the ceiling of health, access to education, access to opportunity, and have extended our lives.”

As a result of those investments, Fried said society is seeing a “dramatic transformation.”

In 1900, only 4% of the U.S. population was over the age of 65. Now, 17% is over 65 and by 2050, that age group is projected to make up 25% of the population.

The age structure transformation matters, but Fried said the progressions it took to get there are more important.

The progression was the first demographic dividend, which is what happens when countries shift from having high mortality rates to low mortality rates.

As children began to survive their entire childhoods, every country experienced a second demographic dividend, which is when the labor supply of young, capable people became the economic powerhouse for a whole society.

“Countries flourish as they have more workers than dependents,” Fried said. “Even the size of the number of children in the population relative to the number of people working is lower. As this age structure changes, as young people move into adulthood and succeed, countries are really fueled economically and have an opportunity to flourish.”

But older people play an economic role in society as well. Societies where people live longer are wealthier societies.

As societies continued to improve, Fried said the news coverage stopped lining up.

“If you look at the headlines in the papers, the dominant picture is that population aging is a big, big problem,” she said. “We seem to be anticipating that this immense, unprecedented success is a big disaster.”

Fried said the common perception is that older people have too many needs and are not contributing enough to society. That perception is reflected at a policy level with the “old-age dependency ratio” — the number of people in the United States who are 65 years or older, over the number of productive, working-age people, mainly 18 to 64 years old.

“How we can afford more older people, or not, is being boiled into an old-age dependency ratio with the implication that every person 65 or older has deep personal care needs, none of them work for pay, none of them contribute anything to society, their families, their grandchildren or the betterment of their communities,” Fried said. “There are a lot of questions there.”

As society is structured now, Fried said older adults contribute a “huge amount.”

“If you add up what we know how to count, which is the hours of volunteering by older people and informal caregiving for loved ones, it adds up to $160 billion a year in contributions in the United States by older people, which is the dollar equivalent of what the U.S. spends on long term care,” she said.

On a personal level, there are a lot of fears about aging. People assume they won’t have enough money when they grow old, that they will lose their role in society or that they will be ill and without the care they need.

There are also a lot of myths, such as the misconception that older people are financially dependent.

“The data shows that financial transfers go more from old to young than young to old,” Fried said. “Big time.”

Another myth is that jobs for old people take jobs away from young people.

“That’s called the ‘lump of labor fallacy,’ and it is not true,” she said. “Older people who are economically productive create jobs for younger people.”

When Fried was training to become a geriatrician, she said the “question of the time” was whether certain diseases and disabilities could be prevented in older people. Would doctors even prescribe what is needed for prevention if they could?

“Fast forward 25 years, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ on all counts,” Fried said. “We know now that half  of all chronic diseases are preventable, such as heart disease, stroke and cancers. We don’t do it, but we know it.”

Fried said it is also apparent that healthy environments matter as people get older. The fourth leading cause of death is air pollution, a problem the United States has just started to control.

“Many of the cities where your kids couldn’t go out and play in the morning because it was too polluted are no longer like that,” she said. “These things matter in terms of whether we age healthy.”

What the U.S. has yet to solve are the racial disparities in life expectancy.

“Too many people, who are not receiving the benefit of this kind of prevention, are arriving at old age sick, if they’re lucky, and are tracked to get sicker,” she said.

Fried recalled a study that showed that older black people in the City of St. Louis, who were not beneficiaries of prevention assets, developed multiple diseases and became disabled at least 10 years earlier than white people and black people in St. Louis suburbs.

“We have not solved the inequality issue, but if we do, we will have the opportunity to get everybody to arrive at old age healthy and be tracked to stay healthy,” she said. “That will be a game changer for our country if we think about the opportunities it helps unlock. It will be a game changer for all of us if we think about the health care costs that could be lowered as a result.”

Where does all of this leave society? Fried isn’t sure yet. Is the future going to be a disaster? Could it be great? How does a society plan for children who will live to be 120?

“If this is about people we love, if this is about a future we care about, let’s think about what’s possible,” she said. “We have created a new stage of life — we added 30 years — but what do we do with it? Are there any opportunities here?”

Young people are already living with the expectation of a longer life, but Fried said society has not adapted to their expectations because people get hung up on the challenge of an “either-or mentality.”

“There are so many needs in the world,” she said. “Oh my god, how could we deal with them? If we think about inequities, if we think about job loss, if we think about urbanization and globalization, if we think about climate change, if we think about people in poverty and poor education, how do we factor old people into that?”

The answer to that question is the “design opportunity of the 21st century.”

To consider what that design might look like, Fried asked the audience to consider Nelson Mandela’s work in The Elders, an international, non-governmental organization for esteemed elders working together for peace and human rights.

“The Elders see it as their mission to work every single day of their lives, together, to tackle the issues that threaten our future and lay the groundwork using what they know, their skills, their connections, their network and their presence on the global stage to craft a better future,” Fried said.

Fried said this organization sets the stage to commit a “grand act of imagination” that will build a better society.

To begin, Fried said the design needs the basics: Social protections and health programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, which act as models for the future.

“(The models) offer what we’ve learned, which is if we design the institutions and systems of our world for the length of life we now have, they turn out to be better for everybody else,” she said. “It’s true for how we design age-friendly cities, it’s true for how we design age-friendly health systems and it’s true even for whether we make stop lights last long enough to get across the street for everyone.”

As people age, Fried said they gain wisdom and unique knowledge, but are not using it to leave the world “better than they found it.”

“It is really important to successful aging to know that your time on this Earth matters — the things we do will endure beyond us,” Fried said.

One of the issues older people need to act on is climate change, she said. 

“The Elders said there is no question that the existential crisis of our future is climate change,” Fried said. “They said a global solution to the climate crisis requires the direct participation of the people who are most affected by it. Older people are most affected and young people are the ones most likely to die from massive heat waves, hurricanes and flooding.”

