CHQ&A

On this episode, we feature a conversation between interviewer John Merino and Maureen Rovegno, Chautauqua’s director of religion, on the little-known history of what has come to be called the “Burned-over District,” or the “on fire” religious environment and culture of the early 19th century in Western New York. As you’ll hear, Chautauqua itself is one of the movements that has roots in the “Burned-over District,” and the Institution will program a week of lectures on that era from July 22 to 25. More information is available at chq.org.

The Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series is described as follows:

We refer often to Chautauqua’s beginnings in 1874 and its history going forward, but little-known is the history that preceded Chautauqua’s founding. The Chautauqua Assembly reflected many movements that had had their genesis in what was called the “Burned-Over District” resulting from the “on fire” religious environment and culture of the early 19th century in Western New York. The Assembly synthesized the religious passion of the age with its own unique contributions to American culture, as did other religious and civic expressions of the region arising out of that epoch. In this week we will revisit that incendiary era, and then meet some other religious and civic entities that have also stood the test of time.

Our guest on this episode is Ambassador William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States. Ambassador Burns retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. Hailed as an “American diplomatic legend” by Secretary of State John Kerry, he holds the highest rank in the Foreign Service, Career Ambassador, and is only the second serving career diplomat in history to become deputy secretary of state.

Ambassador Burns is the author of an acclaimed new book, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, which Henry Kissinger called “an incisive and sorely needed case for the revitalization of diplomacy — what Burns wisely describes as our ‘tool of first resort.’”

He joined Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill for an onstage conversation on June 28 in the Chautauqua Amphitheater, during the first week of the 2019 summer assembly season, themed “Moments That Changed the World.”

Hugh Hewitt is a lawyer, law professor and political commentator who as of July 1 began his service as president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. His nationally syndicated radio show is heard in more than 120 cities across the United States every weekday afternoon, with an audience estimated at more than 2 million listeners every week. Hewitt also makes frequent appearances on all the major cable news networks and Sunday morning political talk show panels, and he is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. He is also the author of a dozen books, including two New York Times best-sellers.

Hewitt served for nearly six years in the Reagan administration in a variety of posts, including assistant counsel in the White House and special assistant to two attorneys general. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School and has been teaching constitutional law at Chapman University Law School since it opened in 1995.

Hugh joined CHQ&A’s John Merino for an in-studio conversation on June 27, shortly after delivering a lecture in the Chautauqua Amphitheater as part of a week themed “Moments That Changed the World.”

Dan Egan is author of the acclaimed book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, in which he traces an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the Great Lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come. The book has garnered comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; one reviewer said that “Dan Egan has done more than any other journalist in America to chronicle the decline of this once-great ecosystem.”

For his day job, Egan is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and a senior water policy fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.

He joined Emily Morris, for an onstage conversation on June 26 in the Chautauqua Amphitheater, during the first week of the 2019 summer assembly season, themed “Moments That Changed the World.” Morris is Chautauqua's vice president of marketing and communications and chief brand officer.

Our guest this episode is Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford. Professor Cox’s research and teaching focuses on architectural acoustics, signal processing and audio perception. He has written several books for academics and the general public, most recently The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World and Now You’re Talking: Human Conversation from the Neanderthals to Artificial Intelligence.

A former senior media fellow at the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Professor Cox has presented 25 documentaries for BBC radio and has been featured on BBC1, Teachers TV, Discovery and National Geographic channels; one of his most popular interviews concerned the debunking of the myth that “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” He has also written for New Scientist and The Guardian, and runs a website that hosts experiments to test people’s responses to sound: sound101.org, which hosted the popular experiment on the “Worst Sound in the World.”

Professor Cox joined our Christopher Dahlie (who during the day serves as head of audio at the Chautauqua Amphitheater) for an in-studio conversation on July 23, shortly after Cox delivered a lecture in the Amphitheater as part of a week themed “The Life of the Spoken Word.”