Category: Monthly Gathering

Zoom Presentation: 7pm (EST), Saturday, December 17, 2022

Southeast Michigan Mensa will be presenting a series of Monthly Gathering lectures on Zoom through March 2023. To attend this month’s presentation, you must pre-register at the following link: https://tinyurl.com/SEMM-1222-Gathering . The event’s Zoom URL and instructions will only be sent to those who are pre-registered.

It was an election where:

• Both political parties worked exceedingly hard to mobilize their base, and the election yielded the highest voter turnout in U.S. history.
• Before the votes were even counted, Republicans claimed the election was being stolen. 
• Democrats win the vote and lead in the Electoral College, but Republicans protest, contending their candidate would have won easily with honest voting.
• Claims of fraud included, among other things, that some states reported more votes than eligible voters.
• In several contested states party officials appointed dueling slates of electors and sent conflicting returns to Congress.

Sound familiar? Maybe so, but the year was 1876 and the winner of the election was Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

The 1876 presidential election is the most controversial in American history. A dispute over the results led to a months-long battle that did not conclude until days before the inauguration. Historians have since debated over a potential “bargain” that took place in the final moments that settled the dispute in favor of Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, with assurances that the federal government would end its Reconstruction efforts. Since then, and especially recently, this election has been an important reference point for many politicians and political media personalities who use it to make pronouncements on the current political landscape. Comparisons to the 2020 election are inevitable, and the 1876 election has thus been subjected to both serious, well-considered study, and politically-infused analysis. This talk will explain the events that led up to the election’s conclusion, and provide thoughts on what we know and do not know about this pivotal moment in American electoral history.

Our speaker, Dustin McLochlin, has been the historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums since 2017. Prior to that he worked as the education coordinator at HPLM. His work has been featured in the Presidential Quarterly, Muster of the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Toledo Blade, and the Columbus Dispatch. He also manages a monthly series on “Hayes’ Evolving Views on anti-slavery and Reconstruction.” He received his Ph.D. in the field of Policy History in 2014, and Master of Arts in History in 2008, both from Bowling Green State University. He received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Indiana University Kokomo, in 2005.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), to push protons or ions to near the speed of light, with the help of a ring of superconducting magnets. This ring is a giant circular tunnel built underground. The tunnel is 17 miles (27 kilometers) long, and between 50 and 175 meters below the surface. It lies beneath the border of Switzerland and France.  The LHC is the largest, and one of the most complex machines ever built. 

Join us on Saturday, October 15, when our guest speaker Dr. Claude Pruneau, Wayne State University professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy, will provide us with an overview of research being conducted at the LHC, and the particles being produced and studied in the collisions of heavy ions there. This presentation is geared towards non physicists, so come and learn, without fear of frying your brain.

Dr. Pruneau is a French Canadian native born in Quebec City. He completed his studies at Universite Laval where he earned a Ph.D. in Physics in 1987. He worked as Research Fellow successively for the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and McGill University in Montreal. He joined the Wayne State University Faculty in 1992, where he conducts an active research program in relativistic heavy ion physics and study of the Quark Gluon Plasma at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN in Switzerland. Dr. Pruneau is a member of the American Physical Society, the Canadian Association of Physicists, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Please note that this program will be presented live and on Zoom. The live presentation will take place at:

Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church in Southfield
23925 Northwestern Hwy
Southfield, MI 48075

Doors open at 6:30pm. The program begins at 7:00pm. Admission: $4 for Mensa Members, $5 for non-Mensans. 

Following the presentation, please join us for dinner at Buddy’s Pizza, located at 31646 Northwestern Highway, in Farmington Hills, just northeast of Middlebelt Road.

If you’d prefer to participate on Zoom, you’ll need to pre-register by clicking on the following link: https://tinyurl.com/SEMM-1022-Gathering ,The event’s Zoom URL and instructions for connecting will only be sent to those who are pre-registered. The Zoom room opens at 6:30pm for mingling. There is no charge for the Zoom presentation.

For more than 150 years, academics have questioned how William Shakespeare of Stratford, a man who left school at age thirteen and apparently never traveled abroad, could have written such a broad and deep body of work, one that is said to draw on the largest vocabulary of any writer in the English language.

