MOUNT VERNON — A University of Chicago scholar with expertise in theology and medieval history will lecture at Cornell College on “The Mysticism of the Ground” as the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar at 11 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus at Chicago’s Divinity School, where he taught from 1969 to 2003. He has authored books related to the history of Western apocalypticism, including “Visions of the End” and “Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil,” as well as works on Christian spirituality and mysticism. He recently completed the fourth volume of a history of Western Christian mysticism, “The Harvest of Mysticism in Late Medieval Germany 1300-1500.”

During his two-day campus visit, McGinn also will give a presentation in a religion class on Judaism and meet with religion majors and minors plus other students and faculty. This is the 50 th year of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, which has sent 518 scholars on about 4,500 visits to member campuses since the 1956-57 academic year. The purpose of the program is to allow an exchange of ideas between the visiting scholars and the resident faculty and students, contributing to the intellectual life on campus.

Additional sponsors of McGinn’s visit are the Cornell College Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa; the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium; the President’s Office; and the religion department. Among more than 3,600 U.S. colleges and universities, Cornell is one of only 270 with a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most select honorary society in the United States.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College Lyric Theatre presents the musical thriller “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” opening Friday, Jan. 27, at 8 p.m. in Kimmel Theatre of Youngker Hall.

Remaining performances are Saturday, Jan. 28, at 8 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 29, at 2 p.m. and Feb. 2-4 at 8 p.m.

With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and based on the book by Hugo Wheeler, “Sweeney Todd” tells the story of the unjustly exiled barber who returns to 19th-century London seeking revenge against the lecherous judge who framed him and ravaged his young wife. The barber’s thirst for blood expands to include his unfortunate customers, which leads to gruesome success for the proprietress of the neighborhood pie shop, whose customers are lining up in droves for her mysterious new meat pie.

This 1977 Tony Award-winning musical has been called sophisticated, macabre, visceral and uncompromising, yet “Sweeney Todd” nevertheless has a great sense of fun, mixing intense drama with moments of dark humor.

The Cornell performance is directed by Kaia Monroe, assistant professor of theatre, with music direction by Jonathon Thull, voice instructor and Lyric Theatre founder.

Admission is $10 for adults and $6 for students, seniors and youth. “Sweeney Todd” contains situations not appropriate for children under 12. Admission is free to Cornell students, faculty and staff. Reserve tickets at (319) 895-4293.

MOUNT VERNON — Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, will lecture at 11 a.m. Monday, Jan. 30, at Cornell College.

The title of Korb’s talk is “How to Provide for the Common Defense and Secure the Blessings of Liberty at the Same Time.” The lecture is in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, and a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information. From 1981 through 1985 he served as assistant secretary of defense, administering about 70 percent of the defense budget. Korb served on active duty for four years as a naval flight officer and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of captain. He has written 20 books and more than 100 articles on national security issues, appeared on numerous television news programs and published op-ed pieces in many national newspapers.

Before joining the Center for American Progress, Korb held positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the University of Pittsburgh and the Raytheon Company.

Korb’s Cornell lecture is sponsored by the politics department and the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium.

MOUNT VERNON — Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer for her 2002 book chronicling U.S. policy toward genocide in the 20th century, will speak on “Iraq’s Collateral Damage” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College.

Power’s visit is for the Earhart-Cornell Lecture series, “The Liberal Arts and the Public Square,” funded by the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Mich. Admission to the lecture is free.

Irish-born Power is professor of public practice in public policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for general nonfiction.

As a recent college graduate, Power covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996 as a freelance journalist for U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe and the Economist. She returned to the United States when the Holocaust was in the public eye, with the opening of a museum in Washington, D.C., the release of a Steven Spielberg movie on the Holocaust and the vow that “never again” would genocide be tolerated. Yet the response from the current administration to the murder of Muslims in Sarajevo and elsewhere was passive.

In “A Problem from Hell,” she examines America’s policy toward genocide, documenting the moral failures of those in power yet celebrating individuals during the 20th century who have spoken out about genocide.

