“Conversations for Open Minds” is presented by the St Olaf College Institute for Freedom and Community, a space for free inquiry and meaningful debate of important political and social issues. Hosted by Edmund Santurri, Morrison Family Director and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at St. Olaf College.
The #1619Project is still one of the most controversial and important documents of our time. Edmund Santurri, director of the St. Olaf IFC, leads a conversation between Leslie M. Harris and Phillip W. Magness who present very different perspectives.
4 Apr 2022
Michael Fitzgerald: Revisiting the 1619 Project
Michael Fitzgerald specializes in southern history, African American history, and the Civil War era including slavery, civil rights, and related topics. His most recent book is “Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South.” His current project is a full-scale history of the Reconstruction era in Alabama.
In this podcast Edmund Santurri interviews Michael Fitzgerald following the IFC sponsored conversation between Leslie Harris and Phillip Magness about the 1619 Project (https://www.stolaf.edu/multimedia/play/?e=3756 (https://www.stolaf.edu/multimedia/play/?e=3756)).
3 Mar 2022
Russia, Ukraine and the South Caucasus: Post-Soviet Conflicts with Connected Roots
Artyom Tonoyan, a scholar of the South Caucasus with family ties to Armenia and Ukraine, talks about the Russian invasion of Ukraine against the background of regional and international politics.
21 Dec 2021
Elizabeth Shermer: Indentured Students: Higher Ed and the Student Loan Crisis
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on labor, capitalism, and politics. She has written about those topics in op-eds, academic articles, and scholarly books, including Sunbelt Capitalism (2013) and The Right and Labor, a 2012 edited collection done with Nelson Lichtenstein, and a 2013 edited collection on Barry Goldwater. Harvard University Press published her history of student loans, Indentured Students, under its Belknap Press imprint in August 2021.
21 Dec 2021
Michael Kazin: Moral Capitalism in the Democratic Party
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. He is the author of six books and the editor of three. His most recent book is War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918, published in January, 2017 by Simon and Schuster. It won the best book prize from the Peace History Society. His other books include American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011); A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006); America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (six editions, co-authored with Maurice Isserman); The Populist Persuasion: An American History (1995; revised editions, 1998 and 2017); and Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (1987), which won the Herbert Gutman Prize. He is also editor-in-chief of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History (2010). He is currently completing a history of the Democratic Party to be published in March of 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kazin is a former online columnist for The New Republic and has written articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and many other periodicals and websites. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright Program and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
21 Dec 2021
Eugene McCarraher: Capitalism as Religion
Eugene McCarraher is professor of humanities and history at Villanova University. He has also taught at the University of Delaware and Princeton. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, he has also written many essays and book reviews for the Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Commonweal, Dissent, the Nation, In These Times, the Hedgehog Review, and Raritan. He has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell University Press, 2000) and The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a book about automation, tentatively titled Automated Vistas: A Brief History and Critique of Automation, as well as a series of essays on the lineages of small-c communism.
13 Oct 2021
Virgil Storr: Markets and Morality
Virgil Storr is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, George Mason University, and the Don C. Lavoie Senior Fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. He is the author (or co-author) of several books including Understanding the Culture of Markets, Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster, and Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?.
28 Sept 2021
Gretchen Morgenson: The Hidden Force Behind Wealth Inequality in America
Gretchen Morgenson is the senior financial reporter in the Investigations unit at NBC News, a position she assumed in December 2019.
Previously, Ms. Morgenson spent two years as an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal and almost 20 years as assistant business and financial editor and columnist at The New York Times. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” coverage of Wall Street in The Times.
Ms. Morgenson began her career in 1976 upon graduation from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She joined Vogue Magazine as an editorial assistant and began writing the personal finance column for the magazine several years later. In 1981 she became a stockbroker at Dean Witter, a job she held for three years. Ms. Morgenson joined Money Magazine as a staff writer in 1984 and moved to Forbes in 1986. She was named assistant managing editor at the magazine in September 1997.
Ms. Morgenson is co-author, with Joshua Rosner, of Reckless Endangerment, a New York Times bestseller about the origins of the 2008 financial crisis published in May 2011 by Times Books. Ms. Morgenson has won two Gerald Loeb Awards, one in 2009 for her coverage of Wall Street and another in 2002 for excellence in financial commentary. Ms. Morgenson has also served on two Pulitzer Prize juries, evaluating investigative reporting entries in 2009 and 2010. Ms. Morgenson and her husband live in New York City and have a son.
13 Sept 2021
Irshad Manji: What is Diversity Anyway?
Irshad Manji is the founder of Moral Courage College, which teaches people how to engage on polarizing issues without shaming or “cancelling” each other. A professor of leadership at New York University for many years, Irshad now lectures with Oxford University’s Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights.
Her books are bestsellers in some countries and are banned in others. No wonder Oprah has given Irshad the Chutzpah Award for boldness. Irshad’s latest book, Don’t Label Me, reimagines diversity to include diversity of viewpoint. Chris Rock labels it “genius.” Not everyone agrees.
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