By Matthew Ehret Today, the Arctic has increasingly become identified as a domain of great prosperity and cooperation amongst world civilizations on the one side and a domain of confrontation and war on the other. In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with…
Category: Dialogue of Cultures
Symposium: Earth’s Next Hundred Years
Date: Sunday September 26 at 7pm ESTTitle: Vol II: Cheikh Anta Diops dream of a United Africa – the economic vision for an African Belt and Road InitiativeLecturer: Nicholas JonesBio: Nicholas is a professional dancer with La Grande Ballet de Montreal who has performed around the world and recently founded the Artists Alliance for Africa as a non-profit devoted…
Plato’s Fight Against Apollo’s Temple of Delphi and the Cult of Democracy
By Cynthia Chung Homer’s great poems that are left to us today, The Iliad and The Odyssey, describe the events of the Trojan War and its immediate aftermath, events which marked the descent of Greece into a Dark Age. Following the Trojan War, c.1190 BCE, the civilization of mainland Greece collapsed, written language was lost, and cities disappeared….
How a Quaker Medical College in Pennsylvania Trained the First Women Doctors in the World
Though the story is quite remarkable many have never heard of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania which was built in 1850 and became the first medical school for women in the world that had the authority to award its female students a medical degree. The creation of the medical college would come two years…
Ancient Greece and Africa Share Long History
By Nana Coupeau Africans and Ancient Greeks had long, rich history together often reflected in the depiction of Africa in Ancient Greek art. The first contact between Greeks and Africans was sometime during the Bronze Age. At this time, the Minoan culture on Crete flourished and their shipbuilding skills enabled them to travel to far-flung…
Ode to the Orange Tree
Timeless Conversation Between Two Aristocratic Men Gu Yuan & Guo Moruo By Quan Le This is the occasion for expressing some of my desultory remarks on Chinese culture, history and more generally on epistemology, my core interest. Epistemology has 3 theoretical branches : theory of knowledge, heuristics/maieutics and hermeneutics. Epistemology has one practical application at…
The Poetic Principle in the World of the I Ching: Mankind’s Long Journey to Reason and Beauty
In this lecture Dr. Quan Le focuses on the I Ching, the first Confucian Classic (of five: Yi Jing, Shu Jing, Shi Jing, Chun Qiu and Zhou Li) which magnificently embodies the poetic principle famously outlined by Shelley, centuries later, in his Defense of Poetry which re-asserted that Poets are the true legislators of the world….
Through Beauty’s Morning-Gate to the Land of Knowledge: RTF Poetry Symposium
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.” – William Shakespeare (A…
V.I. Vernadsky and the American System in Russia
As the dust settled on the American Civil war in 1865, Russia took pride in the fact that this Eurasian nation turned the tide in favor of Lincoln’s cause of preserving the union and abolishing the institution of slavery. Czar Alexander II was also known as “The Great Liberator” for liberating the serfs in 1861…
Paul Robeson and the Battle for the Soul of America
By Matthew Ehret This essay is an accompaniment to a lecture delivered by the author honoring the life of Paul Robeson as an unfinished symphony “Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made…