Fried proposed that Chautauqua become a model for how older adults can become the “pay it forward” generation on climate change and other pressing issues of the future.

“Every 20-year-old here will be 60 when we have solved these problems, when we have built a society for the opportunities of longer lives, when every age group benefits,” Fried said. “It’s going to require our collective grand act of imagination for an uncrafted future that is possible.”

Once, when she was the principal cellist in the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra, Aja Gabel played Yo-Yo Ma’s cello.

During a break from rehearsing with the symphony, the renowned cellist left the stage to do sit-ups and asked the orchestra members if anyone wanted to play his instrument. No one took him up on the offer — except for a young Gabel, who was watching in the audience.

“I had never played such a nice cello,” she said. “And I never will again.”

In 2018, Gabel published her debut novel The Ensemble, an intimate epic that features a cellist named Daniel, a prickly musician with a chip on his shoulder and one-fourth of the Van Ness Quartet. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s pick for Week Four follows the quartet members — Jana, Brit, Henry and Daniel — across 18 years of friction and devotion as they grow into adulthood.

In her CLSC Author Presentation at 3:30 p.m. today, July 18, in the Hall of Philosophy, Gabel will untangle the rigorous, messy processes behind music and writing, with a focus on theorizing “revision” when understanding art and life. Gabel will be joined by the Athena Quartet, whose members include Chautauqua School of Music faculty members Aaron Berofsky, Kathryn Votapek and John Michel, as well as violinist Yehonatan Berick, highlighting the 2019 CLSC vertical theme of “Collaboration.” To open and conclude Gabel’s lecture, the Athena Quartet will play the first and last movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 — which is, according to Berofsky, “incredibly sad, but great.”

“For me, quartets … are the most intimate, personal genre,” Berofsky said. “You have to attend to every single detail, whereas, as a soloist, you can kind of just do it by instinct in some ways.”

Without the benefit of a piano or orchestra, quartets can easily sound out of tune, requiring a perfectionist’s commitment. The closeness engendered by such painstaking work, Berofsky said, is an aspect of the book that resonated with him and the fellow quartet members.

“Listening to the music, hopefully (the audience) will hear (The Ensemble) in a new light,” Votapek said.

Excepting Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, The Ensemble is the first fiction pick of a CLSC season that has already seen five author presentations, many from prominent journalists and nonfiction writers. According to Atom Atkinson, director of literary arts, the novel’s unconventional arrangement and specific attention to an insular subculture made it an even more exciting pick for Week Four. The journey within the book, they said, is really “the arc of a life of the ensemble.”

“It’s doing something conceptually and structurally that is innovative while still being inviting and welcoming to a lot of different kinds of readers,” they said. “It’s also quite educational for anyone who has not been inside the world of being a musician — period — let alone this particular niche. I think that, of all the communities that might have a layperson interest in that world, Chautauqua is one of them. “

From the frenzied competition scenes to the precise descriptions of neck divots and arms bowing in tandem, The Ensemble vibrates with the expertise of a life steeped in the world of classical music. Gabel was a serious cellist for 25 years, and pairing writing and music — her two “true loves” — seemed like a natural pairing for her first novel. It also meant she was already an expert on her subject matter, not only the routine and career trajectory of her characters, but also the deep familiarity present within a group of individuals bound to each other by the strings of their instruments.

Gabel would eventually decide not to pursue a professional career in classical music, yet she  always tried to be “music-adjacent.” When she worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, she worked with music as an arts administrator. When she studied writing, she took cello lessons on the side.

“(Music) was always a constant in my life,” she said. “I was so desperate to make it be in my life — and so sad at the idea that it wouldn’t be — that I think it contributed to my writing the novel. I wanted to live a life where I could still live a life of music.”

With Gabel’s intentional inclusion of concert pieces at the beginning of each section, Beethoven, Mozart and Dvořák literally punctuate her book as it charts the Van Ness Quartet’s course from students to professional musicians. She begins and ends the book with a Dvořák “because they would play it in two different ways”; she has the quartet play a difficult Shostakovich when she wants to gesture toward the group’s instability and unease; and she saves a Mendelssohn for when the quartet starts to “expand their lives.”

“If you were listening while you were reading that section, it would make sense,” Gabel said. “I understood those pieces so well, so it was fun to dramatize them in this way. It’s not an opera; it’s a novel set to music.”

The Ensemble is written as a series of close third-person narratives, a switch from the  first-person chapters of an early draft and a structure reminiscent of The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver’s best-selling novel about an American family living in the Belgian Congo. To inform her portrayal of a motley family, Gabel turned “again and again” to family-spanning books like Alice McDermott’s After This and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

As a fellow cellist, Gabel said she’s not as “angsty” as Daniel, but she does identify with his internal struggle when playing alongside someone as effortlessly talented as Henry, the book’s prodigy. Although she might not be autobiographically attune to all that her characters undergo — take Jana’s experience with adoption, for example — Gabel does find herself needing to “believe in the conflict,” which often means seeking out a personal avenue into a fictional situation.

“Perhaps I’m interested not in motherhood in a literal sense, the way Jana is, but I am interested in it in other ways,” Gabel said. “How do you maintain yourself and love another person that you have purposefully and intentionally decided to bring into the world?”

As The Ensemble’s quartet members fall in and out of love with each other and their craft, they illustrate the tension inherent between human loneliness and the intensity of their relationships. In non-literal ways, Gabel used her debut novel as a map.

“It’s not in vogue to say that fiction is cathartic, but I have always experienced it that way,” she said. “I have always done my best work when I am writing something I am trying to figure out.”

In her professional life, Gabel now lives primarily as a writer, though just last week she attended an open rehearsal for the Los Angeles Philharmonic that “took (her) right back.” The Ensemble is a convergence of these two worlds that have brightened and defined her life.

“I feel like as long as the book is in the print, I’ll be able to engage with music,” Gabel said.

