Presented by the National Humanities Center
Friday, October 24, 2025 at 6:30pm CDT
The National World War I Museum and Memorial, Kansas City, MO
For this In Conversation event, they will be joined by award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, whose experiences as a decorated war correspondent in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan have made her keenly aware of how entrenched disagreement can lead to violence and unspeakable suffering.
This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To attend in person, please register here. The event will also be streamed live, accessible here.
Presenters
Cornel West
Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, where he teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in philosophy of religion, African American critical thought, and a wide range of subjects—including, but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University. West has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. West is a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now! He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.—a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.
Robert P. George
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the US member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, George holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jane Ferguson
Jane Ferguson is a Polk, Emmy, Peabody, OPCA, and DuPont Award-winning foreign correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contributor to the New Yorker, and McGraw Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She has over 13 years of experience living and reporting in the Middle East and reporting from the Arab world, Africa, and South Asia. Focusing on US foreign policy and defense, conflict, diplomacy, and human rights, she has earned a reputation for exclusive ground-breaking access, thoughtful storytelling, and character-driven reporting. Her memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, is currently available from HarperCollins.