Crossing the Divide: From Ideology to Wonder
Exhibit on the Encounter’s theme
Near the end of his life, the great American novelist Walker Percy observed that ours “is the age of theory and consumption” and “the common mark of the theorist and the consumer is that neither knows who he is or what he wants outside of theorizing and consuming [because] one’s self is always a leftover from one’s theory.” This remark has interesting implications for the theme of this year’s New York Encounter: it suggests that the real divide is not primarily between people, but between abstract ideas and real life, between what we think will make us happy and what we really desire.
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“His seeing caused me to begin to see”: Looking at Race and Reality with James Baldwin
“It has always been much easier,” writes the essayist and novelist James Baldwin, “to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.” Though we usually talk about racism as a historical phenomenon in the past or a societal structure to be solved, Baldwin invites us to look more closely at the lack of self-awareness from which it emerges. He suggests that America’s ongoing racism, as well as its consumerism, obsession with staying young, and willful ignorance of others’ suffering, are symptoms of a “death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.”
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Giussani in America
The work of a group of friends who have encountered the charism of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, this exhibit explores the life and impact of founder Father Luigi Giussani in the United States. How do Americans—with their unique sense of “destiny” and “promise” and the potential of the individual—receive the proposal of this Italian priest?
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“A human being is a remarkable thing”
Exhibit on the wartime writings of Dutch-Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1941-1943)
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Humans and Machines: Behind the Curtains of Artificial Intelligence
When we hear the words “artificial intelligence,” it is hard not to relate them to the pop culture and science fiction that so deeply influence the way we perceive the world. Will then robots turn against us and destroy the world as we have seen in “Terminator”? Will we be imprisoned by machines in a fake reality called “The Matrix” or we will hunt them as in “Blade Runner”? Though science fiction inspired and keeps inspiring great scientists and technological progress, what is today’s state of the art of artificial intelligence? What’s behind it?
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Featured images:
“His seeing caused me to begin to see”: Looking at Race and Reality with James Baldwin
Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
“A human being is a remarkable thing”
Portrait of Etty Hillesum. Place, date and photographer unknown. Public Domain. Source: nationaalarchief.nl
