by Barry Gan
At the delightful CPP conference in Chico, hosted by Ron Hirschbein and his wife Lee, among others, we agreed that next year’s conference, once again, would be at St. Bonaventure University. I promised everyone at this year’s conference that as soon as I could firm up dates for 2006, I would do so. So . . . we have some dates. Oct. 19 – Oct. 22, 2006, Thursday to Sunday.
The conference will be in conjunction with a celebration that I have planned for that weekend, a celebration of 25 years of peace and nonviolence studies at St. Bonaventure University. Former students in the peace and nonviolence programs will hopefully return to share with themselves and us what they have been doing during the years since they graduated. I expect that the conference will be well attended by philosophers and non-philosophers alike.
The topic that we agreed upon for the conference is “Peacework.” This title matches the name of the New England Quaker journal founded by Pat Farren, a St. Bonaventure graduate. I will check with Peacework to see if they object to our using their name for our conference theme. It seems appropriate.
I have also succeeded in firming up one of the keynote speakers for that weekend—Arun Gandhi, Gandhi’s grandson and founder of the M.K. Institute for Nonviolence at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. He has agreed to speak at our conference, which takes place almost (but not quite exactly) 100 years after the first nonviolence movement that Gandhi initiated in South Africa.
Hopefully you can all begin to make plans to attend, and hopefully some of you will consider bringing some of your undergraduate students to the conference as well.
