An interdisciplinary conversation to explore ways in which dialogue can help disparate human groups -- social, economic, ethnic, national, ideological, cultural, and religious -- not only connect but capture, combine, and channel the dynamic energy of diversity into community building and networking -- locally, nationally, and globally. Special emphasis will be placed on the role of technology in facilitating dialogue as well as learning to recognize the fundamental interrelatedness of all that is.
Consistent with the technological theme, the workshop will be offered in USAO's new interactive classroom which can be linked to other state institutions via OneNet. In keeping with the dialogical theme, presenters and respondents all have extensive experience with building bridges between diverse groups. In addition, except for topics and suggested readings, there is neither a fixed, predetermined syllabus nor a quantifiable set of objectives and outcomes. This course is a process in which the open-ended journey is also the goal, and the spontaneous interaction of the participants -- presenters, respondents, and audience -- will give shape to the whole.
Main presenters-facilitators are Professor Leonard Swidler, Temple University and Professor Ingrid Shafer, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. In the team-teaching tradition of USAO's Interdisciplinary Ideas courses, Swidler and Shafer will introduce issues and enunciate positions designed to stimulate others -- both invited respondents and members of the audience -- to bring their insights to the discussion. Respondents include Professors Sidney Brown, Ann Frankland, Dan Hobbs, and Cecil Lee. The workshop can be audited or taken for one hour credit. Those enrolled for credit will be expected to be present for all sessions, demonstrate familiarity with the assigned readings, and submit position papers on two of the seven segments by April 1, 1997 to Dr. Shafer. Reading material for the course is posted in the "Building Community through Dialogue" web site at: http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/DIALOGUE.HTML.
The February 1997 workshop is envisioned as a small-scale prototype for a state-wide interactive conference in Fall 1997 and is one of a variety of activities sponsored in part by the Philadelphia based Global Dialogue Institute. Information concerning the Fall 1977 conference will be posted in this website as it becomes available. In addition, we intend to continue and expand this conversation by means of a private, subscription-by-owner, world-wide e-mail forum, INTERREL@VM.TEMPLE.EDU, which will deal specifically with using the dialogical method to foster humaneness -- a sense of kinship and mutual respect among individuals and groups, especially concerning such deeply held convictions as one's religion, or one's loyalty to a group seen as demanding the rejection of others. INTERREL (alluding to "Interreligious Dialogue" as well as the "Interrelatedness" of all that is) will also provide opportunities to discuss strategies for spreading the dialogical way of thinking.
Interested USAO students and area residents should contact Dr. Shafer (204c D.H.; 224-3140, ext. 312; e-mail: facshaferi@mercur.usao.edu).
Potential participants in other parts of Oklahoma should contact USAO's Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. John Feaver (415/224-3140, ext.221, e-mail: vpacadem@mercur.usao.edu).
PRESENTERS:
Leonard Swidler
is Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue at Temple
University. He holds advanced degrees in History, Philosophy, and Theology
from Marquette University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of
Tübingen (Germany), and has been on the Temple faculty since 1966. In
addition he has served as visiting professor at Graz (Austria), Hamburg and
Tübingen, Nankai University (Tianjin, People's Republic of China), Fudan
University (Shanghai, China), and Temple University Japan (Tokyo).
Since 1964, Swidler has been the editor of the Journal of Ecumenical
Studies (co-founded with his wife Arlene Anderson Swidler); he has
published more than 50 books and 150 articles, including After the
Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religion (1990), Death or
Dialogue-From Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (1990), Human Rights:
Christians, Marxists, and Others in Dialogue (1991), Toward a Catholic
Constitution (1996) and Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global
Ethic (1997). Swidler's "Dialogue Decalogue"
(1983) has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Swidler is Founder and Director of the Global Dialogue Institute with several subsidiaries, including the Global Dialogue Consortium, the Center for Global Ethics, and the Commission for Bosnia in Dialogue. He is advisor to state, academic, Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic & Jewish leaders in Sarajevo concerning the establishment of a Department of Interreligious Dialogue at the University of Sarajevo. He has lectured all over the world, including Fudan University, Shanghai, China, National Chen Chi University, Bosnian Academy of Science and Arts, Sarajevo, Bosnia, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria. He is currently focusing a large portion of his efforts on developing a global ethic and humanizing big business.
Ingrid Shafer came to USAO in 1968 to help develop the new interdisciplinary core program which would be required of all graduates. She is now Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Mary Jo Ragan Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. Shafer was born in Austria, lived there through the Second World War, discovered the Holocaust, and originally came to the United States to do dissertation research for the University of Innsbruck on Archibald MacLeish's J.B., a 20th century Job story. While she remained in the States and did not finish that dissertation and degree, she never stopped being haunted by the enigma of evil with its correlative of suffering, especially the kind of deliberately inflicted suffering rooted in inter-group indifference, mistrust, envy, and hatred.
Shafer holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and Masters' degrees in Literature and Human Relations, all from the University of Oklahoma. At USAO she has developed and taught a series of Interdisciplinary World Thought and Culture courses, designed to familiarize students with the most essential and pervasive patterns of various civilizations. She has been visiting scholar at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and is an Associate of the Chicago Center of Religion and Science. She has lectured on the Holocaust, Catholicism, Andrew Greeley's work, Global Ethic, Science and Religion, and the "Hermeneutics of Love" at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Temple University, as well as the University of Graz and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Shafer has published three books, some fifty articles, book chapters, and poems. She is also the creator/editor of several critically acclaimed websites. Last year Swidler and Shafer co-taught a Global Ethic course at both Temple University and USAO via Internet.
