Humanities Dialogues at Poly

Join Tony Clark, senior lecturer, and Debra Neill, lecturer, for their presentations and discussion on Nov. 7 in the Fall 2019 Humanities Dialogues at ASU Poly series. 

Their presentations are titled "On the 'Pleasures of War' Redux: Why Warfighters Love the Wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq" and "Establishing Religious Freedom: The Unlikely Alliance that Separated Church from State in Virginia," respectively. 

About Tony Clark's focus:

We are living at a historical moment when Congress long ago abdicated its constitutional responsibility to declare war, when only 0.4% of the total U.S. population serves in the active military forces (with roughly 93 thousand of these 1.3 million women and men serving directly in the U.S. Army and USMC combat forces combined), when we have a U.S. president who avoided military service recently tweeting about being “locked and loaded” to go to war in Iran, and when the corporate media mostly is nowhere to be found in reporting directly on war. A recent Annenberg survey found that 60% of 18 to 29-year-old Americans supported deploying ground troops against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and 62% of this same age cohort told pollsters they “definitely would not join.” Clark explores the implications of this chasm and the all-volunteer military for democracy, in a society where the "pleasures of war" are celebrated in written and visual texts.

About Debra Neill's focus:

At a time when the wall of separation of church and state is being dismantled, it is important to remember why it was erected in the first place. While the movement to separate religion from governments began long before American Independence in 1776, there were few examples where complete religious liberty had been established. Instead, various schemes of toleration were the norm. This pattern was most expressively rejected in the newly independent state of Virginia. It became a beacon of religious freedom in the early republic after Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom was passed in 1786. This achievement was the result of an unlikely alliance between rationalists like Jefferson and Madison and religious dissenters. Neill discusses this alliance and the various motives that drove these Virginians to disentangle religion and government.

The Humanities Dialogues at ASU Poly promote conversations across disciplines and are organized by the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts' Faculty of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication. 

The presentation will be from 10:30-11:45 a.m. in AGBC Room 145 at ASU Polytechnic campus and all are welcome.

Professor Wendy R. Williams, Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication

College of Integrative Sciences and Arts

Wendy.R.Williams@asu.edu