Belmont is represented by “Population Public Relations,” a team including Public Relations Student Society of America chapter president Sarah Norton, Jason Weidman, Allison Hurst, Joseph Norris and Bethany Nelson. The team is advised by media studies professor Susan Barnes.

Together, the team is charged with the task of raising awareness for the Census based in part on informational materials from the national Census office. The goal for their project is to create ways to spread the word. The competition also gives the students a chance to work with a real public relations client.

“I am gaining real experience, in real time, with all the time constraints, budgets and pressures of a real PR campaign,” said Nelson, a senior public relations major.

As part of their PR scheme, Population Pubic Relations has Belmont Census Week, a series of three convocations devoted to making Belmont students aware of the Census and its importance. The three convocations are being held in Massey 100 at 10 a.m. and offer different credit for each:

• Monday, February 15: Faith Development
• Wednesday, February 17: Community Service
• Friday, February 19: Personal Growth

The convocations are aimed not only at encouraging students to participate in the Census; they are also aimed at targeting Nashville’s homeless community.

The students are organizing a collection of gloves that can be passed out to the homeless of Nashville. Inside these gloves will be information on how to participate in the 2010 Census. They hope to collect between 200 and 300 pairs of gloves. For Norton, their participation is important.

“The census is a large factor is determining funding for cities based on population, so it’s incredibly important for the results to be as close to accurate as possible,” said Norton.

Jason Weidman has made contact with Susan West, Belmont’s Vice President of Presidential Affairs about obtaining funding for the project, although the formal written request has not been submitted yet. Weidman, a 21 year-old junior, was optimistic when speaking about the funding.

“I’m hoping we can receive funding from the university because this is not just a great opportunity for the Public Relations program, but it’s also a great opportunity for the university as a whole,“ he said.

According to Norton, her team must complete their activities by February 28. They will have a couple weeks to prepare their report for the judging in March. The top three finalists of the competition will present their campaign to the client, the United States Census Bureau, in May. The winner will be announced shortly after the presentations.

For more information on the United States Census and Belmont Census Week, the team has created a Facebook group to promote their efforts.

The phrase—and it’s subsequent ideologies—have been pounded into our society’s vernacular.  The book by John Gray has sold more than 45 million copies.

But on a recent visit to Belmont, renowned sociologist and masculinity expert Dr. Michael Kimmel set out to debunk the “different planets” myth.

“The real story actually is the variations among men and the variations among women,” he said.

Kimmel, who’s penned several books of his own, said that as a society we want to believe that men and women are more different, but every social study shows that is not the case.

To illustrate his point, Kimmel explained how women’s lives have been changed over the past half century:

1)      Women made gender visible through feminist movement

2)      Women made up half the work force

3)      Women strove to strike a balance between work and family

But as Kimmel said, “Women cannot have it all… because men do.”

His primary message was that men need to support women in their efforts for gender equality through doing more house work and helping prevent domestic abuse and date rape.  After all, in households where husbands and wives share the work, everyone is happier.

To Kimmel, divide and conquer isn’t the answer.  Besides, we are all Earthlings.

This D.C. connection comes in the form of Joshua DuBois, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He is scheduled to speak at a Christian Faith Development convocation at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 30, in MPAC.

DuBois, who grew up in Nashville, is a Pentecostal minister who managed the religious aspects of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. According to Time magazine writer Alex Altman, DuBois led as many as eight campaign staffers and hundreds of volunteers during Obama’s presidential bid.

DuBois earned an undergraduate degree in political science at Boston University in 2003 and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton in 2005. The 26-year-old was working on a Juris Doctor degree at Georgetown University until 2008, when he became apart of the Obama campaign.

That’s right – he’s 26. He’s young, and according to Altman, Obama took a “gamble” when he appointed DuBois to his position. Altman says Obama “risks lending ammunition to critics who say religion remains a secondary issue for the Democratic party.”

Apparently, to our president, DuBois is worth the risk.

