In Conversation: How to Be Agreeably Disagreeable

SAVE THE DATE! October 24, 2025

Doors open at 6 PM, event begins at 6:30 PM.

Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of  Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.  

Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard  University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated  Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in  Philosophy at Princeton.   

He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at  nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.  

Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now.  He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. 

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Jane Ferguson is a Polk, Emmy, Peabody, OPCA and DuPont Award-winning foreign correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contribute to the New Yorker, and McGraw Professor of Journalists at Princeton University. She has over thirteen years of experience living and reporting in the Middle East and reporting from the Arab world, Africa, and South Asia. Her work focuses on US foreign policy and defense, conflict, diplomacy, and human rights. Her work is characterized by exclusive ground-breaking access, thoughtful storytelling, and character-driven reporting. Her memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, is currently available from HarperCollins.