NEWS

Local angles: Chapel Hill, Greensboro

UNC Public Safety wins award for community policing excellence

The International Association of Chiefs of Police and ITT Industries Night Vision have named the UNC Department of Public Safety a finalist for the 2002 Community Policing Award. Five winners and eight finalists were selected from more than 92 entries from the United States and six other countries.

"Your entry was selected as a finalist because it demonstrated that your department has championed positive change in your department and community by adopting a community policing philosophy," said Gary Kempker, association director, and Larry Curfiss of ITT Industries Night Vision in a recent letter to UNC Police Chief Derek Poarch.

Poarch and the UNC department will be recognized Oct. 6 at the association's annual conference in Minneapolis. The department has approximately 190 full-time employees who handle policing, parking and commuting matters on campus.

"It is certainly an honor to be selected for this award," Poarch said. "The award is an example of the recognition that comes when law enforcement and the community partner to address crime, the fear of crime, and quality of life. The award belongs to the police officers and other employees in the department who work daily to achieve our vision of being the best public safety department in the country."

UNC's is one of only 27 college and university public safety agencies in the country that are accredited. UNC earned re-accreditation in 2000 from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

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Religion, culture wars and education to be topics of humanities seminar

The focus since 9/11 on differences between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam, including UNC's summer reading program debate, will be among topics of "Religion, Culture Wars and Education," a seminar offered Sept. 13-14 by the UNC Program in the Humanities and Human Values.

Topics also will include tensions among different religions; disputes pitting religion against science; and different interpretations within religious traditions. Also covered will be religious liberty in the American colonies, origins of the idea of separation of church and state, evolution and creation and the recent controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance.

Speakers will be Dr. Warren Nord, humanities program director, and Dr. Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar for religious freedom programs at The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation based in Arlington, Va., and Nashville, Tenn., dedicated to free speech, a free press and free spirit for all people. Haynes travels America, working with local and national educational, religious and civil liberties organizations to bring peace in disputes related to religion.

"Growing religious pluralism in America often creates tensions in communities where we haven't yet learned how to live with on another," Haynes said. "Before Sept. 11, the need to address religion and religious perspectives was not high on the educational agenda, but perhaps now it will be. The tragic events of that terrible day are clear reminders that religion matters in a world torn by conflict over religious differences. And it matters in our nation, the most religiously diverse country on Earth."

Tuition is $95. Scholarships for teachers are available, covering half the tuition. For more information, call 919-962-1544 or e-mail human@unc.edu.

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Speech to concern global positioning to research, preserve, Rwandan gorillas

Using global positioning to track and help preserve mountain gorillas in Rwanda will be the topic of a free public talk at the Chapel Hill Public Library Sunday (Sept. 8) by Dr. Scott Madry, a UNC research associate professor of anthropology.

The talk will be at 3 p.m. in the meeting room of the library, off Estes Drive near East Franklin Street. For more information, call 968-2777.

Madry partners with officials at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International on a project to use state-of-the-art technologies to support research on the gorillas, which inhabit the Virunga mountains, one of the least mapped and least accessible areas of the world. For more information, visit www.informatics.org/gorilla/ or http://www.gorillafund.org/000_core_frmset.html.

Madry is on the resident faculty of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Previously he worked at the Institute for Technology Development's Space Remote Sensing Center of NASA and the Rutgers University Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis.

The lecture was arranged by Carolina Speakers at UNC. The outreach program brings more than 90 faculty members to business, civic and community groups across the state. The speakers share their expertise on more than 150 topics, including 46 that focus on North Carolina and the South.

For more information or to schedule a Carolina Speaker, contact Sandy Roberts at 919-962-1993 or sandy_roberts@unc.edu, or visit the Carolina Speakers web site at www.unc.edu/depts/uncspeak.