For more information on DuBois’s visit to Belmont, contact Benita Walker in the Office of Spiritual Development at (615) 460-6628.

To see a schedule of other programs coming up this fall, click here.

The 8^th annual symposium theme is “Nature and the Human Spirit.” This was chosen to parallel the overall theme of “A Paradise Lost?” There will be a total of 25 lectures and special events over the eight-day span of the symposium. The dates are scheduled for Sept. 13-21 with many different venues around campus. The events include the student reading of selected poetry on Sunday, Sept. 13, on the patio next to the bell tower as well as the viewing and discussion of the film Into the Woods directed by Sean Penn on Sunday, Sept. 20, in the Leu Center for Visual Arts. A schedule of events is posted below. There is also a more detailed list of the eight days at http://www.belmont.edu/english/humanities_symposium/.

Also, on the schedule next to each event is an abbreviation for the different convocation credits students can receive for attending an event. There are only two for this series of events – C&A is Culture & Arts, and AL is Academic Lecture. Be sure to attend and get plenty of convo credits!

Adrienne Young is a Nashville-based Americana singer/songwriter as well as a Belmont alumna. She will be giving a folk concert on Tuesday, Sept. 15 in the Curb Café at 7:30 p.m. The following morning from 11 to 11:50 she will be in the Troutt Theatre for a demonstration of NIA dancing.

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry with more than a dozen books of prose and poetry. She will be holding a poetry reading on Thursday, Sept. 17 for the public at Belmont Heights Baptist Church starting at 7 p.m.

“Mary Oliver has devoted her entire career to writing poetry and essays about this very topic, so her contribution to this year’s symposium will be a tremendous highlight of the program,” stated English professor Annette Sisson on the symposium webpage.

The full schedule for “Nature and the Human Spirit” is as follows:

Sunday, September 13

Monday, September 14

(AL)Dr. Maggie Monteverde, Department of English, Belmont

Massey Board Room, 10-10:50 a.m.

• “Deep into the thicket: Nature Writing, Holy Writing (AL)

Dr. Robbie Pinter, Department of English, Belmont

Massey Board Room, 12:00-12:50 p.m.

• “Bringing Nature to the Classroom, Bringing the Classroom to Nature”

(AL)Dr. Jimmy Davis (Communications), Dr. Darlene Panvini (Biology), and Dr. Bonnie Smith (English), Belmont

Massey Board Room, 2:00-2:50 p.m.

• “The Preservation of Nature: The Book Arts and the Natural World”

(C&A)LCVA 117, 4:00-5:30 p.m.

Tuesday, September 15

(AL)Dr. Doug Murray, Department of English, Belmont

Massey Board Room, 11:00-11:50 a.m.

• “Nature as Conscience and Consciousness: The Pastoral Hero and the Sympathetic Imagination”

(AL)Dr. Annette Sisson, Department of English, Belmont

Massey Board Room, 2:00-2:50 p.m.

“Finding Common Ground: An Eco-Feminist Reading of Christa Wolf’s Work”

(AL)• Dr. Deborah Janson, Department of Foreign Languages, West Virginia University

Massey Board Room, 5:30-6:30 p.m., refreshments to follow

• Folk Music Concert

(C&A)Adrienne Young, Alumna, Belmont

Curb Café, 7:30-9 p.m.

Wednesday, September 16

(C&A)Adrienne Young, alumna, Belmont

Black Box, Troutt Theater, 11:00-11:50 a.m.

• “Seeds: A Story of Self-Cultivation” (AL)Micah Stover, alumna, Belmont

Bunch Library, Leu Art Gallery, 3:00-3:50 p.m.

• “Invisible Landscapes: Learning from Nature in the City”

(AL)Dr. John Tallmadge

Bunch Library, Multimedia Hall, 4:30-5:30 p.m., refreshments to follow

• “Religion, Politics, and Public Good: A Buddhist Perspective”

(AL)Dr. Peter Hershock, East-West Center

Bunch Library, Multimedia Hall, 7-8:30 p.m.

