Center for the Study of Values in Public Life Names Fellows for 2000-01

The Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School has named four fellows for the 2000-01 academic year. They are Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Mary Hunt, Bill McKibben, and Julie Nelson.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, currently a visiting fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, spent three years as a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. After her year at the Divinity School, she will return to South Africa to become director of reconciliation at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. She will use her time at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life to complete her book And the Brokenhearted Shall be Healers, which makes use of political theory and psychology to examine the dynamic of forgiveness.

Mary Hunt is a co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Maryland, and an adjunct member of the faculty of the Women’s Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her publications include the books Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (1991), From Woman-Pain to Woman-Vision: Writings in Feminist Theology (1989), and La sfida del femminismo alla teologia: The Challenge of Feminism to Theology (1980), edited with Rosino Gibellini. She will spend her year at the Center investigating how activism on issues such as same-sex marriage and the open participation of homosexuals and lesbians in the military can reinforce patriarchal structures by forcing activists to embrace social institutions rather than challenge them.

Bill McKibben is a writer and activist who has been a leader in the environmental movement for the past 10 years. His groundbreaking book, The End of Nature (1989), has been published in 19 languages. He is also the author of Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyous Christmas (1998), Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Smaller Families (1998), and The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (1994). His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Christian Century. At the Center, he will investigate how communities of faith can respond to the global-warming crisis and perhaps offer the most effective route into a complex debate that raises the deepest questions of human identity and justice.

Julie Nelson is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Her publications on the relationship between economics and feminism include Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (1993), edited with Marianne A. Ferber. She will spend her year at the Center writing a book on the relationship between questions of knowledge and questions of value, particularly in regard to the issue of “caring labor.” She is interested in improving the quality of intellectual policy debates in economics, and in constructing more ethically adequate economics.

All four fellows will be in residence at the Center for the full academic year, according to David Little, director of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life and Dunphy Professor of the Practice of Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at the Divinity School.