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, said that, in the least, one can find the answer to what “The Transition” is through the epigraphs in his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.

“What is the normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age,” Rohr quoted from his book.

Rohr said many older people find themselves stuck in the culture of the first half of life, where they continue to live by the values of fame and wealth. However, there comes a point when one must look inward to contemplate life and “discover your soul.”

Rohr, Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, continued his lecture series Tuesday in the Hall of Philosophy as part of Week Four’s interfaith theme, “Falling Upward: A Week with Richard Rohr.” His lecture was titled “The Transition.”

Rohr said that when one thinks of falling upward in religious terms, one normally associates such a journey with Jesus and the Resurrection, and this is what is celebrated on Easter: the Resurrection of Christ in which he is worshiped, not imitated, Rohr said.

“Human beings have a strange quality,” Rohr said. “If a spiritual message does not somehow include you and me, you’re not interested in it. And that’s unfortunate. We’ve told the story of Jesus in such a really unspiritual way, … and that’s why it doesn’t work for transformation, because it’s always looking outside yourself and you’re supposed to worship someone else who did it right.”

Rohr said this worshiping doesn’t work for transformation. Rather, Rohr prefers to use the Greek epic poem, The Odyssey, because it is a text that cannot be taken as literally as Biblical scriptures.

“Symbolism is 10 levels of meaning, and it fascinates the soul and the mind and the heart,” Rohr said. “As you look for that, that deeper meaning, sure, you can make mistakes, but haven’t we made enough mistakes with our literalism? I think so. So we’ve still got a lot of growing up to do.”

The Odyssey is the tale of Odysseus, who after fighting and winning the Trojan War, returns home to his family, only to be called to a second journey — or what Rohr quotes David Brooks as terming, “the second mountain.”

Odysseus’ first journey is like one’s first half of life, which Rohr also called the “survival dance.” The second half of life is the second journey, which he termed the “sacred dance.” As he said Monday, many people struggle to move from the survival dance to the sacred dance because the survival dance involves making money, and no one wants to stop making money once they’ve started. So, they never move on.

“You do more and more of the same thing even though it isn’t working anymore and you don’t need it anymore,” Rohr said. “I hope this is giving loads of permission all over the place to take second journeys.”

Rohr then shard a scene from The Odyssey, in which the ghost of Tiresias, with a golden scepter in his hand, told Odysseus of his next trip; how he must go to the mainland with a well-made oar to a people who have never heard of the sea, ships or salting their food. The ghost of Tiresias also said the oar Odysseus made would be a winnowing shovel.

“The very same metaphor Jesus uses — which is used to discriminate between the essentials and the nonessentials, between the wheat and the chaff, between what matters and what doesn’t matter,” Rohr said. “That’s how you move into the second half of life. What are the essentials and what are the nonessentials?”

This prophecy that Odysseus is receiving from Tiresias is important in terms of location, too, Rohr said. Odysseus receives this prophecy while he is in Hades, the place of the dead. Just like most of the human race has to hit rock bottom before going up — what Rohr refers to as “falling upward” — Odysseus is at the bottom when he learns of this prophecy.

So, when Odysseus returned home and then was told to leave again as the prophecy had foretold, Rohr said he had to be pushed, as no one can go on a second journey without being pushed.

“Loss of a job, loss of reputation, loss of a marriage, loss of faith — it’s always got to be a loss of something that you thought was you, that you thought was essentially you, and you could not live without it, and you have to find out that that’s not true,” Rohr said.

This is what makes the entire journey religious, Rohr said. He said the Latin term religiō means to reconnect. Therefore, the process of reconnecting is religious.

“The more you can include, the more you can connect, I would say the more religious you are. … It is, in a word,  universal; God allows you universal compassion,” Rohr said. “Odysseus is also reconnecting his outer journey to the mainland, or his interior world. At least that’s the way I would see it, which is much of the task of the second half of life.”

In the same way an extrovert becomes an introvert with age and an introvert becomes more of an introvert with age, one writes the script of their life in the first half of life, Rohr said. Then, the second half of life is about writing the commentary on that life.

“The first world, the first half of life — of occupation and productivity — must now find its full purpose,” Rohr said. “The second half of life is not about productivity alone. The amazing thing is you still are (productive), but it’s about generativity, inner generativity.”

Rohr believes the whole Gospel to be about forgiveness, which he said is a religious term for letting go of what is being dragged around. The ego or persona that one develops in the first half of life is something that needs to be let go of, he said.

Before returning home, Odysseus’ last task is to plant his oar in the ground of the mainland and then leave. Rohr compared this to how Jesus told his disciples to leave their families and occupations behind. Just as they did, Odysseus planted his oar, and this is the end of Odysseus’ second journey.

“Odysseus has to return home to Ithaca to prepare a solemn sacrifice to all the gods who rule the broad heavens in human language,” Rohr said. “He’s finally living inside the big and true picture in Christian language. He is finally connected to what Jesus called the reign of God.”

Rohr closed his lecture with a personal commentary on life.

“Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived,” he said. “Once you know you’ve touched upon this mystery of life and this mystery of death, you tend not to be so afraid of death.”

“Colossians 1:15-20 is the premier text for Franciscan Christology, so forgive me if I have too many ideas in my head and mouth,” said Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, at the 9:15 a.m. Wednesday Ecumenical Service.

His sermon title was “Incorporating the Negative,” and the Scripture reading was Colossians 1:15-20.

In these verses, the word “all” is used eight times.

“It is a universal vision,” Rohr said. “I wanted to name my book ‘Another Name for Every Thing.’ ”

The book was titled The Universal Christ, because the publishers thought the alternative title sounded too pantheistic.

“I wanted to talk about the confluence of matter and spirit, the ordinary and holiness,” Rohr said. “The early church fathers clarified this problem long ago. Pantheism is that God is the same and equal in everything, that we are all God. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be God.”