Thursday, September 17

(AL)Dr. Judy Skeen, School of Religion, Belmont

Bunch Library, Leu Art Gallery, 11:00-11:50 a.m.

• Campus Nature Walk: “Learning to See the Unseen”

(C&A)Dr. John Tallmadge

Belmont campus, begins at the Belmont Bell Tower, 3:30-4:30 p.m.

• “Nature, Community, and the Life We Dream”

(AL)• Janisse Ray

Bunch Library, Multimedia Hall, 5:00-6:00 pm

• Reception with the Symposium Speakers

Lower Foyer, Troutt Theater, 6:00-6:45 pm

• A Reading by poet Mary Oliver

(AL)Mary Oliver

Belmont Heights Baptist Church, 7-8 p.m.

Friday, September 18

(AL)Dr. Abigail Jahiel, Illinois Wesleyan University

Massey Business Center 104, 8:30-10 a.m.

• “Nature and the Human Spirit” Symposium Panel

(AL)Featured speakers Mary Oliver, Janisse Ray, John Tallmadge, and guest publisher, Helene Atwan

Troutt Theatre, 10-10:50 am

• “As China Goes, So Goes the Planet: The Transboundary Implications of Chinese Environmental

(AL)Dr. Judith Shapiro, American University

Massey Business Center 103, 1-1:50 p.m.

• Documentary Films: Manufactured Landscapes and Shifting Nature

(C&A)Bunch Library, Multimedia Hall, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 19

(C&A)Candice Ethridge, native plant enthusiast, and Kevin Bowden, “Bird Walk” leader for Tennessee Ornithological Society

Radnor Lake, 8 a.m.

• “Rethinking the Environment, Politics, Development, and Culture Nexus”

(AL)Dr. Kavita Philip, University of California, Irvine

Massey Business Center 103, 9:30-11 a.m.

• “Environments, Diversity, and Equity: A Buddhist Perspective”

(AL)Dr. Peter Hershock, East-West Center

Massey Business Center 103, 1:15-2:45 p.m.

Sunday, September 20

(C&A)Moderated by Ken Roberts, Alumnus, Belmont U

LCVA 117, 2:30-5 p.m.

Monday, September 21

(AL)Massey Business Center 100, 10-10:50 a.m.

We couldn’t bear to edit David McCullough’s responses, so his words are all here–lengthy and unedited. We’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a table of contents and setting bookmarks for each question to make it a bit easier to digest.

1. Do you feel that one subject matter is more important than the other?
2. What draws you to certain stories more than others?
3. What are values that make us uniquely American?  What has and will last?
4. What is your message to my generation?
5. Do you still write on the same typewriter you started your career with?
6. Do you have a favorite book that you have written?
7. When you’re faced with so much information, how do you choose what gets into a book?
8. If you could write a biography about a current living person, event, place, something like that, what would it be?

Vision: Your first book was published over 40 years ago, that was The Johnstown Flood.  Since then, you have focused on both major events in our history and important people, garnering you recognition as both a biographer and a historian.  Do you feel that one subject matter is more important than the other?  (People v. events)  Why?

McCullough: I feel very strongly that history is about everything. It isn’t just about politics or the military or social issues.  If art, music, engineering, science, medicine, finance, the world of architecture and technology – if those are left out, then you’re not getting a full sense of the human condition. History is human and we human beings are involved in all kinds of things and that’s part of our humanity.

…

I’m also of course very interested in those people or events or subjects which tell us something particularly revealing about the American story and the American people and I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it’s about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved. History isn’t just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.

Vision: Your work creates an amazing narrative of American history, in snapshots of different people and places in our history. What draws you to certain stories more than others?  Why Truman and not Eisenhower, the Brooklyn Bridge and not the Golden Gate?

