Midcoast Senior College
SUMMER WISDOM 2026

Sponsored by Thornton Oaks Retirement Community

May 5,12,19, and 26 2026

Tuesdays at 1:00 p.m.
Brunswick United Methodist Church, 320 Church Rd, Brunswick, ME 04011

All events are in-person. Seating is limited; reservations are not accepted. Doors open at 12:30 p.m.. Please call 725-4900 or email: mscoffice@midcoastseniorcollege.org with any questions.

May 5: Foreign Policy (FARO) — Or, “Larry’s Laws of Unintended Consequences in International Interventions” with Ambassador Larry Butler

The talk will deal with international conflict management, using the speaker’s personal experience and citing case examples from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and now Venezuela. Intervention from the United States led to perversely unexpected outcomes, such as boatloads of refugees from those countries coming to our shores, massive expenditure of human and financial resources, and loss of American influence overseas. Ambassador Larry Butler spent 40 years in diplomatic service, working in twelve countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Finland, Iraq, Kosova and Serbia. Prior to serving as President Clinton’s National Security Council staff lead on securing the Northern Irish peace accord in 1995, he was the lead at the American Embassy in Belgrade (then in Yugoslavia) supporting Richard Holbrooke’s achievement of the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia.

May 12: Mary Heuston: A Black Freedom Story in Bath-Brunswick Maine 1850 with Dr. Eben Miller

Dr. Eben Miller is the author of Born along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and The Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press,2012). We are excited to have Dr. Miller share his current research on the self-emancipation of Mary Heuston in 1850s Bath-Brunswick and questions of Black freedom and oppression as part of the mid-19^th century Atlantic maritime industry.

May 19: All Stories Lead Back to Lewiston: Personal Narrative Through Storytelling with Cheryl Hamilton

Cheryl Hamilton is an award-winning story-telling expert and founding Executive Director of Steller Story Company, which she founded after directing programs for local, national and international non-profits that focused on employment, education and migration. She has coached more than 1,500 people from 80 countries. For Cheryl, her storytelling work has deep local roots and we are fortunate that she will share with us the impact on her professional storytelling work of living and working in Lewiston in 2001 during the beginning of Somali migration.

May 26: The New, New Imperial Presidency with Dr. Andrew Rudalevige

Recent presidencies—and perhaps especially Donald Trump’s second term in office—have been marked by unilateral commands and dramatic confrontations. On issues ranging from immigration and trade, from budgeting to the war powers, presidents have made aggressive claims to expansive executive authority. In the 1970s, Congress responded to Vietnam and Watergate by constructing elaborate legislative checks on the presidency, only to see those constraints crumble over time. What implications for present and future governance lie in the post-Watergate efforts to reboot the “imperial Presidency”? Will we see a renewed effort to rein in executive authority, or the permanent expansion of presidential power? Dr. Andrew Rudalevige has been the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College since 2012, and a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and at University College London’s Centre on U.S. Politics. He studies American political institutions, with an emphasis on the modern presidency, and is the former chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section. His books include By Executive Order, Managing the President’s Program, and The New Imperial Presidency.