Panentheism, he said, “is pure gospel, it is incarnation, it is God in all things, manifest in all things, but is not the totality of God.”

“It puts us at home in the world,” he said. “God is not somewhere else; this is a major problem for all world religions.”

It is not private malice that is destroying the world, Rohr told the congregation, but “the schizophrenia in our moral theology.”

“On a corporate level, we say war is good and killing is good, but when you come back to Peoria and kill someone, we put you in jail,” he said.

The writer of Colossians was talking about a cosmic vision only 30 years after Jesus died on the cross.

“How did we get to universal metaphysics from a little man from Galilee who died on a cross in Jerusalem?” Rohr asked.

Rohr acknowledged that “The Universal Christ” is probably a better title for his book because it captures what the Scripture is conveying. In Colossians there are three verbs to describe what the Universal Christ does — it synthesizes, reconciles and recapitulates everything that is already inside our self, our being.

“You don’t have to be a Christian to understand the Universal Christ,” Rohr said. “Jesus is like the shortcut on the computer, he helps you get there faster and see the divine presence in everything. This has already been happening for 13.6 billion years.”

When Jesus appeared, Rohr said, “we were finally ready to fall in love with a person.”

“There was no more need for animal sacrifice,” he said. “What we had to sacrifice was the coldness of our hearts.”

How then, he asked the congregation, do we integrate evil and sin?

Rohr described a trip to a cathedral in Europe and viewing the artwork in the building. There was a painting in the central part of the cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel stabbing a dragon.

“This is not the way to deal with evil,” he said. “The only way to understand this way to deal with evil is in the framework of retributive justice.”

In a side chapel of the cathedral were several paintings of St. Martha.

“Instead of stabbing the dragon, which is still a dragon, she is taming it, feeding it,” Rohr said. “This is how Jesus incorporated the negative. A mind ready to understand sees restorative justice.”

When the only way to have victory and perfection is to exclude imperfection and sin, Rohr said, “this is why we are having an immigration tragedy.”

“This is the human understanding of holiness — to sweep away imperfection,” he said.

The divine way to understand holiness is to tame evil — and forgiveness is what tames evil. This is not pretty, sentimental forgiveness, though.

Rohr said that reconciliation, peace was made by the blood of the Cross.

“Who was Jesus making peace with?” he asked. “Initially, the church said with God the father, who had to be talked into living with us and loving us.”

The Franciscians held a minority position on this question, Rohr said.

“It is like most minority position papers — read but not studied,” he said.

Jesus was making peace with reality, he said.

“Jesus was forgiving reality for being violent, immature, stupid and wrong,” he said. “The same thing with the human soul — this evil is so hidden in our unconscious that we still do it.”

Jesus is the Alpha, totally reconciling human beings, forgiving every thing for what it is.

“Divine perfection is forgiveness healing imperfection,” Rohr said. “Do we really think we can sweep imperfection under the door, to say it belongs somewhere else, not with me?”

All things, good and bad, he said, together make unity in the glory of God.

The Rev. J. Paul Womack presided. Roger Barrows, director of the scholarship program for the International Order of the King’s Daughters and Sons and a former scholarship student, read the Scriptures. The Motet Choir, under the direction of Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, sang “Anniversary Song,” by Jane Marshall, arranged by Alice Parker. The Alison and Craig Marthinsen Endowment for the Department of Religion provides support for this week’s services.

Tonight, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and the Music School Festival Orchestra will perform a piece that changed the course of musical history and even started a riot.

The concert, at 8:15 p.m. tonight, July 18, in the Amphitheater, features Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Alongside Stravinsky’s piece, the orchestras will play Alfred Schnittke’s “(K)ein Sommernachtstraum.”

CSO Conductor and Music Director Rossen Milanov said “The Rite of Spring” “literally changed the way we hear music, the way music is composed.”

The piece’s influence began with a controversial premiere in 1913. Stravinsky’s original composition, combined with unorthodox choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, was instantly met with uproar. Witnesses said the orchestra’s music was impossible to hear in the roaring crowd; Stravinsky himself wrote that the audience’s fervor grew to “a terrific uproar.”

The audience’s confusion manifested in derision toward the orchestra. The piece’s first conductor, Pierre Monteux, wrote that, “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.”

Milanov said the piece’s reception was characterized by this controversy — some listeners embraced the groundbreaking piece, while others resented this break from traditional music.

“People were divided into two camps: the traditionalists and those who were looking for something a little different,” he said.

“The Rite of Spring” was met with one of the most mixed critical responses in musical history. Regardless of its initial public reception, Milanov said the controversial piece was an influential departure from tradition.

“The music is so innovative, so original,” Milanov said. “It was almost a revolution in musical history.”

The orchestras will open with another untraditional piece: Schnittke’s “(K)ein Sommernachtstraum,” a 1985 composition with a title based on the German translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The piece surprised audiences with an unorthodox beginning and uses what Milanov described as a combination of classical and modern influences.

“Schnittke was famous for his collage technique, providing a bridge between the music of the past and the music of our time,” Milanov said.

The entire MSFO, with more than 80 student musicians, will perform alongside the CSO.

Maya Fields, a violist in the MSFO, has performed with professional orchestras before — both as a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra when they played with the Cleveland Orchestra, and as a member of the MSFO last year in collaboration with the CSO for their joint performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony.

“It was incredibly inspiring,” Fields said. “I think that it’s really good to have students work with professionals, because you sort of know what it is to rehearse professionally, what professionals are like, what it’s like to interact with the professionals (and) what it’s like to interact with really good conductors like (Milanov).”

The chance to share the stage with professional musicians encourages the students to be at their very best.

“You feel like you have to be really on your game,” Fields said, “because they’re professionals, and I think that they probably look at us and expect us to know what we’re doing.”

“It’s really hard to tell people true things.”

This line is repeated throughout the course of How the Light Gets In, Chautauqua Theater Company’s first New Play Workshop show of the season.

