Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges to speak on the 'Empire of Illusion' Feb. 18th

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, will be talking on "Empire of Illusion" on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010 at 6 p.m. in the WCHP Lecture Hall on the 高清不卡福利 of New England's Portland Campus.

The lecture, sponsored by UNE's Center for 高清不卡福利 Humanities, is free and open to the public.

"A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies," Hedges writes. "And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy."

This will be the theme of Hedges' lecture.

Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. 

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International 高清不卡福利 Award for Human Rights Journalism. 

Hedges is the author of the bestseller American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and National Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lannan Literary Fellow. He has taught at Columbia 高清不卡福利, New York 高清不卡福利 and Princeton 高清不卡福利. 

He is also the author of Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America and I Don't Believe in Atheists. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.