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The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
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I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU ALL DO IT, BUT I COME AWAY FEELING GRACED AND LIFTED A BIT HIGHER, BOTH ACADEMICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY.”
Elena Stephens, a Dallas ISD science teacher, completed her second three-week Summer Institute class in July. She reflected on her experience and how it has impacted her and her students:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues, speaks about the Political City at the Dallas Festival of Ideas in February 2015.
Your Investment Shapes The Future of Dallas
1000 Because of your generous support of “For the City: The Dallas Festival of Ideas,” the inaugural festival took place in February 2015 to great public acclaim in venues throughout the Dallas Arts District despite the ice and snow. Mother Nature was not on our side, but the community rallied and showed incredible resilience in the face of adversity. We remain so thankful that your belief in the Festival helped us to deliver on its mission—to help shape the city of the future by igniting, uniting, and energizing the people of Dallas through the power of ideas. There’s more to do. You Can Help! Generous supporters like you make our programs possible. Help us reach our year-end goal of raising $79,750 so that we can continue to make a difference by enriching the hearts and minds of Dallas. To make a donation, please call 214.871.2440, visit our website at dallasinstitute.org,
“The Institute communicates that we as teachers are valued, worthy, intellectual professionals...I don’t know how you all do it, but I come away feeling ‘graced,’ and lifted a bit higher, both academically and spiritually. If more teachers like those from the Summer Institute were in our classrooms, the students would be lifted up—developing emotional and academic skills foreign to our test-driven, current culture. I believe there would be more collegiality, a higher level of discourse, and more joy throughout schools.” Elena Stephens discusses classic literature with her classmates. She is one of thousands of teachers who have completed our two-year Summer Institute classes.
A scene from The 67th Book of the Bible. From left to right: Dennis Raveneau, Kenneisha Thompson, and Vontress Mitchell.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the MLK Symposium, the Dallas Institute commissioned the creation of an original stage play based on Dr. King’s powerful “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote surreptitiously while behind bars in Birmingham in the summer of 1963, the most explosive period and the turning point of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
The play dramatized both the crisis of that moment in the Civil Rights struggle and the remarkable power of Dr. King’s letter—by any measure a key document in America’s political history. Willie Pearl Mackey King shared her story of helping piece together Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” from scraps of paper at the age of 21. Be sure to join us on Monday, January 18, 2016, for the 11th annual MLK Symposium: “Martin Luther King, Jr., and Civil Rights in America: From Birmingham to Charleston.” We will take an open and honest look at the challenges that remain in ensuring equality under the law and civil rights for all citizens, especially in light of events since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. For more information, visit dallasinstitute.org.
Teju Cole, writer, critic, and Bard College’s Distinguished Writer in Residence and Achebe Fellow, will be the keynote speaker at the 2016 MLK Symposium.
The Dallas Institute’s 2015 Education Forum provided the opportunity for citizens and educators to dwell on the ideals of liberal learning and on what education suited to a free people can be in our city and throughout America.………………………….…………..
Diana Senechal and Ben Olguín discuss the importance of liberal learning for all students.
The speakers in attendance: Drs. Louise Cowan, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Delbanco, William Deresiewicz, Ben Olguín, Diane Ravitch, Dan Russ, Elizabeth Samet, and Diana Senechal. All talks from the 2015 Education Forum can be viewed on our website at dallasinstitute.org.
The 2015 James Hillman Symposium, an annual conference held to study and honor the work of the father of archetypal psychology, addressed the third volume of James Hillman’s Uniform Edition, Senex and Puer. Senex and Puer are Latin terms for “old man” and “youth” and personify oppositional states such as old versus new, authority versus creativity, and control versus impulse. Speakers discussed these primary patterns depicting how we perceive ourselves and others.
Scholars and artists from Brazil joined us in Dallas for the James Hillman Symposium in October 2015.
