Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa to speak at forum in Silliman
Dr. Maria A. Ressa, 2021 Nobel laureate, will be the featured speaker at a liturgical service and forum at Silliman University Audio Visual Theater, 1:00-4:00 p.m. on August 24, 2023. The award-winning CEO and president of Rappler will talk about “Pressing Issues on Press Freedom” in one of the events in Silliman University’s month-long celebration of its 122nd Founders Day.
Ressa is a Filipino and American journalist who started out working for ABS-CBN and the government television channel PTV-4. In the last two decades, she has gained renown for her work as lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN and ABS-CBN, and then for co-founding the news website Rappler in 2012. Besides writing investigative reports for these media organizations, she has published her findings in books such as “Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia” (2013); “From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism” (2013); “A Thousand Cuts” (2020); “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future.” She has become an international symbol of the fight for freedom of the press in hostile circumstances and was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize together with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.
The August 24 liturgical symposium is organized by The Wednesday Forum, together with the Philippine Ecumenical Peace Platform and the Colleges of Mass Communication and Divinity School of Silliman University. It also features a Biblico-theological Reflection by Dean Van Cliburn Tibus of the SU Divinity School. The forum will be followed by a launch of Ressa’s latest book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future.”
