and the environment at URI on Nov. 20
KINGSTON, R.I. — November 9, 2001 — Larry Rasmussen, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, will speak on the role of religion in the environmental movement as part of URI’s fall honors colloquium, “A Just and Sustainable Future: Overcoming Barriers to Action.”
Rasmussen will speak on Tuesday, November 20 at 7 p.m. in Room 271 of URI’s Chafee Social Science Center. His lecture is entitled “How Can a Moral and Religious Imagination Promote Sustainability?” It is free and open to the public.
Yes magazine said of him: “Rasmussen offers a ground plan for the re-creation of our religious traditions so that they might more adequately channel, augment, and empower the deep spiritual energies of those who would see the destinies of humans and the earth more adequately aligned.”
His most recent book is Earth Community, Earth Ethics, which won the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was a book of the month choice for the Catholic Book Club. Other books he authored include Moral Fragments and Moral Community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans, Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life, and Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life.
Rasmussen has been a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for 15 years. Before that, he was professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. and assistant professor of religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is a lay theologian of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. His current work in Christian ethics includes analysis of power, methodological issues in the Bible and ethics, technology and ecology.
He is a co-moderator of the Justice, Peace, and Creation Unit of the World Council of Churches and serves on the Science, Ethics, and Religion Program Advisory Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics and a member of the faculty of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York.
For more information about the many other events of the URI Honors Colloquium, visit www.uri.edu/sustainability, or call the Honors Program at 874-2303. The major sponsors of the colloquium are The Providence Journal and the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities.
For Information: Todd McLeish 874-7892, Jennifer Smith 874-2116