Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2016

August 18 | Living and Dying in the Modern Age: Living Wills, Control, and Mortality

Thursday, August 18, 7:30 pm  |  Dialogue leader: Samuel Brown Mark & Elizabeth England's home at 1194 South 500 East in Salt Lake City. Late-comers, please use the back door.   Discussion: Hospital intensive care units have changed when and how we die–and not always for the better. The ICU is a new world, one in which once-fatal diseases can be cured and medical treatments greatly enhance our chances of full recovery. But, paradoxically, these places of physical healing can exact a terrible toll, and by focusing on technology rather than humanity, they too often rob the dying of their dignity. By some accounts, the expensive medical treatments provided in ICUs also threaten to bankrupt the nation. In an attempt to give patients a voice in the ICU when they might not otherwise have one, the living will was introduced in 1969, in response to several notorious cases. These documents were meant to keep physicians from ignoring patients’ and families’ wishes in str

June 30 | How Crazies in the Past Might Have Described Our Present and How You Might Predict the Future

Thursday, June 30, 7:30 pm  |  Dialogue leader: Rick Casady Mark & Elizabeth England's home at 1194 South 500 East in Salt Lake City. Late-comers, please use the back door.   Discussion: Imagine yourself living a century ago, making predictions about coming events. Who would have foreseen the Great Depression, hyperinflation, World War II, the nuclear era, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, the collapse of colonial empires, today's technological marvels, or the massive social upheaval which attended these? We invite you to read one author's descriptions (attributed to people associated with the Dada movement and Zürich, Switzerland in 1916) and share your observations about our wildly improbable present. We would also like your predictions about what significant events or trends will occur in the coming decades. About Rick: San Francisco native. Father, a veteran of the Big Red One and school teacher, had pioneer ancestry on maternal l