Westminster Town Hall Forum

As a follow-up to our Fall Season: "Ethics, Conscience, and the New Public Square," listen in to the conversation between AMPERS CEO Joel Glaser and our Executive Director Sara Wilhelm Garbers as they discuss community radio and public media in our time.

In this special episode of the Forum podcast, we talk with Paul Neimann, one of the originators of the Forum. He and his wife Diane moved to Minneapolis in the 1970s and believed their new home deserved a great speaker series. That idea became the nationally renowned Westminster Town Hall Forum. Diane passed away in 2019. But Forum director Tane Danger sat down with Paul to learn more about the or...

Dr. Keyu Jin speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis. Born in China and educated in the U.S., she is a world-renowned economist at the London School of Economics. Her most recent book is "The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism." In it and in this talk, she explains how China became the most successful economic story of our time as it has shifted from primarily s...

Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher in conversation with Tane Danger at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis. Swisher's newest work is "Burn Book; a Tech Love Story." It’s part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech’s power players and influence. In it she shares how tech came to be at the center of global commerce and power, and the risks that poses to...

Award-winning journalist Michele Norris speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis. She spoke about her best-selling book, "Our Hidden Conversation; What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity." For more than a decade, Norris asked people around the world to send in their stories. The prompt was simple: "Race. Your Story. Six Words. Please Send." She and the Race Card Team...

Transgender rights activist and author Raquel Willis speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Raquel Willis is an award-winning activist, author, and media strategist dedicated to Black transgender liberation. She is the co-founder of The Transgender Week of Visibility and Action. She spoke at the Forum about her work and her memoir, "The Risk it Takes to Bloom; On Life and Liberation." This t...

Nancy Giles speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis on November 9, 2023. Giles is a comedian, actress, and social commentator. Since 2002 she has been a regular contributor to the Peabody Award-winning program CBS News Sunday Morning. In that time, she has earned five Emmy Awards for her unique blend of common-sense wisdom, laugh-out-loud humor, commentary, and interviews. She’s...

Author and NPR host Steve Inskeep speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum. Inskeep's latest book is "Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America." It shares Lincoln’s lessons for bridging intense political divisions. He spoke at the Forum about what we can learn from Lincoln to help navigate our own divisive politics. Steve Inskeep is a cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition, the most...

Senior correspondent for APM Reports Emily Hanford speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum. For more than a generation, schools across the U.S. embraced a specific methodology of teaching kids to read. The problem? Cognitive scientists had proven decades before it didn’t actually work. In her award-winning podcast "Sold a Story," Emily Hanford investigated the influential authors who promoted...

Samuel G. Freedman, author of "Into the Bright Sunshine: A Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights." He spoke with Forum director Tane Danger at a special Westminster Town Hall Forum recorded at the Minnesota State Fair. They discussed the former Vice President's upbringing in South Dakota, what Minneapolis was like in the early 1900s, and why Humphrey's speech at the 1948 Democratic...

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch speaking on life as a diplomat, the Russian war in Ukraine, and the political smear campaign against her by then-President Trump and his allies. She is the author of the best-selling memoir, "Lessons from the Edge." Yovanovitch served for more than 30 years in the US State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents. She did tours in...

Dr. Cornel West and Ms. Ifeoma Ike Esq. speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum's 2023 Arc Toward Justice program. Moderated by Angela Davis of Minnesota Public Radio News. The Arc Toward Justice series invites national racial justice leaders to reflect on a another year George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis and the international uprising that followed. We ask them to discuss where we have come...

Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, M.D. speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum on May 2, 2023. She is a women's mental health specialist, a board-certified physician psychiatrist, and a Clinical Assistant Professor at George Washington University. She is the author of "Real Self-Care: Crystals, Cleanses and Bubble Baths Not Included." In it, she argues women are largely targeted by a wellness industry desig...

Veteran and author Elliot Ackerman speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He spoke on his most recent book, "The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan." Elliot Ackerman is a writer, journalist, former White House Fellow, and decorated veteran. He served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and th...

Ari Shapiro's talk at the Westminster Town Hall Forum, March 28 2023. He is the award-winning co-host of National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and the author of the new memoir "The Best Strangers in the World; Stories from a Life Spent Listening." Learn more at the Westminster Town Hall Forum website, www. WestminsterForum.org

Parker Palmer is a writer, teacher, activist, and founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal, a nonprofit organization committed to creating a more just and compassionate world by nurturing personal and professional integrity. His bestselling books include, among others, A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, Healing the Heart of Democracy, and On the Brink of Everything....

André Thomas is Professor of Choral Music Education, Director of Choral Activities, and the Owen F. Sellers Professor of Music at Florida State University. He is the conductor of a variety of choral organizations throughout the country and served as the artistic director for the Tallahassee Community Chorus. He is in demand as a choral adjudicator and clinician and has conducted 48 Honor and All-S...

Jim Sciutto is CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of the weekday program CNN Newsroom. He reports and provides analysis on all aspects of U.S. national security, including the military, foreign policy, the intelligence community, and the ongoing Russia investigation. An award-winning journalist, he has received the Headliner Award for the documentary Targeting Terror: Inside...

Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago where her teaching and research focus on militarization, violence, racism, and identity in 20th-century America. Her recent book, Bring the War Home, explores white power activism from its roots in the Vietnam War to its collaboration with neo-Naxi, Ku Klux Klan, skinhead, and militia movements. She has been featured on...

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and bestselling author of fourteen books on religion and spirituality, including Leaving Church, An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark, named one of the best religion books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly. She has served on the faculties of Piedmont College, Columbia Theological Seminary, Candler School of Theology at Emory Unive...

Jonathan Capehart is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and member of The Washington Post editorial board, focusing on politics, social issues, and cultural shifts nationally and globally. He is a regular contributor to the blog PostPartisan and hosts the podcast Cape Up. He is a periodic commentator on MSNBC and a moderator at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Center for American Progress, the Atlan...

David Hogg is a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. He is among twenty Parkland students who founded Never Again MSD, a gun control advocacy group, and he is a founding member of March for Our Lives, one of the largest youth-led movements in the world. An advocate for ending gun violence in America, he has traveled the country calling fo...

Art Cullen is editor and co-owner of The Storm Lake Times, a flourishing, family-owned, twice-weekly newspaper founded in 1990 in Northwest Iowa. In 2017, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a series of columns indicting corporate agri-business for polluting the rivers and lakes in the most-intensively farmed land in the world. His recently published book, Storm Lake, chron...

Michael Beschloss is an award-winning author of nine books on presidential history. He is the presidential historian for NBC News and a contributor to PBS NewsHour. A graduate of Williams College and Harvard Business School, he has served as a historian for the Smithsonian Institution, as a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and as a Senior Fellow of the Annenberg Foundation....

Mona Hanna-Attisha is an associate professor of pediatrics at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and a pediatrician at Hurley Children’s Hospital in Flint, Michigan. She has been acclaimed internationally for her research that exposed elevated levels of lead in the blood of the children of Flint. She directs the Michigan State University and Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Pu...