RESPONDENTS:
Sidney D. Brown is Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oklahoma (1971-1995) -- where he came after nineteen years of teaching at Oklahoma State University -- and Regents Professor of History, USAO (1996-). He was research professor at the University of Tokyo 1956-57,1977-78, 1984-85. An expert on the Japanese Meiji period, the translator of the three volume diary of Kido Takayoshi, a major 19th century Japanese political figure, and the author of numerous articles in the field, Brown was awarded the Japan Cultural Translation prize in 1986 and the imperial Third Order of the Sacred Treasure -- the highest decoration a foreigner can receive -- in 1987. He was consultant and narrator for the prize-winning film Gagaku Court Music of Japan and has lectured on the history of Jazz in Japan.
Dan S. Hobbs is Adjunct Professor of Higher Education, University of Oklahoma (1991-) and Distinguished Professor of Education, USAO (1991-). Between December 1991 and July 1992 he was Interim President of the University Center at Tulsa, and in 1987-88 -- after a quarter century with the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education -- he served as their Interim Chancellor. Over the years -- as Research Officer, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and Senior Vice Chancellor for Planning and Policy Research -- he wrote numerous State Regents' reports, including the Oklahoma Higher Education Plan for the 1970's and 1980's, and reports on the status of women (1984), minorities (1991), medical education (1980), financial aid (1985), and Oklahoma demographics (1994); he also co-authored the report on Texas Higher Education Formula Funding (1989). Hobbs has served as examiner for the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, was on the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979-1988, and was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame in 1994.
Cecil Lee is Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma (1959- 88) and Regents Professor of Art (1991-) at USAO. In the 1960s Lee chaired the OU School of Art. He has directed some 50 courses abroad, including a 1991 OU seminar at Oxford. He also taught a liberal studies course at Wiesbaden, Germany. Lee has been involved in numerous projects to bring Art History to the public, including a program to circulate slides and teaching guides in the public schools and preparing and presenting a television series, The Tradition of Beauty for Channel 13. He has published articles on Japanese and Chinese art. His work is in the Australian National Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Ann Frankland is Associate Professor of English (1988-) and Chair, Division of Arts and Humanities (1990-), USAO. Dr. Frankland has worked with foreign students since the early 1980s when she organized the English as Second Language (ELS) programs at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. She calls herself a "Raging feminist" not in the sense of hating men, but in the sense of opposing patriarchal structures that denigrate women and keep them "in their place." She considers her two chief achievements at USAO writing a 1.5 million dollar Title Three grant and developing her interdisciplinary "Mindwalking" course, in which philosophy of science, Newtonian physics, quantum, relativity, and chaos theory all come together in a piece of literature, Arcadia, the Pulitzer Prize, winning play by Tom Stoppard.
We are convinced that despite tremendous future-threatening problems, there is more to the human spirit, to this state, this country, this world, this universe than the bleak scenario suggested by pessimistic academics, cynical journalists, sensation-seeking talk show hosts, and other prophets of doom. We are convinced that it is essential for the future of humanity that we go beyond the one-dimensional paradigm of a world imagined in terms of black-and-white static assumptions and answers to a multi-dimensional, dynamic world vision.
Armed with reason, hope, faith, courage, and love, we need to leave behind the playpen of safe caricatures in order to discover and engage the world outside with its perilous yet promising horizons. We do not propose abandonment of standards, but realistic development of nuanced standards that balance individual rights with community needs and are both rooted in the past and adaptable to the changing circumstances of the present and future. The key term is Dialogue -- DIALOGUE not merely in the commonly used general sense but in a very specific, technical sense of a conversation on a common subject between two or more persons with differing views who share the willingness to change and grow, and who have come primarily in order to learn from each other.
In fruitful dialogue all participants share from the outset enough of a common "vocabulary" that they can understand their conversation partners' positions at least in general terms. All participants are both willing to learn/listen and to speak/teach. All participants acknowledge that no one has the absolute truth, though some may be better informed and/or have more clearly enunciated or logically coherent positions. All participants respect one another not only as persons but in terms of the other's ideas. This means that people who are totally convinced that they must convert others for their own good exclude themselves from dialogue. Of course, this does not mean that I cannot be privately convinced of the truth of my position; it only means that I have to grant others the right to be equally convinced of theirs! In other words, in order to participate in dialogue one must first accept the validity of dialogue-as-method and agree to use the dialogic mode of discourse.
Unfortunately, what may appear as dialogue is frequently debate or dispute or proselytizing -- adversarial, or at least patronizing, rather than cooperative. Dialogue as defined above is among equals and becomes impossible if participants have come primarily to teach rather than to learn. Such individuals become obstructions, impediments, even after they have left, because dialogically minded persons tend -- by the nature of their way of thinking -- to feel guilty about not inviting everyone to speak. We must keep in mind that by not accepting the ground rules of dialogue, individuals exclude themselves from the community! We must also remember that it is important to avoid sarcastic, strident, adversarial tone; it is contagious. But so is civility!
USAO Nash Library Room
118
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21:
09:00-10:30 Introduction and Workshop Overview
11:00-12:30 Family, gender, children (Text: Dialog01)
12:30-02:00 Lunch: Reflections by Swidler and Shafer
02:00-03:30 Ethnicity, nationality, tribalism (Text: Dialog02)
04:00-05:30 Education: competition/cooperation, facts/values, opinion/knowledge (Text: Dialog06)
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22:
09:00-10:30 Business: stockholders/stakeholders, (Text: Dialog03)
11:00-12:30 Science/Technology: Pondering Jacob Bronowski's "The Sense of Human Dignity"
12:30-02:00 Lunch
02:00-03:30 Toward a Global Ethic (Text: Dialog05)
04:00-05:30 Interreligious dialogue and concluding synthesis (Text: Dialog04)
Last revised 16 February 1997 by Ingrid Shafer
Copyright © Ingrid H. Shafer 1997