News and Events

The Vagina Monologues, a play dedicated to raising awareness about women's issues and stopping violence against women, will have three shows this year. Each show is at 7 pm in Burdick 205, one on Wednesday (28th), one on Thursday (29th), and one on Friday (30th). Tickets are $5 at the door, and merchandise (lollipops and buttons) will be $1 each. 10% of the profits will go to help women in Haiti and the remaining 90% will go to the Faulkner County Women's Shelter.

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Noted Speaker Linda Martín Alcoff to Appear at UCA March 7

Linda Martín Alcoff, a Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, will give a talk at UCA on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 at 7pm in the College of Business Auditorium. This lecture is entitled “Rape After Foucault: Rethinking Experience and Resistance,” and is free and open to the public. A catered reception will follow. Martín Alcoff is globally renowned as a public speaker and writer focusing on social identity and race, politics, sexual violence, epistemology, and Latino issues in philosophy. She has written two books, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006) and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996); Visible Identities won the Franz Fanon Book Award in 2009. Currently, she is working on a new book on sexual violence. She is originally from Panama, but her website proclaims that she now “lives happily in Brooklyn,” New York. According to Dr. Taine Duncan of UCA’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, Martín Alcoff “is a provocative and important advocate for marginalized voices.” Her website is www.alcoff.com, or you can follow Dr. Martín Alcoff on Twitter at bosqueflores. The lecture is sponsored by a UCA Foundation Grant, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Dept of Philosophy & Religion at the University of Central Arkansas.

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Noted Speaker Peter Rollins to Appear at UCA January 31

Peter Rollins, a popular writer, lecturer, storyteller and public speaker, will give a talk at UCA on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 7pm in the Ballroom of the Student Center. This lecture is entitled “The Idolatry of God: Christ and the End of Religion,” and it is free and open to the public. Rollins is a representative of a newer emergent Christianity, and he is the author of a number of books, including How (Not) to Speak of God, The Orthodox Heretic, and his latest book which is Insurrection: To Believe is Human To Doubt, Divine. Originally from Northern Ireland, where he founded a community called Ikon, a faith group that has gained an international reputation for blending live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection to create ‘transformance art’, Rollins now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He has a PhD from Queens University in Belfast, and he has presented all over the US and around the world. According to Dr. Clayton Crockett of UCA’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, Rollins “is the most exciting and compelling voice of contemporary Christianity who is willing to push institutional Christianity beyond its present forms.” His website is www.peterrollins.net.

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Brand new! This is the link to an interview that Dr. Crockett did back in August 2011. It was just published as a podcast on a website called Homebrewed Christianity. Click here to listen: http://homebrewedchristianity.com/

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Conference opportunity!

The University of Utah is hosting the Ninth Annual Intermountain West Graduate Philosophy Conference to be held March 1-3, 2012. Click here for more information.

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If you're interested in service learning, teaching English, and would like to visit Korea, check out these flyers for more information regarding the TaLK Program: Flyer One and Flyer Two.

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Our own Dr. Peter Mehl and Mr. Phillip Spivey will be two of the panelists on the upcoming "Preventing Another 9/11" to be presented on September 12, 2011 at 6:00 pm in Little Rock. This event is sponsored by Raindrop Turkish House and The Institute of Interfatih Dialog, the location is 1501 Market Street, and the other panelists are John Graves, of Henderson State University; Andre Guerrero, of Arkansas Department of Education; Jacek Lubecki, of University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Kadir Nagac, of Arkansas Tech University; and Mehmet Ulupinar, or Raindrop Turkish House. For more information you can e-mail littlerock@turkishhouse.org or call 501-223-2155.

Holocaust Survivor to Speak

Posted in: News on June 14, 2011

Conway Senior High School, UCA Department of Philosophy and Religion, UCA Department of History, UCA College of Liberal Arts, University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are sponsoring:

"An Evening with Holocaust Survivor Martin Weiss"

"Martin (Marty) was one of nine children born to orthodox Jewish parents in Polana, a rural village in the Carpathian Mountains. His father owned a farm and a meat business, and his mother attended to the children and the home. Everyone in the family helped take care of the horses and cows.

1933-39: Martin attended the village's Czech schools, which were quite progressive. Like many of the other children, he looked forward to leaving the provincial life in Polana. In March 1939, his life was changed dramatically when Nazi Germany and its allies dismembered Czechoslovakia. Hungarian troops occupied Polana, and Jews were subjected to discriminatory legislation. Czech schools were closed, and the students had to learn Hungarian. The villagers all resented the new rulers, and the democratic freedoms that they had enjoyed under Czechoslovakian rule disappeared.

1940-44: After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, conditions in Polana worsened. Two of Martin's brothers were conscripted into forced labor battalions. The family soon learned that some Jews from the area had been deported to the occupied Ukraine where they were killed by SS units. In April 1944, Hungarian gendarmes transported the village's Jews, including Martin's family, to the Munkacs ghetto. In May, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Martin, his father, brother, and two uncles were selected for forced labor; the other family members were sent to the gas chambers. Martin and his father were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and then to the subcamp of Melk, where they were forced to build tunnels into the side of the mountains. His father perished there.

Martin was liberated from Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen, by the 71st Infantry Division in May 1945. He returned to Czechoslovakia, where he found some surviving family members. In 1946 they immigrated to the United States." (http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/survivoraffairs/meet/detail.php?content=weiss)

Marty Weiss will share his heroic story of survival in Conway Senior High School's James H. Clark Auditorium on Wednesday, 9 March 2010 at 7:00 PM. This event is open to the public.

Field Trip

Posted in: News on June 14, 2011

Some of the students enrnolled in Dr. Held's Medieval Philosophy class visited the Ozark Medieval Fortress in northern Arkansas during early November. This was an optional (and very cool) part of the coursework.