What Makes a City? Nature and Public Spaces In Spring 2016
Dr. Gail Thomas, creator of the Center for the City events, speaking at the 2014 “What Makes a City?” conference.
How will 20,000 acres of nature coursing through the heart of Dallas help heal our city? What if over 200 neighborhoods had access to canoeing and kayaking in rivers, to hiking and biking on thickly forested trails? What if each of us were to recapture a profound awareness of the mystery and magic of the natural world? Join us in Spring 2016 for “What Makes a City? Nature and Public Spaces,” an exploration into the power of Nature as teacher, as healer, as provocateur, inviting us to celebrate those qualities so often forgotten yet so fundamental to good health and a good life.
Initiatives to Improve Dallas are Underway After the 2015 Dallas Festival of Ideas
Antonia Williams-Gary speaks at the May 2015 Dallas Festival of Ideas Salon. The Salons are designed to keep the momentum of the ideas generated at the Festival going throughout the year.
The first annual Dallas Festival of Ideas is delivering results. Teams are at work turning ideas into action in the 2015 Festival’s five areas of focus: innovation, culture, physical city, education, and politics. Projects underway include: a community-based crowdfunding/ crowdsourcing website, a mobile cultural unit, a real estate investment trust for southern Dallas, a national search for teachers’ stories, and a program to increase Dallas voter turnout from 7% to 21%.
On October 29th, these five ideas were pitched for funding at the 2015 bigBANG! conference presented by Social Venture Partners Dallas and United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. The Innovative City team and their plan to develop “a Kickstarter for the Community” won $21,500. The 2016 Dallas Festival of Ideas: The United City, will focus on ways we can unite to help make Dallas work even better. We invite you to join us on February 19-20 in Fair Park to tell us what you think! More information can be found on thedallasfestival.com.
Scott Samuelson, a Kirkwood Community College philosophy professor in Iowa, received the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 cash award given to encourage an emerging humanities leader in his or her work. Samuelson has devoted his life to bringing philosophy to those may not have otherwise studied it.
Scott Samuelson with his parents, Chris and Carol Samuelson, at the Hiett award luncheon.
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In memory of Dr. Louise Cowan…. 1916-2015…. To the Dallas Institute family, With great sadness but with hearts filled with gratitude for the work that she leaves in our charge, we want to inform our Dallas Institute community of the passing of Dr. Louise S. Cowan, at 2:27 AM, Monday, November 16, 2015, at the age of 98. A renowned teacher of literature and poetry, she was a Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute. After a weeks-long struggle with her failing systems, she “died softly” according to her family who surrounded her—son, Dr. Bainard Cowan, his wife Christine, and their eldest daughter Claire. With her husband Dr. Donald Cowan, who passed away in 2002, Dr. Louise embraced a vision of hope for the human enterprise and a commitment to making that hope real in individual lives. People of deep faith, the Cowans believed in the transforming efficacy of education as the highest calling and gave their extraordinary lives to inspiring and deepening the hearts and minds of everyone in the work. We ourselves were both transformed, awakened to our callings and to the purpose of our lives by our blessed relationship with Dr. Louise. She was our teacher, as she was for many, at both the University of Dallas and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The Dallas Institute bears the indelible mark of Dr. Louise’s and Dr. Donald’s vision and grace, and the work of the Dallas Institute’s Louise and Donald Cowan Center for Education is on the threshold of bringing their distinctive vision of liberal education for all to our public schools, a focus of abiding love and concern for them both in their work at the Dallas Institute. Sincerely,
Larry Allums
Claudia Allums
Executive Director
Director
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
The Louise and Donald Cowan Center for Education
The Louise S. Cowan Memorial Fund. In response to gifts received honoring Institute Founding Fellow Dr. Louise Cowan, the Dallas Institute has established the Louise S. Cowan Memorial Fund. We are deeply grateful to those who have made contributions and invite others who would like to do so to contact us at 214-871-2440, visit www.dallasinstitute.org, or mail in the enclosed form.