Advance notice for next January’s New York Encounter , a three-day conference sponsored by the Catholic group Communion and Liberation. It will be held in New York January 17th to 19th and is, very nicely, free. Among the highlights are a talk on alienated youth by Christian Smith, the Notre Dame sociologist who’s led several important studies on the spiritual life of youth, an interview with Sean Cardinal O’Malley, and a report on the work of Vaclav Havel by the president of the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation.
Several of us here went to the events last year and much enjoyed them. They are now available . Of the ones I could get to, particularly good were The Story of Shahbaz Bhatti , about the murdered Christian who served as Pakistan’s minister for minority affairs; Liberty in Modern and Contemporary Art by Francis Greene of St. Francis College in Brooklyn; and Desire, Liberty, and Satisfaction by the Irish journalist John Waters.
