ADULT EVENTS & PROGRAMS

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment ratification, we will discuss this "heroic narrative" (The Wall Street Journal) and discover the inspiring and timely account of the complex relationship between leading suffragist Alice Paul and President Woodrow Wilson in her fight for women's equality. Woodrow Wilson lands in Washington, DC in March of 1913, a day before he is set to take the presidential oath of office. He is surprised by the modest turnout. The crowds and reporters are blocks away from Union Station, watching a parade of eight thousand suffragists on Pennsylvania Avenue in a first-of-its-kind protest organized by a twenty-five-year-old activist named Alice Paul. The next day, the New York Times calls the procession "one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country." Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? weaves together two storylines: the trajectories of Alice Paul and Woodrow Wilson, two apparent opposites.

Following an ancient pilgrimage route a thousand miles from Canterbury to Rome, the bestselling and award-winning writer weaves history and culture into an exploration of why Christianity is struggling in the world it created. He is accompanied by fellow pilgrims and by the towering figures of the faith: Joan of Arc, Henry VIII, Martin Luther. The goal: walking to Saint Peter's Square over the old Roman road, in hopes of meeting the pope who is struggling to hold together the world's 1.3 billion Roman Catholics.

In the tight-knit community known as Heaven, a ramshackle slum hidden between luxury high-rises in Bangalore, India, five girls on the cusp of womanhood forge an unbreakable bond. Muslim, Christian, and Hindu; queer and straight; they are full of life, and they love and accept one another unconditionally. Whatever they have, they share. Marginalized women, they are determined to transcend their surroundings. When the local government threatens to demolish their tin shacks in order to build a shopping mall, the girls and their mothers refuse to be erased. Together they wage war on the bulldozers sent to bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that wishes that families like them would remain hidden forever.

Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor--and a crucial clarification of Catherine's financial status--puts all to right. Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen's death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.