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Friday Center Director to discuss opportunities for lifelong learning

Opportunities for education and growth outside the classroom will be the topic of a free public speech in Sept. 18 by Norm Loewenthal, director of UNC's William and Ida Friday Continuing Education Center.

The Chapel Hill Newcomers Club will sponsor the talk at 9:30 a.m. at the Hargraves Recreation Center, 216 N. Roberson St., Chapel Hill. For information on membership or the speech, contact Marty Kirchner at 968-0503 or Arline Henry at 942-9686.

Loewenthal helped guide the emergence of the Friday Center and electronic distance learning through UNC. He will present new avenues for learning through a variety of UNC-sponsored programs. Audience members will have the opportunity to suggest new continuing education initiatives.

The lecture was arranged by Carolina Speakers at UNC. The outreach program brings more than 90 faculty members to business, civic and community groups across the state. The speakers share their expertise on more than 150 topics, including 46 that focus on North Carolina and the South.

For more information or to schedule a Carolina Speaker, contact Sandy Roberts at 919-962-1993 or sandy_roberts@unc.edu, or visit the Carolina Speakers web site at www.unc.edu/depts/uncspeak.

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Reactions to store mannequins to be subject of art exhibit

"Theft in the Doll's House," a conceptual photography exhibit whose themes concern varying reactions to store window mannequins, will be displayed Sept. 19-Oct. 3 in the John and June Allcott Gallery of UNC's Hanes Art Center.

The artists, Jill Casid of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Maria DeGuzman of UNC, will give a free public lecture at the gallery at 6 p.m. Sept. 19, with an opening reception following from 7-9 p.m. Casid is an assistant professor of visual culture studies in art history. DeGuzman is assistant professor of Latina/o literatures and cultures in English.

In the exhibit, enlarged Polaroids of department store mannequins mimic store displays. "We took these images on the run, passing through commercial districts in a number of cities," write the artists. "We were escorted promptly out of several stores. Window shopping has been, since the 19th century, a way of participating in commodity culture and yet resisting its final goals," the sale of the goods. "But with the taking of these images, we stepped over an invisible line from window shopping without buying to an interruption of the flow of commodities."

For more information, call the art department at 962-2015.

Talks to profile writer Cardozo, born Jewish, raised Catholic

Dr. David Halperin, a UNC religious studies professor emeritus, will speak about his new book, "Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings," at 7 p.m. Sept. 19 at the Barnes & Noble bookstore at the Streets at Southpoint Mall in Durham.

On Oct. 17, Halperin will speak on "The Strange Life and Violent Death of a Messiah" at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Friendly Center in Greensboro. Both talks will be free and open to the public.

The Durham talk will be co-sponsored by the C.G. Jung Society of the Triangle Area. Halperin's wife, Rose, will display her portrait of Cardozo, which supplied the book's cover, at both talks. For more information, call the Southpoint store at (919) 806-1930 or the Greensboro store at (336) 854-4200.

The new book, Halperin's fourth, provides the first English translation of the Hebrew writings of Cardozo (1627-1706), who combined rabbinic learning, Catholic training and awareness of Eastern religions into a unique theory of comparative religion. Published in September 2001, the book traces Cardozo's life through his writing. Halperin has researched Cardozo since 1989.

Cardozo was born in Spain to a Marrano (secretly Jewish) family at a time when the Spanish Inquisition was burning Marranos at the stake. Raised as a Catholic, he grew up to be a physician and a devotee of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. He spent most of his life fulfilling what he thought was his Messianic destiny, to discover and to reveal the secret identity of God. He met a strange and violent end, stabbed to death by his nephew.

Halperin, who taught at UNC for 24 years, won the Tanner (1990), Favorite Faculty (1995) and William C. Friday/Class of 1986 awards (1996) for excellence in undergraduate teaching at UNC. He received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, as well as a fellowship from the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

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Contacts: David Halperin, (919) 490-5856, dhalperi@email.unc.edu; L.J. Toler, UNC News Services, (919) 962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu