LITHIA SPRINGS – Jerry Levin, CNN Middle East Bureau correspondent from 1981 to 1988, will lecture at 6 p.m., Jan. 30, at Mercer University’s Douglas County Center, 975 Blairs Bridge Road.
The lecture, titled “Palestine, Israel, Bush and Bin Laden and the Dysfunctional Family of Abraham,”is sponsored by the Department of Humanities in Mercer’s Tift College of Education. The event is free and open to the public.
Levin spent most of the month of August 2001 in the Holy Land, where he was a member of the CPT Christian Peacemaker Team, which has been operating in the West Bank since 1995. He had been Cable New Network’s (CNN) Middle East Bureau chief for only 11 weeks when he suddenly had the opportunity to gain a perilous first hand perspective of Lebanon’s bitter civil war, which he had been sent to cover.
As he walked to work on the morning of March 7, 1984, he was kidnapped at gunpoint from a Beirut sidewalk.
Prior to his assignment in the Middle East Bureau, Levin was Washington Bureau Chief for CNN. From 1991 to 1994 he was Director of News and Information Services for World Vision, the Christian relief and development agency.
Levin was a founding member of the Journalists’ Committee to Free Terry Anderson; and as a result of what he calls his “little adventure,” was made an honorary life member of the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the Foreign Press Association.
Founded in 1833 in Penfield, Ga., Mercer is the only independent university of its size in the country to offer programs in liberal arts, business, engineering, education, medicine, pharmacy, law, theology and nursing. With more than 7,300 students and 400 faculty members on campuses in Macon and Atlanta and four off campus centers in Douglas County, Covington, Griffin and Eastman, Mercer is one of the largest Baptist-affiliated institutions in the world.
Led by President R. Kirby Godsey, Mercer has been ranked among the leading colleges and universities in the South by U.S. News & World Report for 12 consecutive years.
