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| Oct. 8, 2009
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Opening credits of new Bruce Willis sci fi flick ‘Surrogates’ includes interview with SBU’s Anne Foerst The opening credits of Bruce Willis’ new science fiction thriller include a brief interview with St. Bonaventure professor Dr. Anne Foerst, an expert on the relationship between science and religion.
The movie, “Surrogates,” is set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots. A cop (Willis) is forced to leave his home for the first time in years in order to investigate the murders of others’ surrogates.
The opening credits depict a “virtual” discussion about these surrogates and features a PBS interview with Foerst conducted several years ago on a show about transhumanism (which Foerst is against).
Dr. Foerst has published papers in academic journals on the possibility for mutual enrichment between artificial intelligence, the cognitive sciences, and Jewish and Christian theologies and anthropologies. She also writes for popular media to bring the relationship between religion and science to a broader audience.
ABOUT FOERST: Foerst is an assistant professor of computer science at SBU.
Before joining the faculty at St. Bonaventure in 2001, Foerst was a researcher at the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as a theological adviser to scientists building humanoid machines.
Foerst holds degrees in computer science and philosophy from the University of Bonn, Germany, a master of divinity degree from the Seminary of the Protestant Church in Rhineland, and a Ph.D. in theology from the Ruhr-University at Bochum, Germany.
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St.
Bonaventure graduate and New York state senator to keynote this year's
Communications Day
New York State Sen. Catharine Young is this year’s Communications Day keynote speaker. Past speakers include the likes of Walter Cronkite, Tim Russert and Dan Barry. Young graduated from St. Bonaventure in 1982 with a degree in mass communication. She served in the Cattaraugus County Legislature until 1999, and then was elected to the New York State Assembly. In 2005, she was elected to the New York Senate.
All Communications Day sessions will be held in the John J. Murphy Professional Building on campus. Sen. Young will take the podium in the Dresser Auditorium at 12:30 p.m. and her talk will be followed by the award ceremony.
The day includes 16 sessions that will focus on different aspects of the media and public relations. Topics include “So You Want to be on Television: Broadcast Reporting,” “Internet Writing: It’s Different” and “Sports Reporting: Far More Than Scores and Statistics.”
Each information session will be conducted by a professional in that field. This year’s professionals consist of many of the faculty members in St. Bonaventure’s Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication, administrators from St. Bonaventure’s Office of Marketing and Communications and many journalists from the greater Buffalo and Rochester areas. The day will conclude with an awards ceremony to recognize high schools and individual students who excel in their field of print or broadcast journalism. Communications Day started in 1936 under the name of Press Day. Regular events started in 1949 when the journalism department was founded at St. Bonaventure. When Press Day first started it dealt solely with different forms of newspaper writing and reporting. As time progressed and media grew to include radio, television and the Internet, and communications began to include both public relations and advertising, Press Day became Communications Day. Click here to return to the top of the page _____________________ John Mulryan, Board of Trustees Professor of English, Steven Brown, Professor of Classical Languages, and Bruce Swann, Classics Librarian at the University of Illinois, are now under contract to produce an annotated translation of L.G. Giraldi’s “De Deis Gentium,” an extensive commentary on classical myth, first published in Basel Switzerland, in 1548. This will be the first translation of the Latin text in any language. The contract is with ACMRS, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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