McCullough: That’s a very good question and I’m not sure I can answer it. Something clicks, something happens … It has to be an idea that makes me want to get at it and I think that what’s at the root of that impulse is the desire to learn. The desire to know more about a subject, an era, or an individual.  The people I choose are nearly always people who – and I see this more in retrospect that I ever did when I was working on the subject – they are people who showed courage and fortitude in the face of difficulties and adversities.  And people who went on a journey so to speak – it may not always be a geographic journey it can be an inner journey.

When I was writing the Adams books, for example, I was very concerned that when Adams left the presidency in 1801 he went home to Quincy mass and never went anywhere else or did much of anything else for 25 years. And I thought how in the world am I going to sustain all that time and that percentage of his total life where he never did much but then I found that it was then, after his professional career was over, that his inner  journey began.  And in many ways the inner journey was as interesting and as eventful as the political or career journey.

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface.  And that’s to a very large degree what all writers are doing – they’re trying to get below the surface.  Whether it’s in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries.  And you have to sort of go where the material is.  A man like John Adams was ideal because he wrote letters all of his life – wonderful letters all his life. his wife wrote wonderful letters. He kept journals and he was incapable of writing anything dull or short. So he was a dream come true in that sense.

I don’t pick my presidents because they were great presidents.  I’m not much interested in ranking presidents and who is the best and who is the worst. I am much more inclined to be interested in them if they had an interesting life and if they were a complete person – and by that I mean they also had flaws and failings. The most interesting people are never perfect.

Vision: In a lot of ways it seems that America is at a crossroads – economically, ideologically, politically.  As a historian and someone who so brilliantly has told the American story from so many different angles, what are values that make us uniquely American?  What has and will last? What has lasted through the difficult times before and what will last now?

McCullough: You’re very good.  You are. Those are very good questions and not easy to answer.

I think we have some very distinctive qualities.  First of all, anyone who wants to become an American. I don’t mean just by having citizens’ papers, but who wants to be an American, as one of us and embrace the ideals and the aspirations that have been consistent in American life is welcome to do so.  You could go to France and live in France for the rest of your life but you would never be a Frenchwoman.  It just isn’t possible. But we have an open door and we particularly welcome people who want to be useful and who want to help make the kind of society we all dream of creating happen. The individual matters here, still.

And we still dislike hypocrites.  It’s a very American characteristic.  We still like people who have ideas and who are willing to stand up for what they believe in.  We’re very forgiving of failures and very willing to give people a second and third chance if they mean to do better and are sorry for what they’ve done.

Vision: Do you think there are historical reasons for that?  I’ve never heard anyone phrase it, “we’re forgiving of failures”?

McCullough: We’ve been replenished as it were by people who have come from failure.  Who haven’t done well or Things haven’t gone their way elsewhere and they come here.  We’ve got work to do. We’ve always had work to do and we welcome people who are willing to pitch in and help push the car out of the mud.

We also believe fervently in education and that’s a very strong constant theme from the beginning that one can raise oneself – I don’t mean just necessarily in their standard of living but in their enjoyment of life – through education here. And that everybody wants their child or their grandchild to have a better education than they had or the best possible education, to make the most of what they are, of who they are.

Though we’ve fallen behind in lots of ways – including in education – we are still seen by the rest of the world as the best place in the world to come and get an education.  It’s our ingenuity and our brainpower, our inventiveness, our capacity for innovation that is very distinctly American and is our most valuable natural resource by far. Now we’ve been blessed with great natural resources but the most important blessing we have is that attitude.

I could talk for 3 hours on this question, but it’s a very, very good one.

Vision: What is your message to my generation? The future leaders. How do we take on this mantle of this society that we’ve inherited?

McCullough: First of all I’m very concerned that your generation is by and large historically illiterate.  I have lectured all over the country at colleges and universities for more than 25 years.  I know how much you don’t know. And that’s not your fault.  We can’t blame you for not knowing what you haven’t been taught.  So I say that in preface to what I consider to be the larger suggestion, and that is to read.

Read.  Read. Read. Read.  Read great books.  Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time.  And read closely.

