FIC MARCH PROGRAMS
March 3, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Skip Schwarzman is our Quarterback.
March 6, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Jason Ferris. His topic ‒ Christianity and Democracy: Can This Relationship Be Saved?
That’s a timely question to ask when evangelical Christians angrily batter the wall of separation between church and state and voices of the Christian right prophesy God’s wrath on those who criticize the current President. As recent studies and opinion pieces bring the question into sharp focus, Jason Ferris discusses Jonathan Rauch’s book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025).
Author Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. A self-described “homosexual atheist Jew,” he makes the surprising argument that the health of American democracy depends on the renewal of Christianity. Rauch considers that view of America’s current religious landscape ‒ how it has changed in recent decades, where it seems to be heading, and why it matters.
Jason is the 18th minister of Old Pine Presbyterian Church, which dates to 1768. He describes his pastoral mission as helping people navigate a secularizing culture, and teaches regularly on Christianity’s intersection with philosophy, science, art, and culture. Jason is also a writer and documentary filmmaker. He studied English at Davidson College, where he was awarded the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship for creative writing. After working for public television in New York City, Jason graduated from Union Theological Seminary.
March 10, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Russell Cooke is our Quarterback.
March 13, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Speaker is Francis Barchi. Her topic ‒ My Genetic Information: Who has it? How did they get it, and what are they doing with it?
Francis Barchi gives us an overview of today’s “state of play” in this era of data sharing and biobanking in medical research, when our biologic samples and related health information may be collected, stored, and distributed to researchers unaffiliated with those who originally collected them. She focuses on the ethical issues that arise in a world of big data, artificial intelligence, and computational analysis in which so much about ourselves can be known so widely by so many.
Francis is an associate professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy at Rutgers and a member of the Rutgers Global Health Institute and was a senior fellow at Penn’s Center for Medical Ethics. Her research focuses on ethical issues in health internationally with attention to sub-Saharan Africa on the individual, household, and community factors that influence women’s and girls’ health and well-being. A committed educator, she teaches at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels in the fields of health, human rights, and biomedical ethics at Rutgers and internationally. And holds a PhD in social welfare, an MBE in bioethics, and MS in nonprofit leadership from Penn.
March 17, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Alan Penziner is our Quarterback.
March 21, Friday Club Dinner – cocktails at 5:30 p.m., followed by presentation, with dinner at 7:00 p.m.
Speaker is Brian Rose. His topic ‒ Assessing the Evidence for the Trojan War: Recent Excavations at Troy.
Digging below the surface of ancient myths and of Homer’s Iliad, archaeologist Brian Rose and his colleagues used advanced technology to look for truths about the Trojan War. Radar and magnetic resonance imaging helped them predict what their excavations might yield before they broke ground. They also made efficient use of funds and resources to mitigate what Brian has described as an irony of archaeology: Reconstructing history can destroy it. But was there really a Trojan War? Excavations at Troy between 1988 and 2012 provided archaeological evidence that some of the ancient stories about it were based on truth.
Brian Rose is the James B. Pritchard Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at Penn and curator of the University Museum’s Mediterranean section. His work focuses on the archaeology of both Italy and Anatolia (now Turkey) in the Iron Age and the Roman imperial period. Between 1988 and 2012 he directed post-Bronze Age excavations at Troy, and he is now the director of Penn’s excavations at Gordion in Turkey. Brian is the English language editor of Studia Troica, the annual journal of Troy excavations, and has recently edited three monographs: The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion, The Archaeology of Phrygian Gordion, and The Golden Age of King Midas. His book The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) provides an overview of the excavations in recent decades.
March 24, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Patrick Keough is our Quarterback.
March 25, Tuesday Movie Night at the Inn – doors at 6:00 p.m.; feature at 6:30 p.m. Feature King of Hearts (le roi de Coeur). Free admission with snacks and drinks including popcorn, chips, nuts, soda, beer, and wine.
Dan Rottenberg, Innmate and former film critic – another part of his illustrious, industrious writing career – leads a discussion about this multifaceted gem, a satire, fantasy, comedy directed by Philippe de Broca.
During World War I, inmates at the local asylum take over their town in northern France after both the French residents and German troops evacuate. They proceed to act out their wildest fantasies, which are far more appealing than the sanity of real life, as a British private is sent to dismantle a bomb set by the fleeing German army. Starring Alan Bates and Geneviève Bujold. Director Philippe de Broca, France, 1 hr 42 mins, English, French and German w/ English subtitles
March 27, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Speaker is Benjamin Nathans. His topic – Soviet Dissidents: Free People in an Unfree State.
Benjamin Nathans tells the story of Soviet citizens who fought a battle of ideas that helped to collapse a totalitarian regime in his new book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024). Their strategy, said the writer Andrei Amalrik, was “simple to the point of genius: In an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” Citizens became heroic martyrs for many of us in the West as they faced arrest, bogus trials, sentences to labor camps and psychiatric hospitals, and exile. But their aim was to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state.
Ben is the Alan Charles Kors Professor of History at Penn. He has written or edited four other books, including Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 2002), which was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Vucinich Book Prize, and the Lincoln Book Prize. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.