Jeffrey Nall, Ph.D. delivered this talk to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brevard, June 11, 2023.
Jeffrey Nall, Ph.D., is the civically engaged scholar and speaker behind Humanities in Revolt. He brings the timeless, liberating insights of the humanities to live audiences, from community groups and congregations to universities and conferences. Message him below to inquire about speaking availability for your congregation, campus, or community group.
Lessons of the Iraq War
The talk was delivered Sunday, June 11, 2023 at the invitation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brevard, West Melbourne, Florida. This was a fitting location for the 30-minute talk since Melbourne, Florida was the central site of my own peace activism and the birthplace of my awakening political consciousness, in 2003.
Some in the audience had participated in the supposedly “pointless” efforts to avert the Iraq War. My message to them was that such a judgment, viewed through the deeper lens of the humanities, is mistaken, and that there is much meaning and value in the passionate and morally principled efforts to prevent and then halt the war. I also challenged audience members to consider the significance of the silence of popular culture when it comes to representing the February 15, 2003 global peace protest, the largest in human history.
For all of the excited cultural gushing over the ‘beauty’ and ‘awesomeness’ of masses of men gathered together to do war—to take life, to destroy, we ought to interrogate the comparative absence of climatic celebrations, of cinematic representations of such astonishing instances of love-potent solidarity.
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