Week Three: July 6–13, 2024
Every summer Chautauqua Institution welcomes over 100,000 visitors, to celebrate community and prioritize personal growth. Many travel here to relax, renew and recharge on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. Join us for our historic 150 anniversary season and see for yourself why Chautauqua was, and continues to be, a cherished destination. Keep scrolling to explore Week Three’s Theme: What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes.
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Chautauqua Lecture Series
What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes
The earth isn’t flat, nor is it the center of the universe. Diseases aren’t caused by an imbalance of humors. Asbestos, as it turns out, isn’t the best building material. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a whole lot more we’ve gotten wrong throughout our history. In this week, we turn with both candor and curiosity to our past, pinpointing the moments and ideas we can now say emphatically and categorically were misguided, incorrect, or flawed. We look at the psychology of personal decision-making, and the reflective introspection and humility that happens when we change our minds. Finally, we take the same lens of hindsight and apply it to our present, considering the thought experiment: What will future generations say we’re getting wrong now?
Kori Schake, American Enterprise Institute’s director of foreign and defense policy studies, returns to the Chautauqua Lecture Series on Tuesday, July 9, 2024, to examine the contemporary legacy of American warfare — from Vietnam through Afghanistan to the current day — asking what mistakes we’ve learned from and those we’ve not, and how this can inform American military strategy as we engage in a new era of diplomacy and defense. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, historian and journalist Kai Bird takes the stage Wednesday, July 10, 2024, to discuss the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose groundbreaking work altered the course of history. Bird will draw on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he co-authored and which served as the inspiration for the 2023 film “Oppenheimer.” Finally, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Amy C. Edmonson, closes the week on Friday, July 12, 2024.
Confirmed Lectures
Kori Schake
Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where her research areas include national security strategy, NATO, and alliances and U.S.-led international order. She returns to the Chautauqua Lecture Series for a week on “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes” to examine the contemporary legacy of American warfare — from Vietnam through Afghanistan to the current day — asking what mistakes we’ve learned from and those we’ve not, and how this can inform American military strategy as we engage in a new era of diplomacy and defense.
Before joining AEI, Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at King’s College, Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland, and served as senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008.
Schake is the author of five books, including America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?; Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony; State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department; and Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance. She is also the coeditor, along with former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, of Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military.
Schake holds a PhD and MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, as well as an MPM from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. She received her bachelor’s degree in international relations from Stanford University.
Kai Bird
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, historian and journalist Kai Bird is the co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the definitive biography of the theoretical physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” that served as inspiration for director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan’s most recent film, “Oppenheimer.” A relentless chronicler of history and a consummate storyteller, Bird elevates lessons from the past to undeniable relevance for audiences of today. He joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series in a week confronting “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes” to discuss the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose groundbreaking work altered the course of history, and help us navigate the tremendous ethical and moral ramifications of that work.
For American Prometheus, Bird and his late co-author Martin J. Sherwin were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography, the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History. Bird is the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, and biographies of Jimmy Carter, John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, which was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The executive director and distinguished lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, his work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the CIA.
An elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians, Bird received his bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and his master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Amy C. Edmondson
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School where she studies teaming, psychological safety and organizational learning. The No. 1-ranked management thinker in the world by Thinkers50, she has been studying psychological safety and workplace behaviors for more than 20 years. Her most recent book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, will frame her presentation for the Chautauqua Lecture Series, concluding a week on “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes.”
In Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2023, Edmondson considers what she calls “intelligent failures” as the vital stepping stones that lead to innovation and discovery. Diving deep into the distinction between intelligent, basic and complex failures, she explains the proactive steps that can prevent harmful failures in the future. Edmonson’s other books include The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review.
Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, Master of Arts in psychology and Bachelor of Arts in engineering and design from Harvard University. Before her academic career, she was director of research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies, and in the early 1980s, she worked as chief engineer for the legendary architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller.
Interfaith Lecture Series
Ethics and Meaning-Making Beyond Faith
Religion is only one framework for ethical meaning-making, and often other paradigms are more prominent, accessible or influential. As the number of religious “nones” continues to grow, how will secular ethics nurture meaning-making in our collective lives? Where do people turn to address ethical challenges when faith is not a vital category in their lives? This week’s theme will explore the secular dimensions of ethics and human values and will feature non-religious and post-religious perspectives.
Confirmed Lectures
Tara Isabella Burton
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and the forthcoming Here in Avalon: out from Simon & Schuster in January 2024, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She has written on religion and culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She holds a doctorate in Theology from the University of Oxford and is a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
Lynn Underwood
Lynn Underwood does research on stress, social support, quality of life, compassionate love, neuroethics and spirituality, through the lenses of science and the arts. She has written books including Spiritual Connection in Daily Life and co-edited books such as Social Support Measurement and Intervention and The Science of Compassionate Love. She conducts workshops using a set of sixteen questions she developed, the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale, helping people to dive more deeply into the ordinary experiences of spiritual connection in their days and communicate with others. This scale has been translated into over forty languages, works for those from religious and non-religious backgrounds, and is used in hundreds of studies. It predicts things like less burnout and addiction and more resiliency. She has been interviewed for ABC, Australian Public Radio, and Philosophy Talks on NPR.