The show opens at 8 p.m. Thursday, July 18 in Bratton Theater, with additional performances at 4 p.m. Friday, July 19, and 2:15 p.m. Saturday, July 20. In that span of three days, How the Light Gets In will explore how difficult it can be to open up to other people, but why it can be important to do so. And while the characters in the show find it hard to tell one another the truth at times, the show’s director, Emilie Beck, hopes Chautauquans will find it easier to talk to one another at the Brown Bag discussion, “Fresh Ink: Behind the scenes of our New Play Workshop How the Light Gets In,” at 12:15 p.m. Thursday, July 18 in Bratton Theater. 

“It can be easy for us to put up a façade, and hard for us to be real and true (with one another),” Beck said. “But when we recognize that we are safe, that we are allowed to be our true selves, that is such a gift. That’s something I want to explore and discuss prior to the show.”

Although coming into a show with no knowledge of the plot or concepts it deals with can be beneficial to some stories, Beck said giving people context for what they’re about to see can also be valuable.

“Any time that we can provide context for a play is helpful,” Beck said. “The way I want to offer that to this audience is focused on the desire people often have to create something that masks our true selves.”

The play follows a handful of disparate characters as they encounter one another in a Japanese garden. Slowly, surely, these individuals connect with one another and come to understand that, although they are all flawed in some way, those flaws do not take away their worth. At the Brown Bag discussion, audience members will have a chance to talk with members of the cast and crew and ask questions about themes, the production process or anything else they might be curious about in advance of the show’s opening.

Playwright E.M. Lewis said she hopes attendees will take the opportunity to dig deeper into the topics the show presents.

“Whether it’s Japanese architecture, the concept of kintsugi or the cultural significance of tattooing, I hope that people take some time to learn a little more about anything they’re interested in,” Lewis said.

Lewis said that while audience members are taken through some emotional territory, there’s a positive message at the heart of the show — one that encourages people to connect with one another.

“When we feel most alone, we’re not,” Lewis said. “Sometimes we can feel very solitary, especially when traumatic things happen to us, but there are often connections and people where we least expect them.”

The New Play Workshops are sponsored in part by the Roe Green Foundation.

“Your identity is hidden with Christ in God,” wrote Paul the Apostle in Colossians 3:3.

That identity — shrouded from view though it may be — forms the basis for the lifelong search for personal truth that happens so often in 21st century Western culture, according to Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.

“You don’t have anything to do with (your identity),” said Rohr, a spiritual writer, Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “It was given to you in an unconditional, beloved way in the moment of your creation. And when you rest in that as your identity, you don’t have to be on the stage to feel important.”

At 2 p.m. today, July 18, in the Hall of Philosophy, Rohr will share insights into growing through “The Second Half of Life.” Rohr’s final Week Four lecture is part of the interfaith theme, “Falling Upward: A Week with Richard Rohr.”

“If religion doesn’t tell us we’re all created in the image of God, I don’t think it’s doing its job,” Rohr said. “It creates just a different kind of violence, a different kind of hatred, a different kind of righteousness.”

Rohr’s interfaith lectures for this week are based on his 2011 book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.

And a crucial part of finding self-identity during the two halves of life, according to Rohr, is being accustomed to failure.

In Falling Upward, Rohr wrote that the majority of the workforce and student body in 21st-century America seems to have “been coddled, been given ‘I Am Special’ buttons for doing nothing special, and had all his or her bills paid by others.” 

Rohr said he’s “glad he wrote that passage,” and that its truth is “so obvious” to him.

“It is a generalization,” he said, “but it’s still a truth that’s worth hearing. I met a lot of (hardworking young people) here this (Sunday) morning. But they’re not the ones who fill the stadiums and jazz bars, where it’s just all about entertainment.”

However, Rohr wanted to make it clear that he’s certainly “not against jazz bars.”

“When entertaining yourself every day of the week is the meaning of your life, you’re never going to be ready for when the big issues come,” he said. “And they will come.”

Chautauqua Opera Young Artists baritone Yazid Gray, soprano Kaitlyn Stavinoha and bass Seunghee Lee didn’t choose opera — it chose them.

“Opera was never something I did (as a child), because I didn’t understand it,” said Gray, who came from a church choir background.

It wasn’t until Gray’s voice teacher encouraged him to audition for a program with Washington National Opera that he realized opera wasn’t what he expected.

“It’s so nice to be able to get on stage without a mic and yell, in a sense,” Gray said, “and just to have so much power on stage and have all the focus be on you in that moment in time.”

Gray, Lee and Stavinoha will each perform repertoire that is familiar to them and show their passion for opera in the fourth Afternoon of Song recital at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, July 18 in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor. The three Young Artists will be accompanied by pianists Dottie Randall and Carol Rausch, music administrator for Chautauqua Opera.   

Stavinoha said as she grew up, she was convinced her career was musical theater.

“I grew up with a very musical theater background,” Stavinoha said. “I wanted to be on the Broadway stage.”

She said her voice teacher encouraged her to sing some classical selections and audition for the high school voice studio at Houston Grand Opera.

“I got in, and it changed my life,” Stavinoha said. “I got this behind-the-scenes look into what it is to be an opera singer.”

She’ll open the program by singing “The Serpent” by Lee Hoiby, a selection she performed in high school.

“I actually performed it for the end-of-the-year recital, and that’s the last time I sang it,” Stavinoha said. “It was the first time I sang operatically in front of people.”

She will also perform a set by Franz Liszt, which she performed for her master’s program recital. Since her last performance of Liszt’s “La tombe et la rose,” Stavinoha has connected to the piece in a new way.

“I think that’s the exciting thing about art song,” she said. “In opera, we’re characters, but in art song, we get to be characters but also put yourself into the piece.”

When Lee was younger, he said he didn’t like to sing, but his mom put him in the church choir.

