Shared Learning Association of Chapel Hill

On Thursday, March 28th, Shared Learning presents our final public lecture of the academic year.  Emeritus Professor in Judaic Studies at Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Eric M Meyers will speak on “Holy Land Archaeology: Where the Past Meets the Present.”

UPDATE: THE SUNDAY AFTER PROFESSOR MEYERS’ TALK, A VERY RELEVANT ARTICLE ABOUT THE TOPIC WAS PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES.  HERE IS A LINK TO THAT ARTICLE: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/jerusalem-city-of-david-israel-dig.html

Professor Meyers has directed digs in Israel and Italy for forty years and is perhaps best known for his 1981 discovery of the oldest Ark from ancient Israel which coincided with the film The Raiders of the Lost Ark. He is the author of 15 books and 370+ scholarly papers and is the recipient of two major research grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He served on the Duke University faculty for more than 45 years and had two stints as the Director of the Graduate Program in Religion.

Professor Meyers’ talk will be held in Shared Learning’s meeting location at Christ United Methodist Church in Southern Village, Chapel Hill: 105 Market St., Rooms 3 & 5.  His talk begins at 11:15 a.m. sharp, with a question period following the lecture (and ending at 12:45 p.m.).  The talk is free and open to the public.

A few updates to the Fall Catalog.

Four courses are now closed to new enrollment–Discover Unfamiliar Languages, Plays: Reading and Discussing, Controversies: How Democracies Die, and Beginning Spanish.   Waiting lists are established for all courses that are full and we will alert you if a space has become available for you.

Also, if you are looking for History & Nature of the Universe, II in the menus referring to this course’s webpage it is going by a new title: Fun in the Physical World

On Friday, February 23rd, at 11 a.m., Shared Learning was proud to host Professor William Ferris, Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill, who gave our February Gray Lindgren Public Lecture at our Association’s meeting location, Expand Church, 114 Weaver Dairy Rd., Chapel Hill.

Professor Ferris’ lecture was based on his book, The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, a fascinating set of interviews with 26 of the most luminous artists and thinkers in American culture — from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward.

Dr. Ferris described to us how he chose subjects and conducted one-on-one interviews, over the past forty years, with such outstanding cultural representatives of the American South; how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity; and how the work of southern and southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South.

Like all of our Lindgren Public Lectures, Dr. Ferris’ talk was free and open to the Chapel Hill area community. We invite you to taste the intellectually invigorating and socially inviting climate that has characterized our organization since its founding by retired UNC faculty members nearly 40 years ago.