Power is a graduate of Yale University, majoring in history, and Harvard Law School. She was founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from 1998 to 2002.

Power’s is the seventh lecture in the Earhart-Cornell series, which previously has featured U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould; social philosopher and author Michael Novak; Yale University law professor and author Stephen Carter; Harvard University legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon; and Walter Williams, economist, columnist and commentator.

Robert Birnbaum interview with Samantha Power

Interview with Samantha Power at the Institute for International Studies, UC Berkeley

MOUNT VERNON – Photos by Muscatine residents, along with artwork by them and the Kosovar children they visited, are exhibited in “Images of Kosovo” in the Orange Carpet Gallery of The Commons at Cornell College through Feb. 23. Admission is free.

The exhibition tells the story of a July 2005 visit by 32 Muscatine residents, including members of the Muscatine Children’s and Youth Choirs, to Gjakove, Kosovo. The trip was part of a musical exchange with the Shropshire Music Foundation, founded by Liz Shropshire in 1999, at the height of the reign of terror. With a belief in the power of music to heal, she purchased pennywhistles and harmonicas for the children of Kosovo.

For two weeks last summer, the Muscatine visitors offered English, art, music, and craft classes and organized a health clinic, eye clinic, and other projects. Jon Fasanelli-Cawelti, curator of the exhibition, traveled with approximately 120 pounds of art supplies in two huge suitcases and two backpacks. Materials were contributed by several people, including Craig Carman ’82, manager of an art supply store in Iowa City, who donated 1,000 pencils and 1,000 sheets of paper.

The exhibition at Cornell features a selected portion of the more than 100 works shown in the original exhibit at the Muscatine Art Center Dec. 17 – Jan. 8.

MOUNT VERNON - Robert Dana has been invited as Iowa’s Poet Laureate to open the legislative session Tuesday morning, Jan. 17, at the State Capitol. He is the first poet ever invited to appear before the Iowa Legislature in Des Moines, as well as the last poet to read in the Senate Chamber in Old Capitol in Iowa City. That reading took place in 1966 after the publication of his book “Some Versions of Silence.“

News release from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs

MOUNT VERNON — A Fairfield artist has turned ordinary household objects and old industrial supplies – including dish scrubbers, disposable plastic bags and rabbit fencing – into sculptures inspired by the relationship between the human figure and landforms.

The art is featured in “Judy Bales: Counterpoint,” an exhibition of fiber work by Bales showing Jan. 15 through Feb. 13 at the Peter Paul Luce Gallery in McWethy Hall at Cornell College.

An opening reception is Sunday, Jan. 15, from 2 to 4 p.m. Bales will lecture on her work Monday, Feb. 13, at 7 p.m. in Room 222a of McWethy Hall. Admission is free to the lecture, opening reception and gallery exhibition.

“The relationship between nature and industry is at the core of my work,” says Bales, a former elementary school art teacher who creates sculptural installations from mixed media and sculptures for the body such as hats and dresses. “It’s amazing to me how industrial materials can look so natural. It alludes to the reclaiming by nature of manmade materials.”

The exhibition includes photos of models wearing her hats, form-fitting creations covering their heads like vegetation blanketing a hillside.

The rural Georgia schools where Bales worked in the 1970s didn’t have a lot of money for supplies, so she had to find materials. That, plus the creativity of her young students and a fibers class she took for her teacher recertification, she says, pointed her toward fibers and mixed media. A fan of hardware stores, Bales favors weaving with wire and other non-traditional materials: plastic bags woven on a wire frame, Brillo pads painted and stitched together.

Bales’ latest canvas is the pedestrian bridge. In two public art projects she designed elements to visually soften the rigid bridges. The Maryland Avenue Bridge in Phoenix, a bicycle and pedestrian bridge crossing an interstate, features colorful steel bands that weave in and out of the trusses, adding a sense of movement to the bridge’s stability. Fairfield’s BNSF Railroad Trail Bridge includes a steel cage inspired by barn structures in the local environment, a nod to the rural history of the community besides being a contemporary and elegant structure.

Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday.