VIRTUAL LAUNCH | With the World to Choose From: Celebrating Seven Decades of the Beatty Lecture at McGill University

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The public is invited to join the virtual launch of With the World to Choose From: Celebrating Seven Decades of the Beatty Lecture at McGill University.

Since the first Beatty Lecture in 1954, ninety inspiring lecturers have stood at the Beatty podium. To launch this anthology of past lectures, McGill Professor Emeritus Charles Taylor (whose 2017 lecture is featured in the collection) joins Dr. Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury, whose preface introduces the lecture) for a conversation on the importance of public discourse and the role of the public intellectual. The event also includes a visual tour of key moments in Beatty Lecture history, a book giveaway contest and more.

ABOUT THE BOOK

To help us understand some of the most significant moments and discoveries of our time, With the World to Choose From spotlights fifteen outstanding Beatty Lectures, spanning seven decades. Readers can discover - or rediscover - these important and inspiring lectures, all in print for the first time. One of the twentieth century’s most influential visionaries, the economist Barbara Ward, opens this anthology with her future-looking 1955 lecture. Lectures from acclaimed biologist Robert Sinsheimer, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, philosopher Charles Taylor, and author and social commentator Roxane Gay carry readers through the decades that followed and up to the present, treating subjects from the tensions of Cold War politics and the implications of genetic engineering to the origins of life in the universe and the watershed #MeToo movement. Some of today’s leading academics add contextual and biographical information to each chapter, and an introduction sheds light on the history of the Beatty Lecture and the life of its notable namesake.