As Lee grew older, his voice teacher encouraged him to try opera. In his selections for the recital, he will sing three Korean songs, and “Aufenthalt from Schwanengesang” by Franz Schubert.

“When I first started singing, my voice teacher gave me this piece,” Lee said. “Now, it’s my first time singing it after 15 years.”

Gray is also revisiting songs he has performed in the past, as he will sing selections from Three Dream Portraits by Margaret Bonds.

“I think I’m most excited for the Three Dream Portraits only because I haven’t performed them in a while,” Gray said. “It’s such a powerful message — each tells a story about the black experience in America.”

Rausch found that each Young Artist was unexpectedly pulled into opera through the songs they selected — songs they performed at some point early in their operatic careers.

“For all three (Young Artists), this isn’t originally what they were going for,” Rausch said. “Somehow our paths have all converged in opera.”

The Young Artists are eager to share the vast variety of songs that have particularly influenced their careers. Recitals are a perfect way to show the melting pot of opera musical styles, Rausch said.

“Everybody is doing something in their native language that I think is important to them, while also doing things that are outside their native language,” Rausch said.   

The recital closes with Hoiby’s “Where the music comes from,” which brings the program full circle for Stavinoha.

“I think music comes from everywhere, and that’s the point of it,” she said.

In its 44th year, the Boys’ and Girls’ Club Track and Field Day shows no signs of slowing down.

Starting at 9:15 a.m. Thursday, July 18 at Club, teams will warm up for a day of track and field events. Divided into three groups — Groups 4 and 5, Groups 6 and 7, and Group 8 through those in the Senior Athletic Club —  Groupers will be participating in the 50-yard dash, 100-yard dash, 220-yard dash and 440-yard relay. Other field activities include a softball throw, baseball throw, broad jumping, discus, basketball free-throws and shot-put on different sports fields around Club.

Groupers from years past come back to see if anyone participating will be able to break long-standing records — some that have been standing since 1965.

Anna Coats, Club’s program coordinator, said that the pride of former Groupers often prompts photo opportunities with Club records.

“We had a lot of people this year come and take their picture with their record because every year there are concerns that it’s going to get broken,” Coats said.

Coats said that going through the competitions they make sure to accurately measure every event so as to be specific as possible.

Coats said Track and Field Day is an intense competition, but Groupers develop strong bonds with one another.

To close out the day of competition, Club staff will compete in a counselor relay — a crowd favorite.

In a week dedicated to the science, economics and ethics of longer life spans, a panel discussion is set to bring cultural perspectives to the conversation.

Kate de Medeiros, the O’Toole Family Professor in Miami University of Ohio’s Department of Sociology and Gerontology, and Ron Cole-Turner, the H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, will join Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt in conversation at 10:45 a.m. today, July 18, in the Amphitheater. The panel discussion continues Week Four’s theme: “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World — A Week in Collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity.”

Ewalt said this panel gives voice to some of the larger cultural questions surrounding longevity, posed by two non-scientists who have spent their careers wrestling with these broader themes. Chautauqua Institution convened the panel after Joseph F. Coughlin, founder and director of MIT’s AgeLab, canceled his previously announced lecture due to medical issues.

“While we were very disappointed to hear from Joe Coughlin on Wednesday that he’d be unable to be with us, we have assembled a panel to offer reflections and insight on the larger story of human life and aging, and how culture has reflected on and shaped this story,” Ewalt said. “We’ll explore how aging has been depicted and explored through literature and other forms, and continues to influence our views on longevity, along with how technology is potentially writing a new story of humanity’s future. Beyond the definitive answers that science can provide us, what else is necessary — as individuals, communities and society at large — to chart a ‘New Map of Life’?”

Cole-Turner, who has lectured on both the morning and afternoon platforms at Chautauqua, explores in his research the connections between science and religion, especially the ways in which technology is changing what it means to be human.  His scholarship includes  transhumanism — the possible future of integrating humanity with technology to extend life, or even live forever.

“(W)e are committed to use all of the means that God has given us,” Cole-Turner told The Chautauquan Daily in advance of his Aug. 8, 2016, interfaith lecture in the Hall of Philosophy. “We are permitted to use technology also, as long as it fits within a broader framework of what seems to us to be legitimately considered God’s program for the transformation of humanity.”

As part of today’s panel conversation, de Medeiros will examine how aging has been written about historically in literature, and how that writing still drives popular opinion. Her research at Miami focuses in part on how cultural systems affect the experience of aging and the construction of self.

“I encourage everyone to think deeply on what shapes their own attitudes toward aging and later life, to challenge stereotypes they may have about what it means to grow old, and to consider what they can do to positively change the social contexts that frame old age,” de Medeiros wrote in her Wednesday column in the Daily.

As the Week Four Miami Faculty Fellow, de Medeiros was scheduled to lead two post-lecture conversations on Wednesday and today; her 12:30 p.m. post-lecture conversation in the Hall of Christ has been canceled.

Cole-Turner, one of this week’s Mystic Heart leaders, will still facilitate Christian meditation at 7:15 a.m. today in the Presbyterian House Chapel and will co-present with Rebecca Cole-Turner on “Christian Meditation: The Taize Experience” at 12:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Missions.

Last Thursday, a volunteer at Smith Memorial Library was caught lying down on the job. And sitting. And staying.

In between bookshelves in the children’s section, Lola the Library Dog flopped on her back, fluffy tan stomach on display.

“She’s presenting her belly to you,” Lola’s handler L.K. Noller told 4-year-old Helena Kretc. “What a gift.”

Helena and her mother Lilian Kretc selected the children’s book, Chicks Run Wild, and settled in next to Lola’s mat on the floor. Helena leaned in close to the dog’s reddish brown head and received a sloppy kiss on the face.

From 4 to 5 p.m. Thursday, July 18 and every Thursday through Week Eight at the Smith, children ages 5 and up are invited to read to Lola, a certified therapy dog. This is Lola and Noller’s third year volunteering at Chautauqua.