You’ve got to remind yourselves  and its something that everybody tells you and it’s something that’s often said particularly in commencement speeches that your education never stops and that college is just the beginning.  You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you’ve ideally and more times than not you’ve come out with a love of learning and that’s what matters above all. And that love of learning will never let you down.  You can have a quest for money, you can have a quest for power, you can have a quest for fame and they are sometimes gratifying and sometimes self-destructive.  The love of learning is always gratifying and never self-destructive. The more educated, the more cultivated a society becomes, better off is everybody.

I think that because of the present economic troubles, a lot of people are waking up to the fact that the days of spending money on things you don’t need with money you haven’t got are over.  We’ve got a lot of hard work to do and very big problems to solve but if you have a sense of history, you know that we’ve solved bigger problems before.  We’ve been through more difficult times before – much more difficult times before. And as some of our leaders are rightly saying, if we work together we can solve them. And we can come out of this. And we can come out of it better off for having been through the experience.

I think to that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work – found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

My advice to all students and soon to be graduates is to find something to do that you love because then the work itself is always the reward not the recompense. And if you love what you’re doing you probably do better at it than doing something you don’t love and therefore you’ll be compensated appropriately.

I find great reasons to be hopeful in knowing your generation.  And I think your intelligence and your capacity to know a lot and do things that we never new how to do is sometimes to me breathtaking.  I also know how much enjoyment awaits you in knowing more about subjects that you probably need to know more about but will find infinite pleasure in knowing more.  To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life.  It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you? We all would like to travel back in time, we’d all like to know more about why we are the way we are, why we think the way we do, why we talk the way we do.  The sky’s the limit.

And I always tell new freshmen, advise them, take the teacher not the course.  Find out who the great professors are – the great teachers – and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you’re interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it’s taught. Whereas conversely, you may have a subject that you think you’re very interested in but if it was taught by a boring teacher, that teacher can kill your interest in it.

Vision: I think my favorite thing that I discovered in researching for this interview was an interview you did with the Academy of Achievement in which you said that you’ve written every book on the same typewriter.  That was in 1995.  Do you still write on that typewriter?

McCullough: I do write on the same typewriter.  I bought the typewriter second hand in 1965. I probably paid $25 for it. It’s a Royal, upright standard typewriter and it was made in 1940.  I have written everything I have had published on that typewriter and there is nothing wrong with it.  It works perfectly. It was made in the USA and made superbly well.   I like it because I like the feeling of making something with my hands. I like pressing the key and a letter comes up and is printed on a piece of paper. I can understand that. It’s not out in the ether somewhere.   I like it when I swing the carriage lever the little bell rings like the old trolley car.  Lots of people including my own children tell me, remind me how much faster I could go if I used a word processor.  I don’t want to go faster.  If anything I’d  like to be able to go slower because I don’t think all that fast.  And maybe the typewriter is writing the books.  I don’t want to risk changing it. As long as it holds up, I’ll hold up.

Vision: Do you have a favorite book that you have written?

McCullough: It’s always the book I’m working on.

Vision: Are you working on one right now?

McCullough: I certainly am.  It’s about Americans in Paris.

Vision: What drew you to that subject?

McCullough: It stretches over a good span of time and has to do with those people who because they went to Paris, did something or learned something that changed life in America.  It is about how much we owe to the experience they had in Paris.   It includes writers, novelists, playwrights, composers, musicians, dancers, architects, sculpturs, inventors, physicians because Paris for much of the 19th century was the greatest medical center in the world with the greatest medical education in the world. A lot of people who are very well known – Samuel FB Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, James Fennimeore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Homes Sr., people like Whistler the painter, John Singer Sargeant, Mary Cassatt. A whole range of people of all kinds. The engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge who went over to Paris to study how they built underwater foundations..  Edison.  Mark Twain.

It’s the story of the country.  Most people don’t appreciate sufficiently how much of our culture and how much of history has been influenced by France and the French. More American history took place in France than in any other country in the world but our own.  For example we fought two horrendous wars there. More Americans are buried in France than any other country but out own. Our capital, Washington DC, was designed by a Frenchman. The symbol of our welcoming to new arrivals, the Statue of Liberty, is a gift from France, Look at all the towns on a map of American that have French names.  It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve worked on.

