Her white hair pulled back in a signature low ponytail. On the road for 300 days a year, she travels with a bodyguard and a personal assistant. Anthropology professors and college students pay her equal homage. She’s won seemingly every award and honor. At 76, Jane Goodall is on top of the world.

At the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel last Friday night, the pioneering primatologist known for her decades of research with chimpanzees in Tanzania, kept a packed audience in rapture for just under two hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Dropped stitches in knitting are mistakes; they create gaps and destroy the integrity of a garment. And if they aren’t fixed when noticed, dropped stitches will unravel, producing more problems than solutions. Christina Wong used this metaphor of knitted mistakes in her performance of “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at Rockefeller Chapel this past Friday, drawing attention to the climbing rates of suicide and depression among Asian women in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

“Classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes, sing to the Lord a new song!” the congregation sang during the processional hymn of the service held in the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel Sunday morning. Several hundred people gathered for a religious commemoration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, with biological anthropologist Russell Tuttle guest-preaching. Read the rest of this entry »

“Who knew so many people would want to come out for an old radical?” said the elderly woman in front of me to no one in particular. “We thought there’d be no one here but old folks like us.” Her husband nodded in agreement. Despite the fact that I was in the foyer of Rockefeller Chapel, a cavernous venue normally blighted with accordingly cavernous acoustics, I could hear their conversation very clearly, probably because the woman was standing about four inches from my face. Waiting for Angela Davis to show up and deliver this year’s George E. Kent Lecture was turning out to be a cozy experience despite the sub-zero temperatures, as people continued to wedge themselves into the chapel. Since someone else had dutifully saved me a seat, I actually got a spot in the pews, but hundreds of others were lining the walls, spilling from the balconies and the wings, and even seated in the choir. But judging by the thunderous applause that rippled through Rockefeller when Davis actually reached the lectern, no one minded the lousy seating. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the nearly empty campus on Monday afternoon, students and community members slowly flocked to Rockefeller Chapel for a service to celebrate and revive the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. As soon as peaceful organ music had lulled the audience into silence, an intense harmony coming from the back of the chapel pierced through the air, making the audience sit up, turn around, and begin nodding their heads or tapping their feet to the sounds of Soul Umoja. This kind of call to attention was something that resonated throughout the service as the participants held up a challenge to clarify and renew the widely accepted idea of Dr. King’s vision. Read the rest of this entry »