School of Arts and Sciences Review Winter 2014 | Page 37

News & Events

Philosophy Club discussion
explores love’s flaws, virtues

Class celebrates
Chinese culture

Lectures, music and art celebrate
the life of poet Robert Lax

In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Philosophy Club hosted a February discussion
titled “Love: Does It Make You Happy or
Miserable?” The topics explored involved
love’s flaws and virtues, the different
types of love, and how modern technology affects love and happiness.
In March 2013, the club welcomed
guest speaker Dr. Timothy J. Madigan to
speak about Aristotle’s view of friendship
as compared with the friendships of the
digital age and whether or not Aristotle’s
perception of friendship is still relevant
2,300 years later in a world with social
media. In April 2013, the Philosophy Club
teamed up with VOICES to discuss gender
roles: how they are perpetuated by the
mass media, what they entail, the benefits and problems involved with them,
and changes that our culture can make
toward gender.

Dr. Charles Walker’s Organizational Psychology
class organized a “Made in
China — Asian Culture
Night” event on April 18,
2013, at the Quick Center
Loft. There was traditional
Chinese food and a musical
performance as well as
activities to celebrate Chinese culture. The event
was sponsored by the Diversity Action Committee.

A weeklong series of lectures, performances and discussions on Olean native
Robert Lax were held March 4-8, 2013, at
the university.
Lax spent his early years in Olean and went
on to become a well-known poet, artist and
spiritual thinker.
St. Bonaventure is
home to the Robert
Lax Archives.
Dr. Steve Georgiou
of the Graduate
Theological Union in
Berkeley, Calif.,
gave three lectures
as part of the
event. On March
8, an original
composition inspired by Lax’s
poetry by
Gwyneth Walker
was performed
in the Regina
A. Quick Center for the Arts, with a
short documentary that followed.
Throughout the week, exhibits mounted
by Friedsam Memorial Library Director Paul
Spaeth were displayed at the library and the
Quick Center’s Branch Gallery.
Lax was born in Olean in 1915. In the
1930s, Lax attended Columbia University,
where he became friends with Thomas Merton. Merton taught English at St. Bonaventure in the early 1940s before becoming a
renowned spiritual writer and Trappist monk.
Lax spent more than 30 years of his later life
on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Patmos. He died in 2000.
St. Bonaventure’s School o