Our Programs

Funded initially by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and in collaboration with the Center for Spiritual Life at Bard College, “The Courage to Be” is a philosophical, scientific, and theological investigation into the religious and philosophical foundations of moral and spiritual courage.

Hannah Arendt was a fierce defender of free and open political speech. In perhaps her most direct defense of free speech, Arendt writes: “Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”

The Difficult Questions College Seminar is a loose collection of courses grouped around the common theme of how we can talk productively and with civility about controversial and often incendiary themes like race, sex, and religion.
 

The American Jewish Peace Archive: An Oral History of Israeli-Palestinian Activism (AJPA), directed by Aliza Becker, provides a vital record of the history of Israeli-Palestinian peace activism in the United States through the creation of an audio archive of activist interviews.

Blogging and the New Public Intellectual is a program funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities which engages an ongoing discussion with the nation’s leading bloggers in politics, history, art, and culture—asking about their experience as bloggers, what they hope to accomplish, and how they work.

The Hate and the Human Condition is an interdisciplinary series of fellowships, courses, lectures, conferences, distance learning, videos and publications exploring hate as one of the enduring questions of the human condition, as well as create scholarly and associated networks to facilitate this exploration.