Join us for a free public conversation.

The Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture and The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University welcome you back to The Embrace for another season of public conversations on democracy, justice, memory, and values.

The series kicks off on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, at 5:15 p.m. and will be followed by a free public dinner and reception at 25 Winter Pl. Boston, MA 02108.

Distinguished legal scholars Aziz Rana and Noah Feldman will engage in a critical dialogue examining whether the Constitution can sustain democratic life amid today's challenges. They will explore how the document's promises contend with its historical compromises and limitations. This conversation confronts a fundamental question: does democratic renewal require reimagining our founding compact? Their contrasting perspectives offer important insights on the meaning of our constitution in our current crisis and beyond.

Brandon M. Terry, the John Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University will introduce the event.

Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government. He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country.

His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His latest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.

Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chair of the Society of Fellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law and religion, and the history of legal ideas.

A policy & public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, Feldman also writes for The New York Review of Books and was a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine for nearly a decade. He hosts the Deep Background podcast, an interview show that explores the historical, scientific, legal and cultural context behind the biggest stories in the news.

Through his consultancy, Ethical Compass, Feldman advises clients like Facebook & eBay on how to improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. In this capacity, he conceived and architected the Facebook Oversight Board, and continues to advise the company on ethics and governance issues.

Feldman is the author of 10 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution. Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

Seating will be provided but please feel free to bring blankets in case the chairs fill

Join us for a public conversation followed by a free public dinner.

This conversation will bring together Robert P. George and Cornel West, who represent divergent intellectual traditions, to explore the possibilities of meaningful discourse amid political fragmentation. Their friendship demonstrates a practice of democratic engagement that addresses disagreement without falling into simplistic political categories. Through their conversation, they will show how engagement across differences can illuminate our complex moral and political landscape. As polarization increases, George and West will offer a model of intellectual exchange that respects principled disagreement while maintaining a commitment to truth, a practice important for democratic vitality in challenging times.

Brandon M. Terry, the John Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University will introduce the event.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has frequently been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. In addition to his academic service, Professor George has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has also served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology. He currently chairs the New Jersey Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Professor

George is author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford U. Press), In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford U. Press), The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI) and Conscience and Its Enemies (ISI). His most recent book, written with Cornel West, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division (Post Hill Press). His book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment will be published later this year by Encounter Books.

Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of  Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. 

Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard  University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated  Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in  Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at  nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. 

Dr. West is a frequent guest on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span and Democracy Now. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

Seating will be provided but please feel free to bring blankets in case the chairs fill.

Join us for a panel discussion about the historic effort led by Chinese immigrant mothers to organize for educational rights as elementary school busing began in 1975. Accompanied by outdoor photo exhibit at Chin Park and a visit by the Boston Desegregation Mobile Museum.

Join us for Boston’s 249th Independence Day Celebration on Thursday, July 4, 2025, beginning at 9 a.m. at City Hall Plaza. Mayor Michelle Wu will open the ceremony with remarks at the flagpoles.

Following the speaking program, a parade will step off from City Hall Plaza and proceed along Tremont Street, stopping briefly at the Granary Burying Ground to honor historic figures. The route continues along Bromfield and Washington Streets, ending at the Old State House, where Captain Commanding Stephen Colella of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company will read the Declaration of Independence from the historic balcony  at the Old State House.

This event is free and open to the public.

The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, which began in Boston, is being commemorated this year with celebration and reflection on American history, our national purpose, and democracy itself. 

A live, community event moderated by Boston Globe Ideas Editor Brian Bergstein, the event will feature conversations with historians and contributors to the recent special issue from Globe Ideas titled "The Revolution Lives On."