Learn & Lunch Bunch North

The Rise of Hate Part 3

The Rise of Hate – the Jewish and Christian Response

By Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy & Religion and Director of the INstitute of Advanced Theology, Bard College

Beyond Toleration: Surviving the Challenge of Contempt

 Enlightenment Europe and America gave the world what was supposed to be the cure for the debilitating, self-defeating wars of the modern period: the principle of toleration. Especially in the field of religion, this moral and legal principle became a foundation of civilized life. But instead of relief from war, genocide came  — often at the hands of allegedly Enlightened governments. The past two centuries in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia have brought many examples.

 Framing an understanding of this terrible paradox, and offering the prospect of genuine progress, this series will investigate the thought of four key Jewish and Christian theologians: Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King. Their influence reached beyond their own constituencies, and key contacts with other religious traditions will feature in our discussion, but our central task is to conceive of what needs to be done to revise the principle of toleration so that its promise might be realized.

This month we will be discussing Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Born and educated in Germany, Hannah Arendt discovered her Jewishness by means of the prejudice she encountered even before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Her response was to resist, and she was arrested for her Zionist activities that year by the Gestapo. She fled Germany, settling in Paris to continue her work on behalf of Jewish emigration, until she and her husband Heinrich Blücher were detained after the invasion of France. They survived and came to New York City, where her book, On the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), made her famous. Deep thought and direct experience inform all her work; Hannah Arendt explored what it means to be free, how freedom can be achieved, and why hatred in the end can be surmounted by means of the human capacity to engage in what she called vita activa (active life). 

Lunch and program are free but donations will be accepted to help off-set the cost.