“I think Lola is our first dog here at the Smith,” said library director Scott Ekstrom. “We have been happy to have her.”

Noller adopted Lola at 11 months old from her local SPCA shelter. The retriever-shar-pei mix was rescued along with eight brothers and sisters after being born under a shed in the middle of winter. Because of a potentially deadly heart defect, Lola was the last of her litter to be adopted.

“I took her home, and my vet said, ‘Just give her care and she’ll probably grow out of it,’ ” Noller said. “And she did, but it was a hard choice. And I was rewarded with the world’s best dog.”

Noller enrolled Lola in obedience school when she started pulling on her leash and acting obstinately around the house.

“Her punishment was puppy kindergarten, (but) she loved it.” Noller said. “She was puppy kindergarten valedictorian.”

She received her therapy dog certification at 1 year old.

Lola’s aptitude for obedience training and love of kids inspired Noller, a certified literary tutor, to bring her to the Kingston Library in Kingston, New York. Now 7 years old, Lola is a staple at that library during the Institution’s off-season.

“The library throws her a birthday party every year,” Noller said.

Because SPCA volunteers were responsible for rescuing and raising her, Noller believes volunteering at libraries is a way to pay things forward.

“I thought, ‘You should be a therapy dog, because you were brought up by volunteers …  you’ll give back and be a volunteer yourself,’ ” Noller said.

Noller said that sometimes reading to Lola is the first time parents hear their children read out loud, something that can be extremely helpful in understanding their literacy progress.

“The parents can hear where their child’s at,” she said. “A couple years ago I noticed a young girl was dyslexic, and the school wasn’t going to test her for another year. … Why should she languish for a year?”

When she’s off the clock, Lola enjoys trying (unsuccessfully) to meet squirrels and exploring the woods around her home. Her favorite book is Noller’s cookbook, Cooking for Dogs.

When asked if she was in fact a “good girl,” Lola declined to comment.

There are a number of stressors that impact people on an everyday basis, but according to Amani Allen, none of them compare to the racially-fueled stressors minorities face — which, quite literally, get under one’s skin.

Allen, a social epidemiologist and professor of community health sciences and epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, July 16 in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Four, “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World — In Collaboration with Stanford Center on Longevity.”

As a social epidemiologist, Allen studies the social determinants of health.

“By that I am referring to the conditions in which we are all born, in which we all grow, in which we all live, work and play and in which we age,” Allen said.

That definition also includes the broad social systems that determine the day-to-day conditions of one’s life, as well as their life chances and opportunities.

“There are social norms and institutional policies and practices that confer advantages to some and disadvantages to others,” she said.

Allen examines how those life opportunities and chances vary for different groups of people and how, in turn, those differences affect mental and physical health and overall longevity. Specifically, her work focuses on one question: Why do some groups live sicker and die sooner than others?

For example, research has shown that lower socioeconomic groups do “live sicker and die sooner.”

“It’s not just that those at the bottom of the socioeconomic gradient do worse than those at the top, but those almost at the top do worse than those at the very top,” she said.

In epidemiologist Michael Marmot’s Whitehall Study, he put forth a social gradient measuring mortality rates. The study showed that those in the lowest occupational grade have the highest mortality rates and that those in the highest occupational grade have the lowest mortality rates.

Allen said this pattern, a “global phenomenon,” is seen in terms of income, education, occupation and wealth.

“This gradient tells us that health and longevity is about more than having just enough subsistence to take care of our basic needs,” Allen said. “Otherwise, we would only expect to see higher mortality rates in only the lowest socioeconomic category, but that’s not what we see.”

Allen said some argue that the social gradient is “psychosocial in nature,” meaning it is related to one’s subjective experience of their social status.

“In other words, there is something about our social position relative to others that matters for health, or that causes us psychosocial stress,” she said.

Others argue that social position not only determines whether one has access to health resources such as housing, food and access to quality health care, but also determines their level of access to those resources, which then determines their ability to avoid health risks and maximize well-being.

In terms of race, Allen said there is substantial evidence to prove that African Americans live sicker and die sooner than any other demographic. That pattern is seen among a majority of the leading causes of death: cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and various cancers. But the pattern is not just apparent at the end of life —  it is also seen in early life with premature birth and low birth weight, which sets the stage for health problems over a life span.

When explaining these persistent racial disparities, Allen turns to the “usual suspects.” At the top of that list is socioeconomic status.

Given the socioeconomic differences between black people and white people, many scientists have examined whether racial health disparities are really a question of socioeconomic differences between groups.

“However, despite the very powerful and persistent role of socioeconomic status in predicting health, as we just saw with the social gradient, it falls far short in explaining racial disparities in health,” Allen said. “Racial disparities exist despite socioeconomic status.”

Allen said there is something unique about the “experience of race” in the United States that impacts health. Although socioeconomic status, genes, access to health care and behavior matter in improving health, they don’t adequately explain health disparities.

But it doesn’t end with race, either. Allen can predict a person’s life expectancy using their zip code. Allen was born and raised in Washington D.C., where there is an eight-year difference in life expectancy depending on where in the city someone lives. Those disparities extend globally, as well. For example, black men in Harlem have a shorter life expectancy than black men in Bangladesh.

“A startling statistic, but a true one,” she said. “The United States is the richest of all industrialized nations and spends the most per capita on health care globally. So why are there places in the United States, such as some of our southeastern states, where maternal death rates exceed those of sub-Saharan Africa? We should not see such dire health outcomes in the wealthiest nation in the world, not for any group.”

When considering the differences between white people and black people, there is also a long-standing disparity in infant mortality. Allen said some would argue it is due to socioeconomic status, but college-educated black women have higher rates of infant mortality than white high school dropouts.

“For a long time, the focus on race, socioeconomic and gender differences in health focused on documenting differences in life expectancy or mortality rates, which somewhat prove the very sensitive and powerful predictors of population health,” she said.

