We offer more than a hundred intellectually stimulating and personally enriching programs each year.

Weekly

Monday Quarterback Luncheon – A 20-20 hindsight of the previous weeks’ editorials and news topics led by Club Members.

Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – Guest Speakers present a wide range of topics, followed by discussion. Please note, on the third week of the month, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon is replaced by Friday Club Dinner at 5:30pm.

Click here to see past recorded events.

FIC MAY PROGRAMS

May 1, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Cordelia Frances Biddle. Her topic ‒ In Other Words: Women of the Bible.

What would Eve ‒ or Ruth, Bathsheba or Delilah say ‒ if they could tear themselves free of pages encrusted with the pious dust of patriarchy and stand before us now? Cordelia reimagined the biblical tales of these women as real people telling us about their complex lives in her latest novel Listen to Me: The Women of the Bible Speak Out (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). She aimed her feminist historian’s pen, with heat tempered by humor, at the assumptions and outright misogyny of the men who created the narratives.

Cordelia Frances Biddle spoke to the Club in 2023 about her novel They Believed They Were Safe (Vine Leaves Press, 2022), and in 2021 on her biography Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil: The Infamous Bank War (Sunbury, 2021). She teaches creative writing at Drexel’s Pennoni Honors College and received the Adjunct Faculty Teaching Excellence award in 2021. She credits her passion for history as a catalyst for much of her work, which includes the biography Saint Katharine: The Life of Katharine Drexel (Westholme, 2014). The same passion marks the set in 1840s Philadelphia Martha Beale Mysteries and the Crossword Mysteries under the pseudonym Nero Blanc, coauthored with her husband Steve Zettler. As a journalist, she has written for Town and Country, Hemispheres and W.

May 5, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Skip Schwarzman is our Quarterback.

May 8, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Diane Turner. Her topic ‒ The Philadelphia Jazz Story.

With the sounds of Norman David’s quartet still fresh for members who heard the group at the Club in Jazz Appreciation Month, here’s a follow-up on the story of jazz in Philadelphia. Diane Turner and co-author Suzanne Cloud made a major contribution to that story with their 2022 book Philadelphia Jazz (Arcadia), portraying the city’s heritage as a hub and home for jazz musicians. Diane offers highlights of a panorama that sweeps from pre-Civil War dance music, through turn-of-the century ragtime, swing in the 1920s to 40s, bebop and hard bop and cool jazz as the music evolved from the 1950s, and then into eclectic styles of this millennium. Philadelphia’s jazz story includes artists who “came up” in this city and moved into wider orbits – Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Nina Simone – as well as those who made it their creative home – Bootsie Barnes, Larry McKenna, Denise King.

Diane D. Turner is curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection of the Temple Libraries, a leading U.S. facility for study of the history and culture of people of African descent, comprising about 700,000 items including books, manuscripts, sheet music, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, broadsides, posters, photographs, and rare ephemera. Diane holds three Temple degrees, including a PhD in history. Her areas of specialization and research include African American labor, cultural, and social history; Philadelphia jazz history; Black independent filmmakers; and oral and public history. Her other books include My Name is Oney Judge (2010), Feeding the Soul: Black Music, Black Thought (2011), and Our Grand Pop Is a Montford Point Marine (2018), co-authored with her father, Corporal Thomas S. Turner, Sr. Her writing also appears in anthologies and in books for the Philadelphia Jazz Project.

May 12, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Buck Rodgers is our Quarterback.

PLEASE NOTE: This month’s dinner moves to Thursday evening.

May 15, Thursday Club Dinner – member mixer at 5:30 p.m., followed by presentation, with dinner at 7:00 p.m.
Speaker is Jennifer Lin. Her topic ‒ Beethoven in Beijing.

Jennifer brings us a saga spun from a tentative gesture of cultural diplomacy ‒ the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China ‒ with an excerpt from the documentary Beethoven in Beijing, which premiered on PBS’s Great Performances in 2021. Through interviews with Chinese and American musicians and historians, as well as rare archival images, the documentary spotlights the resurgence of classical music in China and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unique role in sparking that revival.

Jennifer Lin is an author, filmmaker, and journalist. She worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 31 years, including posts as a correspondent in Beijing, New York, and Washington, D.C. Partnering with Sam Katz of History Making Productions, Jennifer created and co-directed Beethoven in Beijing, and wrote the companion book Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China (Temple University Press, 2022). In 2024, she directed the award-winning documentary Ten Times Better, about an 88-year-old Asian Las Vegas blackjack dealer with a forgotten and unheralded place in ballet and Broadway history. She is currently finishing About Face, a documentary which explores diversity in dance. Jennifer also wrote a family memoir Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

May 19, Monday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Dean Edwards is our Quarterback.

May 22, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Robert Heim. His topic – By Order of the Court?

“By order of the court” is a formal mandate to comply with a judicial ruling. Innmate Bob Heim knows this is a time when the authority of our federal court system may be supremely tested by the responses of the current presidential administration to judicial mandates. Bob gives us his timely perspective on the state of significant court cases as of May 22.

Robert Heim brings a well-informed perspective to this Roundtable as both practitioner and observer. In his long career as a trial lawyer, he has argued many cases in both state and federal appellate courts. He is an elected fellow of both the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers and served two three-year terms on the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, appointed by Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Bob has been Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association and President of the National Conference of Bar Presidents as well as co-founder of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts.

PLEASE NOTE: Quarterback Luncheon shifts to Tuesday due to Memorial Day

May 27, Tuesday Quarterback Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Gresham Riley is our Quarterback.

PLEASE NOTE: Movie Night shifts to Wednesday due to Memorial Day

May 28, Wednesday Movie Night at the Inn – 6:00 p.m.; feature at 6:30 p.m.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Free admission with snacks and drinks including light fare, popcorn, chips, nuts, soda, beer, and wine.

Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see. What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color? We add a fourth. How many times have you seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

On the film’s 50th anniversary, follow King Arthur and his brave knights as they travel from Camelot – a silly place – in search of the Holy Grail. “Good idea, O Lord!” “Course it’s a good idea!”

Along the way they encounter Knights who say Ni, killer rabbits, French taunting, an anarcho-syndicalist commune, witches with false noses, knights with no limbs, Roger the Shrubber, coconut-laden swallows, and more.

May 29, Thursday Roundtable Luncheon – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Aleksondra Hultquist. Her topic – Eliza Haywood: England’s 18th-century Proto-feminist Author, the Arbitress of Passion.

Aleksondra introduces the electric storytelling of a woman, now little known, who was a publishing powerhouse early in the 18th century. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) wrote more than 70 publications in 37 years, but her work has been lost in time due to her subject matter, her gender, and changing literary tastes. Her proto-feminist stance on love earned her the epithet Arbitress of Passion for works that are surprisingly modern, taking up issues such as the double standard and exploring the joys of sexual desire for women. Her characters, especially women in love, find ingenious ways to contend with social mores. In novellas, novels, plays, advice literature, poetry, and other genres she addressed women’s lack of legal standing in the legal system and their need to negotiate a society that disfavored them.

Aleksondra Hultquist is an assistant professor at Stockton University. Her published work focuses on the literature and culture of the long 18^th century, especially women writers and their passions. She is a founding editor of the online peer-reviewed journal ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts and president of the Aphra Behn Society of North America. Her current projects include the manuscript The Amatory Mode: Amatory Fiction’s Passionate Legacy as well as an edited work entitled Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, volume 6 by Aphra Behn, to be published by Cambridge University Press.