Money Url, a financial solutions company based mostly in New York Metropolis, arranged a webinar on Tuesday highlighting the importance of Greek lifestyle and schooling amongst the Greek-American diaspora.
The streamed webinar commemorated the occasion of the institution of the Miltiadis Marinakis Endowed Professorship for Modern day Greek Language and Culture at the Ohio State University.
The event also marked the appointment of the Endowment’s to start with Professor, Yiorgos Anagnostou.
Hard work to preserve and unfold the Greek language and culture in perpetuity
Speakers for the event provided His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of The us the Ambassador of Greece to the United States, Alexandra Papadopoulou, and Capital Link President Nicolas Bornozis, the chairman of the Money Maritime & Buying and selling Corporation.
The system incorporated panelists this kind of as John P. Calamos, Sr., the founder, chairman and worldwide CIO of Calamos Investments and the Chairman of the Countrywide Hellenic Museum.
As host Nicholas Bornozis, the CEO of Funds Connection, said at the outset, the support provided to such schooling by the Marinakis household “ensures the viability and continuity and perpetuity for this academic chair and it boosts substantially the work to maintain and spread the Greek language and culture for the reward of Greek-American culture and American modern society at large.”
“The need to have to protect our cultural heritage has develop into even extra crucial and at the very same time it offers important and new issues. It is extremely essential to share the richness and knowledge of the Greek culture and with the broader American culture and with the globe.”
Having class in philosophy opened up new globe to founder of Calamos Investments
John Calamos, the CEO of Chicago-primarily based Calamos Investments, recalled his own schooling as he went to college or university to analyze architecture and finance when he “ended up having a class in Philosophy — and that definitely influenced me.
“In actuality, I finished up getting several, quite a few courses in philosophy,” he recalled, “and that launched me a lot more to Greek philosophy and that truly inspired me.”
In reality, Calamos came to graduate with a diploma in that willpower and came again to endow a chair at Illinois Tech in Philosophy.
“It was that critical,” he remembers. “And what I inform the learners there is that, in Greek philosophy what is essential is not learning what to consider, but how to feel. Which is what we require to educate.
As section of his role as the Chairman of the Nationwide Hellenic Museum, Calamos claims “I am encouraged (to discover) how do we instruct the subsequent generation about this? This is what is so crucial.
“I desired to be in a position to do that for the following technology heading ahead. That is why I am associated with the Nationwide Hellenic Museum and in lots of other companies.
National Hellenic Museum promotes education, culture to a new era
“The mission is to assistance perpetuate Hellenism and Orthodoxy by advertising training and society that emphasizes the terrific immigrant experience” as properly, Calamos states.
“One of the points that we test to do in the Museum is to show how the Greek Us residents have lived the American aspiration. What inspired them to live the American desire? One particular of the issues that we have completed to perpetuate this is institute the oral background method.”
Each calendar year, he additional, the Museum retains recreations of good Trials which once took location in Historic Greece — with Plato and other historic figures defending by themselves ahead of a panel of professionals in the fields of law.
At these functions, Calamos claims, there are as numerous as 500 folks in the audience — and several of them are not Greek but learners of philosophy and law, bringing Greek lifestyle to American modern society at massive.
One of the other missions of the Museum, he included, is “bringing the future generation in” to be enthusiastic to research and respect Greek historical past and culture. “We train Greek school, pursue the oral background project, we have lectures and artifacts that we present,” he pointed out.
As Calamos discussed, “It’s not just training them Greek. It’s motivating them for their long run this what happened to me and I consider that is extremely significant, and what we have to do going ahead.”
“We have been the western world’s lecturers for millennia”
Archbishop of the Americas Elpidophoros, the head of all Greek Orthodox in the Americas, tackled the viewers by declaring “Cultural and educational development are quintessential qualities of the two Greeks and Greek-People in america.
“We have been the Western world’s teachers for millennia. Whether Socrates or Aeschylus, Euripedes, Hippocrates or Sophocles, just about every factor of human endeavor has been pioneered by the Greeks.
“Therefore, we should really proudly rejoice the ongoing motivation of Greeks, both in the motherland and in the diaspora, to the advertising and development of our values — cultural, linguistic, ethical — and in fact, non secular.
“These religious values of Greece are the bridge between the exceptional aspirations of the Greek philosophical brain and the preaching of the gospel of our Lord — which initial ended up recorded in the Greek language. We cannot independent Greek lifestyle from the Greek language.
“Our grateful celebration of the Miltiadis Marinakis chair is more than a nearby bring about for pleasure in the Ohio Condition College group. It is a lead to for rejoicing across the diaspora, as it bears witness to the dedication of our “λαοσ” — our people — to the hardly ever-ending pursuit of truth of the matter, which is the pretty mother nature of the Greek soul.”
Marinakis chair endowed on March 25, 2021 – Greek bicentennial day
Capital Link officials mentioned that academic departments in the humanities have been dwindling in the past decades worldwide, as portion of a wider shift of interest from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
This change, they say, is more practically oriented, but can endanger awareness of cultural diversity, language, and tradition equally for individuals and societies.
The Ohio Hellenic Paideia (OHP), in Columbus, Ohio, with Evangelos Marinakis in the lead, initiated and accomplished a new round of fundraising amongst 2015-2020, in get to safeguard the continuing operation of the Modern day Greek Studies System at the Ohio State College in Columbus.
The chair of the program has been named immediately after Marinakis’ late father, Miltiadis Marinakis, a properly-highly regarded philanthropist, who instilled in him a sense of duty toward his fellow gentleman and pleasure in his Greek heritage.
The Miltiadis Marinakis Endowed Professorship for Contemporary Greek Language and Tradition was set up by the Board of Trustees of the Ohio State University (OSU) on March 25, 2020 — the bicentennial of the beginning of the Greek War of Independence.