Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.

Coit D. Blacker is director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He also serves as co-chair for Stanford University's International Initiative. Professor Blacker is the author or editor of seven books and monographs, including Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy, 1985-91 (1993); Reluctant Warriors: The United States, the Soviet Union and Arms Control (1987); and, with Gloria Duffy, International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (1984). During the first Clinton administration, Professor Blacker served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council. Professor Blacker is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., Ph.D.).

Amir Eshel is chair and associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, and director of the European Forum at FSI. His research focuses on German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is currently working on a book about the poetic figuration of historical narratives, and he is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban space in Berlin. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry and the contemporary German novel. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of German studies, he taught at the Universitaet Hamburg (Germany). He is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association of Jewish studies, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2002 he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching, from Stanford University's dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature, both from the Universitat Hamburg. He speaks Hebrew, German and English, and has a good knowledge of Yiddish and French.

Robert Gregg is the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor in Religious Studies (Emeritus), and serves as Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. His scholarship includes a book on philosophies concerning death and grieving in ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian communities; two volumes concerning struggles over orthodoxy and heresy in 4th century Christianity that are focused on the "arch-heretic" Arius and reactions to his teachings; a translation of Athanasius' Greek Life of Saint Antony - the famous account of his activities as one of the first desert monks; and a study of 250 Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Latin inscriptions from the Golan that allow glimpses of interactions between Jews, "pagans," and Christians in the Golan Heights and Syria, 1st-7th centuries CE. Professor Gregg's current research treats several "sacred stories" which appear both in the Bible and in the Qur'an-and examines interpretations of these scripture narratives by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers and graphic artists in each of the religions' early centuries.

Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair of English at Stanford University, where she recently completed a term as Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and Chair of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. Her publications include essays on feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (University of California Press, 2002) and coeditor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave in 2006.) For the past five years, she has been actively involved as a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society. For more information, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu.

Raena D. Saddler grew up in St. Louis and attended high school at Colorado Academy in Denver. She is currently a Junior double-majoring in Religious Studies (with a focus on Christianity) and Psychology on the "Health and Development" specialization track (focusing both on adolescent development and clinical psychology). She is also minoring in International Relations with a focus on aid to lesser developed countries--Africa in particular. Raena is planning to spend next fall semester in Rome and come back to work on an honors paper for Religious Studies. She enjoys traveling abroad, and spends a few weeks every summer doing aid-work in Mozambique, Africa. Since coming to Stanford, Raena has been volunteering for three years at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) working with junior high and high school girls as a youth leader and small group leader. In addition to that, she is the head coach for the Menlo-Atherton High School JV women's lacrosse team. Outside of coaching she loves to be around kids and babysits for several families in the area. When she isn't going to class, babysitting, or coaching, she spends the rest of her time with her closest friends and boyfriend of two years.She is very passionate about youth leadership and social justice, and hopes to work for an international aid organization in the future.

Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.

The Brazilian government is declaring victory in its decades-long struggle to become self-sufficient in the supply of oil. The milestone is cause for celebration in a country that has long paid a high price for imported energy.

It will also reverberate here in the United States where policy-makers, too, are trying to wean the nation from costly imports, jittery markets and the foreign spigot. But we must learn the right lessons. Brazil's success came not from treating oil as an addiction but by producing even more of the stuff and by becoming even more dependent on world markets

Here in the United States, most attention to Brazil's fuel supply has focused on the country's aggressive program to replace oil with ethanol that is made by fermenting homegrown sugar. American newspapers are filled with stories about Brazil's famous "flex fuel" vehicles that make it easy to switch between ethanol and conventional gasoline.

Guided partly by Brazil's apparent success, American policy-makers are crafting new mandates for ethanol, and flex fuel vehicles are now taking shape. We have the impression that ethanol is king.

In reality, ethanol is a minor player in Brazilian energy supply. It accounts for less than one-tenth of all the country's energy liquids.

The real source of Brazil's self-sufficiency is the country's extraordinary success in producing more oil. After the 1970s oil shocks, when Brazil's fuel import bill soared, the government pushed Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, to look asunder for new energy sources.

Petrobras delivered, especially at home, where the firm pioneered the technologies that make it possible to extract oil locked in sediments under the seabed in extremely deep water. In the middle 1970s Brazil struggled to produce just 180,000 barrels of oil per day while importing four times that amount. Today it produces about 2 million and is self-sufficient. Indeed, the current milestone of self-sufficiency arrives with the inauguration of Brazil's newest deep water platform, the "P50." When P50 reaches its full output later this year, that one platform will deliver more liquid to Brazil than the country's entire ethanol program.

Brazil's self-sufficiency offers three lessons for U.S. energy policy:

-First is that ethanol, with current technology, will do little to sever our dependence on imported energy. Today's approach involves growing a crop - sugar in Brazil, corn in the United States - and then fermenting the fruits to yield fuel. Sugar plants in Brazil's climate are a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to biomass than is corn in the Midwest, but U.S. policy nonetheless favors corn (and imposes tariffs on imported sugar) because the program is really a scheme to deliver heartland votes rather than a commercially viable fuel.

Yet, even with Brazil's favorable climate and sugar's inviting biology, ethanol is already reaching the limit. That's because the land and other resources devoted to ethanol can be put to other uses such as growing food and cash crops.

Indeed, today the Brazilian government is actually reducing the share of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline because sugar growers prefer to make even more money by selling their product as sugar on the world market rather than fermenting it into alcohol.

New technologies - notably "cellulosic biomass"- could breathe fresh life into ethanol and replace still more oil. Cellulosic biomass is intriguing because it cuts costs by allowing the entire plant - the cellulose in the stalks, as well as the prized grain or sugar - to be fermented into fuel.