Nobody’s written this book before.  The material is rich in much the way the Adams material was because so many of the people who went to France wrote marvelous letters about it or kept journals that are filled with wonderful material.

Vision: When you’re faced with so much information, how do you choose what gets into a book?

McCullough: That’s again a crucial question and a big part of the process.  You have to decide what to leave out and whom to leave out.  You have to try and know enough to see it clearly and that’s hard.  One of the ways you do it is you start writing.  When you start to write things begin to come into focus in a way they don’t when you’re not writing. It’s a very good way to find out how much you don’t know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don’t know at the moment by writing.   It’s so important in College to take all the writing you can., to do all the writing you can. Take courses that require writing beyond just English courses.

Vision: If you could write a biography about a current living person, event, place, something like that, what would it be?  Why? Or what do you think 40 years from now the next David McCullough or someone who’s aiming to be perhaps the next David McCullough, would write about from right now?

McCullough: Very, very hard question.  Somebody living today?

Vision: Or an event, or a place. Something worthy of your stature.

McCullough: I think I would write about somebody doing something in medicine. Someone who’s.  We talk a great deal about the cost of medicine and the injustices of the insurance system and so forth, but we forget how miraculous modern medicine truly is and how far ahead we are and how interesting it is.  I don’t know enough to say who that person might be.  Maybe it would be about Johns Hopkins or some great medical center in wherever.  That’s one idea.  It might be someone who’s had a really interesting life but it would come to you as a surprise that this person has had a really interesting life, but I don’t know who that would be.

McCullough, who won his first Pulitzer Prize for his biography of President Harry S. Truman, has authored 11 books and earned numerous accolades for his work. Two Pulitzers – the second for his biography of John Adams – and the Presidential Medal of Freedom top a list that includes the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award.

McCullough’s lecture at Belmont is free to the public, though tickets are necessary and available at the Curb Center Box Office.  The author is a noted public speaker as well having narrated several Ken Burns’ documentaries. Burns spoke on campus in September as part of the same lecture series.

Belmont University Provost Dr. Dan McAlexander said in a press release, “David McCullough is a national treasure. A brilliant writer who brings his subjects to full life through vivid narrative and painstaking research, he has expanded our understanding of America’s history in all its rich complexity. We are honored to have him on the Belmont campus and thrilled to be able to share this experience with the Nashville community.”

McCullough will end his lecture with a question-and-answer session.  Culture and arts convocation credit is available.

Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund and a Yale Law school graduate, will no doubt touch on the topics of mentoring, service and social justice, when she speaks at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, in MPAC.

Her latest book is “The Sea is So Wide and My Boat is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation.” The book includes letters to many audiences – educators, faith leaders, youth, mothers, elected officials and concerned citizens nationwide. The letters, according to the Children’s Defense Fund website, “reflect on the social and economic progress as well as the setbacks since Dr. King’s death 40 years ago. Edelman challenges each audience to step up and take action at this pivotal moment to ensure a level playing field for the next generation.”

Other upcoming events at Belmont related to spiritual development include:

• Sex & The Soul, 10 a.m. Friday, Feb. 13, Neely Hall. The presenter, Dr. Donna Freitas, is author of “Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses,” teaches at Boston University and is a popular author and commentator on faith and culture.
• Ash Wednesday Service, 10 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 25, Neely Hall. Belmont University marks the beginning of Lent with this ecumenical worship service conducted by Bishop David Choby, head of the Diocese of Nashville and its membership of 75,000 Catholics, and the Rev. Todd Lake, Belmont’s vice president of spiritual development.
• Psychology and Faith, 10 a.m., Wedneday, March 4, Neely Hall. Dr. David Myers, author of psychology’s most widely used textbook, will speak. The most recent of his 17 books is “A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God is Good and Faith Isn’t Evil.”