The Speakers Series of South Haven will conclude its 2017 season on Sept. 28, when Yvonne Caamal Canul, head of the Lansing School District and 2015 Superintendent of Year for Michigan, will address her perspective on what really works in education today, and how those techniques can help break the cycle of poverty through a non-traditional and sometimes controversial approach to education.

The next featured speaker in the 2017 Speaker Series of South Haven is considered among the world’s most influential Muslims. Ebrahim Moosa, a professor of Islamic Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 31 at Lake Michigan College in South Haven.

Moosa will speak on “Reform in the Contemporary Islamic World.” Approaching Islam as a faith for all eras, he will explore the need for a progressive Islam interpreted in the context of contemporary human dignity, identity and ethics. Moosa will explore the question of heritage in the Arab-Islamic world and how heritage affects identity. It involves issues of politics, the interpretation of Islamic law, and the need to shift to a public theology centering on ethics and human dignity.

Moosa maintains, however, that events such as the emergence of military and despotic regimes after the Arab Spring and foreign destabilization of the region has prevented these debates from flowering into social policies. A native of South Africa, Moosa taught at the University of Cape Town, as well as Duke and Stanford universities, before joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2014.

Source: The Herald Palladium