Advocates for this technology, including President Bush in his State of the Union address, have wrongly confused the sexy promise of this new-fangled approach to making ethanol with the practical realities of fuel markets. Schemes to produce cellulosic biomass, today, work only under special circumstances and nobody has delivered the fuel at the industrial scale that would be required for the technology to become commercially viable.

-Second, we should learn that, for now, the greatest force to loosen the world's oil markets lies with oil itself. We can use oil more efficiently, as would occur with a gasoline tax or wise fuel economy standards. But we can also find ways to produce more of the stuff - as Brazil did with Petrobras.

The problem for U.S. policy-makers is that the richest veins for new production lie mainly outside the United States and beyond our direct control.

Indeed, the Brazilian government made Petrobras more efficient by putting the firm partly beyond its control as well. When the government sold part of the company on international stock exchanges, it accepted Western accounting procedures and other strictures that have given Petrobras the autonomy and accountability to its shareholders that, in turn, helped make it an efficient company.

We have a stake in seeing other countries do the same - from Algeria to Mexico to Iran and even Russia. But we must remember that Brazil did this on its own, in response to internal pressures for reform, with little leverage from foreign governments.

-Third, we should learn from Brazil not to confuse the goal of greater self-sufficiency with the illusion of independence. Even as Brazil has become self-sufficient it has also, ironically, become more dependent on world markets. That's because the Brazilian government has wisely relaxed price controls so that the prices of fuels within the country are set to the world market. Thus Brazilians see real world prices when they fill up at the pump, and the decisions about which cars to buy and how much to drive reflect real costs and benefits of the fuel they consume. That is why, even as the country becomes self-sufficient, Brazilians are working ever harder to be more frugal with oil - because the price at the pump is high and rising.

Dependence on oil is a liability that must be managed. But it is not an addiction.

Efficiency, sober policies toward modest alternatives such as ethanol, and more production - all tools of the manager, not the addict - are required. Brazil helps show the way, but only if we learn the right lessons.

A recent report from Duke University that critiques the supposed gap between the number of American science and engineering (S&E) graduates and those of merging economies -- especially China's -- has led to false reassurance that the U.S. lead in science and technology is not under threat from China. It would be a grave mistake to drop our concerns about China's competitive challenge.

First, the Duke report simply claimed that China's true number of science and engineering bachelor degrees was 351,000, rather than the widely reported 600,000. Coupling this with an upward adjustment for American graduates still left China producing 214,000 more such degrees than the United States.

Moreover, undergraduates are only part of the concern. China's production of those with doctorates has increased rapidly. By 2003, China's homegrown science and engineering doctorates numbered almost half of the U.S. total.

Chinese were also earning large numbers of doctorates abroad. In 2001, the number of Chinese S&E doctorates earned in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States equaled 72 percent of the total of S&E doctorates earned by American citizens and permanent residents.

Since 1975, China has increased its global share of S&E doctorates from zero (courtesy of the Cultural Revolution) to 11 percent, not counting doctorates earned overseas. During the same three decades, the U.S. global share has fallen from half to roughly 22 percent.

More worrisome than the aggregate numbers is American universities' reliance on foreigners who earn doctorates. In engineering, foreigners account for over half of America's doctorates, and in computer science just under half.

If foreign-born holders of doctorates continued to stay in the United States, we wouldn't have to worry. Unfortunately, there are many signs that it is becoming much harder to retain them.

One need only look at the flow from Taiwan, one of the former main sources of American S&E doctoral degrees, to see what could happen. Up until 1994, Taiwanese earned more science and engineering doctorates in the United States than members of any other foreign nationality. By 2000, their numbers had plummeted because economic and educational opportunities at home were more appealing.

The Taiwanese didn't just stop coming to America. They also began to leave. As Taiwan's tech sector boomed in the 1990s, huge numbers of Taiwanese technologists (estimates range as high as 100,000) left America for home and took their technical skills with them.

Our two current biggest foreign sources of technologists, China and India, appear to be following Taiwan's path. China has begun to lure back large numbers of technologists. China's central and local governments offer free office space and other benefits to attract technologists home. These inducements are working. A 2005 survey of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professionals Association's members showed that the vast majority regard China as the most likely future work destination, and they rated Shanghai higher than even Silicon Valley on career potential. India's recruitment efforts have also started to bear fruit.

The challenge is not simply keeping up the numbers of technologists in America. China by many measures has improved its technological capabilities. On the Georgia Institute of Technology's Index of Technological Capability, China has more than doubled its index score over the past decade. China now ranks fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany.

This rapid ascent is not surprising given China's increasing investments. China's research and development spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has tripled to 1.3 percent in the last decade, even while its GDP has ballooned. Few emerging economies spend even 1 percent of their GDP on research.

U.S. patents invented in China are also on the rise. Information-technology patents from corporations' Chinese technologists have risen from 134 in 1997-2001 to 482 during 2002-04. As a first step to meet this challenge, we should increase federal spending on basic and exploratory research. Our R&D spending has been flat at 2.6 percent of GDP for four decades, but the share of federal spending has declined from two-thirds to one-quarter.

Given that corporations now de-emphasize basic scientific research, the federal government should further support the basic research that could maintain our lead at the cutting edge of technology.

Increased federal funding would also address the issue of the falling share of investment in certain disciplines. With spending flat, the rising share commanded by biomedicine has meant a falling share spent on engineering and physics.

Federal support may also play a direct role in increasing interest in pursuing a science education. Since the 1950s, the number of undergraduate S&E majors in America has risen and fallen in line with federal research funding, as Professor Henry Rowen of Stanford University has pointed out.

Before meeting China's challenge, we first must recognize it. Complacency in reaction to "good'' news that China is producing fewer S&E graduates than commonly thought is not the answer.