Iona College Faculty to Receive Prestigious Thomas Berry Award

Oct. 25, 2012 - PRLog -- The four conveners of The Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona College will receive the first Thomas Berry Great Work Award at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Environmental Consortium of Colleges and Universities on Saturday October 27, in recognition of their efforts to bring the ecological legacy of the late geologian, Thomas Berry, into the academic life and transformational mission of higher education. The award is named for and honors Thomas Berry, whose vision for the role of the university in a New Cosmology that celebrates the inherent interconnectedness of humans and nature inspired the formation of the Environmental Consortium in 2004.  

The first honorees are the founders of the Thomas Berry Forum at Iona College: Brian Brown, Ph.D., professor of Religious Studies at Iona College; Kevin Cawley, CFC, Ph.D., representative of Edmund Rice International at the United Nations and director of The Berry Forum; Kathleen Deignan, CND, Ph.D., director of the Iona College Spirituality Institute and professor of Religious Studies; and Daniel Martin, Ph.D., Berry Forum dialogue facilitator and founding director of Working with Life.  All the conveners were students or collaborators of Berry’s over several decades, each engaging uniquely with him and the challenging reorientations he proposed for all the major institutions of society. “I can think of no group of people more deserving of this honor and believe it speaks volumes about their dedication to their work and collegiality that they are being nominated as a collective,” said Jeanne Zaino, Ph.D., interim dean of the School of Arts and Science.

This award recognizes faculty members and those engaged in the work and outreach of the university who have advanced higher education’s unique and central role in the environmental future of our region, and the planet, as articulated in Father Berry’s book, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. Toward that end, the four conveners of the Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue have been engaged on a number of fronts: academically, collaborating on the design and offering of a new interdisciplinary and integral environmental studies major at Iona, and in the broader culture served by Iona, offering a space for creative and constructive dialogue on the ecological challenges facing our planet. “Iona College is most proud of the honorees who truly exemplify our mission in action,” said Provost Brian Nickerson.

The conference hosted by Marist College, includes keynote Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker, managing trustee of the Thomas Berry Foundation and co-director, Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, as well as plenaries, lunch social, and multi- and inter-disciplinary poster session featuring faculty and student scholarly and creative work on environmental topics in the region.