Neighbors
September 22-26, 2025
“Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?” For 31 seasons on public television, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood invited children to consider ideas that tend to divide people, rather than unite them: sharing, conflict, loss, grief, anger, war, racism. The 24th Annual Humanities Symposium extends Mister Rogers’s exploration of what it means to be a “neighbor” to our increasingly globalized world where fences, borders, and walls prevail to limit and close off people from each other. If we believe with John Donne that “no man is an island,” then it follows rather naturally that we ask serious questions about our relationships with others: Do we have a responsibility to care for our neighbors? Who are our neighbors? What constitutes a neighborhood? Where is the boundary between myself and my neighbor—and who determines this dividing line? Do “good fences make good neighbors,” as the neighbor in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall” insists?
Join us as we ask these and other questions and discover new ways of being neighbors with one another.
About the Humanities Symposium:
Every fall semester since 2001, the School of Humanities, with the support of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, has organized and presented a week-long series of interdisciplinary talks, panel discussions and activities on a topic which engages with a central aspect of the human experience.
Past symposia have focused on subjects ranging from fairy tales to food, time to technology, Benjamin Franklin to the lunar landing, democracy to otherness, travel to home. In addition to presentations by featured speakers from across the country - including writers, philosophers, social reformers and academics from a wide range of disciplines - presentations and panels by Belmont faculty and students have consistently provided most of the events, involving participants from across the campus. Most events are offered for WELLCore credit. Additional activities coordinated in conjunction with the symposia in years past have included an international film festival, art exhibits, an astronomical viewing, service projects and field trips to local and regional museums. Recordings can be accessed through the Belmont Library Open Commons at the Belmont Digital Repository.
Contact Us
College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
1900 Belmont Boulevard
Nashville, TN 37212
Phone: (615) 460-6437