Our speaker on Saturday, September 17 will be Mark McPherson, who was a featured MENSA guest a few years back. In his address, he will discuss the matter of the oft-debated Shakespearean Authorship Question. In the course of his presentation Mark will cover: Who was “Shakespeare?” And what evidence does or does not exist to affirm him as the author of the plays and poems which have born his name for the last six centuries? These are the burning questions which have intrigued the likes of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and many others. Along just such an inquisitorial line, Mark McPherson has continued his scrutiny of the Bard of Avon. Over the course of years Mr. McPherson has actually “tried” William Shakespeare in absentia in a number of discourses, debates, and in 1984, the production of “The Great Shakespeare Duel,” which aired on PBS. On the heels of convincing a general audience jury of his prosecutorial case, Mr. McPherson was invited to London’s Middle Temple Hall, where a British debate involved him as a member of the Oxfordian Prosecutorial team.

Himself a lover of historical research and mystery, our speaker is also the founder of DAEDALOS, an agency for “consultancy and field investigation,” which over the decades has examined such enigmas as parapsychology, the Loch Ness Monster, the quests for Atlantis and Camelot, the Shroud of Turin, as well as the enduring matter of Shakespeare’s identity and authorial claim upon a host of immortal works.

As an actor, playwright, film-maker and popular lecturer, Mark McPherson brings his own unique style to the stage, even as he has done in his national and international one-character dramas in which he has portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Wyatt Earp, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and C.S. Lewis. He is also the author of two non-fiction volumes, “Looking For Lisette: In Search Of An American Original”, and a memoir, “An Irregular Life: The Adventures and Memories of a Fortunate Sherlockian”.

Bringing a keen sense of curiosity, intellectual method and vibrant humor to his subjects, Mark McPherson admits to applying “the sort of investigative and deductive techniques” to his case-work as two of his idols, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictive creation, Sherlock Holmes. Dubbed” Michigan’s Indiana Jones” by legendary radio host J.P. McCarthy, Mark McPherson’s work has been critically acclaimed on a national as well as international basis. “Poe is fine, but McPherson is superb” wrote America’s literary giant, Ray Bradbury.

For these and other reasons we look forward to what Mark has to say concerning the enigma of Shakespeare, at 7pm on Saturday, September 17.

Please note that this program will be presented live and on Zoom. The live presentation will take place at:

Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church in Southfield
23925 Northwestern Hwy
Southfield, MI 48075

Doors open at 630pm. The program begins at 7pm. Admission: $4 for Mensa Members, $5 for non-Mensans.

Following the presentation, please join us for dinner at Buddy’s Pizza, located at 31646 Northwestern Hwy., in Farmington Hills, Just Northeast of Middlebelt Rd.

If you’d prefer to participate on Zoom, you’ll need to pre-register by clicking on the following link: https://tinyurl.com/SEMM-0922-Gathering ,The event’s Zoom URL and instructions for connecting will only be sent to those who are pre-registered. The Zoom room opens at 6:30pm for mingling. There is no charge for the Zoom presentation.

“Anti-Semitism is a disease.”
-Daniel Barenboim 

Christianity originated as one of multiple Jewish sects found throughout the Roman Empire, and it remained one through much of the 1st century CE. By the end of the first century, especially with the growing influence of Greek sources on the development of the faith, Christianity began to emerge as an independent religion from Judaism and, in the process, Jews and Judaism began to be cast as satanic. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (381 CE), Judaism became a target of Christian hatred, and antisemitism became a fundamental part of Christianity, resulting in untold suffering by the Jewish people and their religion, eventually manifesting itself most horribly in the Holocaust. 

Kenneth W. Phifer holds a BA degree in history from Harvard College and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. A Unitarian Universalist minister for over fifty years, he served the Ann Arbor congregation for 25 years (1980-2005). He is the author of three books and some two dozen articles and has been active in many peace groups and social justice movements. He is a father (5), grandfather (17), and has one great granddaughter. 

Join us on Saturday, June 18, when our speaker, Reverend Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer, will review the origins of Christianity and how antisemitism, often referred to as “the oldest hatred”, came to be a central part of the Christian religion.

Please note that this program will be presented live and on Zoom. The live presentation will take place at:

Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church in Southfield
23925 Northwestern Hwy
Southfield, MI 48075

Doors open at 630pm. The program begins at 7pm. Admission: $4 for Mensa Members, $5 for non-Mensans. 

Following the presentation, please join us for dinner at Buddy’s Pizza, located at 31646 Northwestern Hwy., in Farmington Hills, Just Northeast of Middlebelt Rd.If you’d prefer to participate on Zoom, you’ll need to pre-register by clicking on the following link: https://tinyurl.com/SEMM-0622-Gathering ,The event’s Zoom URL and instructions for connecting will only be sent to those who are pre-registered. The Zoom room opens at 6:30pm for mingling. There is no charge for the Zoom presentation.