The majority of this research Allen is referring to focused on binary disparities: men versus women or black people versus white people. One common observation was what scholars call “the gender and health paradox.”

“That (paradox) is that women live longer than men, and they have a longer life expectancy and lower mortality rates,” she said. “However, they also lived sicker lives. So when life expectancy was the primary indicator used to assess population health, the narrative was that women are doing better than men, that we don’t have to worry about women.”

That assessment was called into question when scientists started to look at measures of morbidity such as quality of life, functional limitations, disabilities and chronic diseases. Another common observation was that across almost all indicators of health, black people fared worse than white people. These findings portray what scholars call “weathering,” or the “premature aging and earlier health decline experienced among blacks.”

Allen showed a graph supporting her claim that the decline in health accumulates over the entire life span as a consequence of “persistent psychosocial and environmental stress associated with a marginalized social status in society.”

“This concept of weathering is really about how these conditions determine life chances and opportunities and structures differently for different groups, and how those differences become embodied, how they get under our skin to impact differences in health and longevity,” she said.

When thinking about the totality of one’s life experiences, Allen said it becomes clear that a person is more than just their race, gender or socioeconomic status.

“We are each our race and our gender and our socioeconomic position and our age and so on,” she said.

Allen, for example, is an African American woman with a high level of education, who lives in a racially integrated, middle-class neighborhood and works in a primarily white, male-dominated environment — all factors that impact her day-to-day experiences.

In some spaces, like work, Allen’s race, profession, education and gender are visible. But in her community, only her race and gender are visible. 

“That matters in terms of how I am viewed in society, and how I am viewed determines my day-to-day social experiences,” Allen said. “It determines how I am perceived by others and importantly, how I am treated by others by society, by institutions, etc., which all have an impact on my mental and physical health. It does for all of us, whether we realize it or not.”

Scholars and scientists started to use “an intersectional lens” to examine health disparities. So instead of examining one aspect of social identity, they examined how multiple aspects impact socialization and health.

Because humans are social creatures, Allen said binary comparisons can mask the true nature of social disparities. Allen recalled an example of mortality rates declining among black people in recent years. But what researchers didn’t see was that mortality rates were increasing for white women at the same time.

Many scholars are now examining the “biology of disadvantage,” or how aging disparities are attributed to persistent psychosocial and environmental stress. The stress associated with disadvantaged social status has the ability to disrupt physiological systems in ways that damage health over time.

“Numerous studies, including my own, have shown a relationship between social stress and dysregulation of biological systems responsible for maintaining optimal physical functioning, such as our cardiovascular system, our metabolic system and our immune system,” she said.

Allen’s research specifically focuses on how the stress from racism plays a role in weathering among African American women. In a survey, Allen found that African American women report racial discrimination as a “particularly salient form of stress.” They also described racism as a persistent stressor, with many of their first encounters with racism taking place in early childhood.

Allen recalled her first encounter with racial discrimination. In kindergarten, she was approached by a white girl who tried to rub the “dirt” off her skin. Although Allen realized the girl did not intend to hurt her, she doesn’t want people to dismiss the girl’s ignorance.

“Let’s not make a mistake that ignorance about the impact … excuses the impact that it has on people,” she said.

In response, Allen’s mother enrolled her and her sister into an African charter school in D.C. where she developed a sense of pride in herself and in her African American heritage.

“Despite that, throughout my life, the sense of pride that I had about who I am and where I come from has always existed alongside, or perhaps under, a mantle of marginalized status in society, in classrooms, in colleges, at work, in restaurants, in shopping malls and even when trying to hail a cab,” Allen said.

Allen has heard similar stories from women all over the world. Women tend to report more psychological stress due to racial discrimination based on their own experiences and the experiences of those around them.

Although it is certain that African American women are experiencing premature aging, it has not yet been proved that racial discrimination is the key factor. That’s where Allen’s work comes in. Allen runs the Health Effects Associated with Racism Threats research group at the University of California, Berkeley. HEARTS investigates racism as a social threat and how that threat affects the body.

In addition, Allen and her students have been studying the effects of weathering in two ways. 

First, Allen’s team studied allostatic load, the measure of cumulative biological dysregulation as a result of chronic stress.

“We are talking about the dysregulation across multiple systems of the body that leaves us more at risk for a variety of health outcomes regardless of whether it’s heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer. Allostatic load has been linked to all of it,” she said.

Regardless of gender, black people have a higher percentage of allostatic load than white people. Regardless of race, women also have a higher percentage of allostatic load, but there is a greater disparity among black people than white people than there is between men and women.

Second, Allen’s team studied telomeres, protein complexes that prevent the instability and degradation of cells. Generally, the longer the telomere, the healthier a person is.

“There is research showing that African American women experience an accelerated rate of decline or shortening of their telomeres over their life span,” she said.

Through a partnership with the HER Lab in San Francisco, Allen’s research group found that racial discrimination was associated with allostatic load, telomere length and hypertension among African American women. They also discovered that racial discrimination in adolescence may be more impactful than experiences later in life.

Although Allen recognizes there is much more research to be conducted, she said there is more than enough to know that when it comes to health and longevity, vast disparities exist between social groups.

Ultimately, Allen said the public health industry has put too much emphasis on fixing people.

“That’s what we like to do in public health, we like to tell people how to eat better, how to exercise; we like to tell them what to do as if they don’t already know,” she said. “But when we think about our neighborhoods, our work environments, etc., it is important to think about how the environment in which we live, work and play, constrains our opportunity to engage in healthy behavior.”

As public health focuses on fixing people, Allen believes officials need to remember that for every person they fix, there is a new person entering the population, which is why there is an unchanged rate of disease.

“It is only going to be by addressing groups or fundamental causes of health, which are not people, but the structures in which people live, work and play, that we will be able to identify the most promising strategies for addressing health equity,” Allen said.