She works with organizations who are interested in the spiritual dimension of their work and has consulted on research projects with Harvard, Yale, University of Connecticut and internationally. Her current research and writing is focused on how difficult circumstances can enable us to flourish. Contemplative practice and doing art are important parts of her life.
She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Inamori International Center for Ethics at Case Western Reserve University. She has been Professor of Biomedical Humanities, and Vice President for research programs for a private foundation. She studied medicine at the University of Iowa, and earned her PhD from Queen’s University in the UK. She was a member of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Rehabilitation Research of the NIH, was awarded a Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship, and coordinated a project on Quality of Life at the World Health Organization.
Greg Epstein
Greg M. Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and as Convener for Ethical Life at the MIT Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life. For nearly two decades, he has built a unique career as one of the world’s most prominent humanist chaplains — professionally trained members of the clergy who support the ethical and communal lives of nonreligious people.
Greg’s New York Times bestselling book, “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe,” remains influential years after its initial publication helped popularize the notion that the rapidly growing population of secular people can live lives of deep purpose, compassion, and connection. Greg’s 2018 move to join MIT alongside his work at Harvard, inspired an 18-month residency at leading Silicon Valley publication TechCrunch, exploring the ethics of technologies and companies shifting our definition of what it means to be human, often in troubling ways. His new book, “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation,” will be published in October of this year by MIT Press, distributed by Penguin Random House.
Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine, Epstein was also named “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project coordinated by the United Church of Christ with assistance from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, for his efforts to bring together atheists, agnostics, and allies, as part of an ancient and ever-evolving ethical tradition that can be called humanism. His writing has also appeared in The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, The Washington Post, and Religion News Service.
Deborah Egerton
Dr. Deborah Threadgill Egerton is an internationally respected psychotherapist, best-selling author and Unity and Belonging Advocate for the Healing of Humanity. Affectionately referred to as Dr. E, she has attained IEA Certification with Distinction for her groundbreaking utilization of the Enneagram in the
realm of bridging historical divides. Her work is dedicated to dismantling marginalization and transcending the divisive practice of “othering.” Dr. E serves as the President of the International Enneagram Association and extends her coaching and mentoring expertise to a diverse spectrum of individuals, including best-selling authors, top-tier executives, spiritual luminaries, accomplished therapists, and a myriad of thought leaders, each hailing from distinct and varied backgrounds. In her multifaceted roles as consultant, coach, mentor, and spiritual teacher, Dr. Egerton guides humanity toward harmonious unification. Activating the transformative forces of kindness and compassion, Dr. Egerton’s book, Know Justice Know Peace: A Transformative Journey of Social Justice, Anti-Racism, and Healing through the Power of the Enneagram was featured on Amazon’s #1 Best Seller in New Releases. Her current book The Enneagram Made Easy is scheduled to be released in March 2024. The accompanying 9-book series, The Enneagram Inner Work Journals is scheduled to be released in April 2024.
Ryan Burge
Dr. Ryan Burge is an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author or co-author of four books including The Nones, 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America, and The Great Dechurching. He has published over thirty articles and book chapters in academic journals concerning religion and politics. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He has appeared in an NBC Documentary, on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper called him, “one of the leading data analysts of religion and politics in the United States.” He is also the research director for Faith Counts, a non-profit, interfaith organization that promotes the value of religion to the American public. He has been a pastor of an American Baptist Church for over seventeen years. Finally, he has been married to his wife, Jacqueline, for sixteen years and they have two boys – Holden and Reid.
Weekly Chaplain
The Rev. Dr. Richard Kannwischer
The Rev. Dr. Richard Kannwischer is the eighth Senior Pastor of the seven-thousand-member Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Richard has been a pastor for twenty-five years and has served congregations in Texas, California, and the NYC metropolitan area.
Explore Performing and Visual Arts
The arts can sometimes bridge differences and illuminate perspectives as no other method can. Artistic expressions at Chautauqua — including professional and pre-professional offerings in classical and contemporary music, theater, opera, dance, visual arts and literary arts — aim to inspire, educate, entertain and engage a diverse and growing audience.
Places to Stay
If you love the events you see in Week Three, ensure you have accommodations. Space on the ground is limited, and accommodations go fast find reservations at the Hotel or Private Accommodations.
Dining & Shopping
Make your Chautauqua experience memorable! Share a delicious meal at one of our many restaurants. Or take piece of Chautauqua home with you from our unique shops.