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 Ziad Munson, assistant professor of sociology, and head of the newly created Social Science Data Center in the department of sociology and anthropology
 John Pettegrew, associate professor of history and director of the American Studies program in the department of history |
Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University
Web Site: http://www.princeton.edu/~stout/
stout_hmp.htm
Title of Presentation: Mending the Fire: Reflections on Democracy in America
Jeffrey Stout professor of religion at Princeton University, is currently president of the American Academy of Religion. His first book, in 1981, "The Flight from Authority," concerns the nature of knowledge, the rationality of religious belief and the relationship between religion and morality. His second and third books, "Ethics after Babel"(1988) and "Democracy and Tradition" (2004), both won the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence. These are both studies of philosophical, political and ethical problems associated with living in a society where people hold many different views about how to live and the nature and existence of God.
Stout's articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Journal of Religion, Religious Studies Review, New Literary History, The Monist, and Dissent. He formerly co-edited the Cambridge University Press Series on Religion and Critical Thought. Stout serves as contributing editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics.
Stout was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1950. As a teenager, he became involved in the civil rights movement and in anti-war activism. He led a student strike at Brown University in 1970, and served as class orator at the Brown commencement in 1972.
Stout earned his doctorate in religion from Princeton and joined the faculty there in 1975. He served as chair of the department of religion from 1992-1999, and is also associated with the department of philosophy, the department of politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Center for the Study of Religion.
His courses include "Religion in Modern Thought and Film," "Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Ethics," "Philosophy and the Study of Religion" and "Social Criticism."
Stout served as the director of coaching for the Princeton Soccer Association for seven years and as assistant coach of men's soccer at Princeton University for two years.
Stout's wife, Sally, is a nurse specializing in cardiac rehabilitation. He has three children: a daughter about to finish medical school and two sons, who focus mainly on visual art.
Ziad Munson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on social movements, political violence, the sociology of the religion, and the sociology of the Middle East. He is the author of Becoming an Activist, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. His book challenges the conventional wisdom that commitment to a cause is a prerequisite to getting involved in a social movement. He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., civic engagement and associationalism, and the role of civil society in wartime. Some of his recent work appears in Taking Faith Seriously (2005), edited by Mary Jo Bane, Brent Coffin, and Richard Higgins, and Everyday Religion (2007), edited by Nancy Ammerman. His current research projects focus on the relationship between individual beliefs and social movement activity, and include a study of homeschooling families in Pennsylvania, the role of scientific knowledge in movement organizing, public attitudes toward electronic voting, and the organizational infrastructure of international political violence and terrorism. He helped found and currently directs the Social Science Data Center at Lehigh. Munson lives in Allentown PA with his wife and two children.
John Pettegrew is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. thought and culture. In studies ranging from pragmatist philosophy to Music Television, Pettegrew's scholarship examines the institutional generation of knowledge, sensibility, meaning, and belief; his work then analyzes individual and group decision making within these historical structures and contexts, measuring thought and other behavior against ideals of human equality and social justice. His publications include Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890 -1920 (2007); A Pragmatist's Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History (2000), edited, chapter, and introduction by Pettegrew; and, co-edited with Dawn Keetley, the three-volume documentary history of American feminism, Public Women, Public Words (1996-99). Current research projects include the study of pragmatism, war, and peace in twentieth-century American social thought. Born and raised in northeastern Wisconsin, Pettegrew earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. Since coming to Lehigh his undergraduate teaching has included courses on intellectual history, legal history, historical knowledge and documentary film, the Vietnam War era, cultural history, post-1939 U.S. history, American tourism, and war in American film, literature, and culture. He has directed completed Ph.D. dissertations on James Madison and the Enlightenment, Margaret Sanger and the free-sex movement, and the post-1960s natural foods movement. In 1998 he co-produced with Lehigh undergraduate students the documentary film aired on the History Channel Work in Progress: Bethlehem Steel during World War II (1998). Pettegrew has directed the American Studies Program since 1998. He enjoys spending a great deal of time with his two children, Helen, 4, and Nick, 8.