18 Oct Global Conversations (RFQ 5:1)
Global Conversations
No faculty is an island. Regis College faculty have a significant recent history of riding the airwaves of CBC’s 60-year-old radio program Ideas into the automobiles and kitchens of thinking Canadians.
Ideas reached out to New Testament scholar Scott Lewis just before Christmas last year to ask what the first Noel might have to do with the apocalypse in the minds of the authors and first readers of the Gospels.
Wondering about how to live a good life, Ideas decided to ask Lonergan expert John Dadosky in April what a good life really means for somebody thinking about it systematically from within a tradition that reaches back at least as far as St. Augustine.
Then, as Canadian synagogues and Jewish day schools were being shot up and protesters marauded through the streets of Toronto’s Jewish neighbourhoods, Ideas latched onto a conversation about the Shoah in today’s context which Regis presented online, turning the Regis webinar into their April 30 broadcast.
Nobody should think it odd that Canada’s national broadcaster looks to Regis College for fresh angles on current affairs, Ideas producer Seán Foley told RFQ. Foley is a Regis graduate who never lost his fascination with the intellectual world of his alma mater.
“Regis College has helped to nourish me spiritually and intellectually, so it is natural that it might pop up in my own work,” Foley said in an email. “But above and beyond that, it’s God’s grace that is animating everything.”
This isn’t some personal hobby horse Foley beats at work. Among the ranks of editors and producers at the CBC, there’s always a degree of curiosity and openness to what’s going on at Regis, Foley said.
“My colleagues have been given special gifts of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness and responsibility – as well as love,” he said. “And they use them.”
When Foley contacted Bertha Yetman about re-editing the Regis Alumni webinar on the Holocaust, she was pleased but not surprised.
“It fit, very fortunately or providentially, in their last year’s schedule,” recalled Yetman, Regis College Alumni/ae Association president. It was Yetman who assembled a remarkable panel that included child Holocaust survivor and retired federal judge Jeanette Goldman, national Globe and Mail columnist and child of holocaust survivors Marsha Lederman, author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust Once Removed, and Regis emeritus theology professor Mary Jo Leddy, author of Say to the Darkness We Beg to Differ, about the value of diversity.
“It was a very tense time in our city, where synagogues were being attacked and a sense of antisemitism was on the rise,” Yetman recalled about the night of the broadcast.
The result of putting Regis College and its intellectual friends on the air was the opposite of tension, Yetman said.
“I got a lot of calls and emails, and others did too,” she said. “Even the participants, even Marsha Lederman, Jeanette Goldman – all of these heard back.”
A civil dialogue across polarization and heated rhetoric was just the kind of contribution Regis can make to civil discourse, said Yetman.
Regis College President Fr. Gordon Rixon agrees.
“It’s about the engagement of culture and theology,” Rixon said. “There are a lot of potential contributions, including civil discourse on difficult topics.”