Stephen Lewis

If you're hanging around the house tonight, or out driving somewhere, check out CBC Radio's Ideas at 9 pm and listen to the 2005 Massey Lectures with Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, a commissioner of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, and director of the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

This years's lectures are entitled Race Against Time

Stephen Lewis offers compelling insight into the problems that continue to threaten humankind—poverty, hunger, gender and class inequality—and a hopeful glimpse of a solution on the horizon. This is a heartfelt plea, an examination of the depth of these challenges and a recipe for banishing them.

Lewis is passionate, knowledgeable and articulate. If his stories don't break your heart, you better get to the funeral home - you must be dead! You may not agree with everything Lewis says, or all of his suggested solutions. But you will certainly come away with a fuller and better picture of the HIV/AIDS pandemic facing Africa.

The publisher of Race Aginst Time, Anansi House, has an on-line discussion forum.

If you miss it out east, just click on the CBC listening map in a different time zone. The lectures continue all week.

Rick & Kay Warren of saddleback community church and purpose-driven church / life fame have recently had their eyes opened to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and are starting to speak out on this issue - which is wonderful, evangelicals, have for far too long, been silent on these types of issues.