Executive Committee
RENOWNED CHRISTIAN ETHICIST to Receive International Baptist Human Rights Award
Glen Stassen is the recipient of the 2013 Baptist World Alliance® Denton and Janice Lotz Human Rights Award. He is being recognized for his prominent lifelong role as a theologian, ethicist, author, advisor and peacemaking activist, which has informed, inspired and infl uenced Christians of various traditions including Baptists for more than 40 years in their pursuit of just peace. The award will be presented during the BWA General Council
in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in July. A renowned Christian ethicist and recognized as one of century “Shapers of Baptist Social Ethics” (Mercer
the 20th
University Press, 2008), Stassen has, for more than 50 years, engaged religious communities, civil society and governments in numerous public discussions on human rights, justice and peacemaking issues, ranging from nuclear nonproliferation to the opposition of wars. He has worked with these organizations to resolve confl icts in multiple places in the world. He is credited with proposing a new globally recognized
theory of just peacemaking rooted in human dignity and human rights in dealing with matters of war and confl ict. He has done much to highlight the Baptist contribution to the Christian origins of the contemporary conceptualizations of human rights. The BWA General Council, meeting in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia in July 2011, passed a resolution recognizing the Just Peacemaking theory as a basic platform for addressing issues of human rights abuses, injustice and violence. Academics, political theorists and Christian groups throughout the world have used Stassen as an advisor on issues of reconciliation and peacemaking. Stassen’s intellectual contributions to the fi eld of human
rights and just peace studies are inseparably tied to his personal engagement with issues of human rights, religious freedom and just peacemaking over several decades. He has worked in or helped to found several organizations for peacemaking, worked behind the scenes to negotiate the removal of the short and middle range nuclear weapons from Europe, has testifi ed at capital punishment cases and developed a strategy for defense attorneys in capital cases, founded and worked on advocacy of human rights for the mentally disabled and assisted nonviolent human rights and peace movements in East Germany (Stassen was present when the Wall came down), Kazakhstan, Myanmar, South Korea, Central America, Eastern Europe, and Southern Africa, among others. Stassen’s ethical stand has had an impact on the research and
public activity of many of the hundreds of graduate students from various countries that have completed their degrees under his supervision. Some of the most visible effects of Stassen’s teaching are found in his PhD graduates. For instance, he is currently mentoring a Christian student in the Philippines who is writing a theological condemnation of his country’s discrimination against the Muslim Moro people in Mindanao. A recent graduate of Stassen’s returned to his native Indonesia and is already recognized for his peacemaking and pursuit of justice there. Another recent graduate wrote a dissertation on how to
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minimize hate speech in Latvia and thereby promote peace between native Latvians and Russians. He is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at
Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, in the United States. His books include Journey into Peacemaking, released in 1982; Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace, published in 1992; Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, which came out in 1998 and for which he served as editor; Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future, which he edited along with Lawrence Wittner, released in 2007; and an edited work, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War, published in 2008. Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context,
which he co-authored with David Gushee, was awarded Best Book of the Year in the Theology/Ethics category by Christianity Today magazine in 2004. A former president of the National Association of Baptist
Professors of Religion, he is a member of the BWA Commission on Peace and president of the Council of the Societies for the Study of Religion. He has held a number of positions in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), including chair of the Religion and Political Science subsection and the Religious Social Ethics Group. He also co-chaired the Biblical/ Contextual Ethics Group and Religion and the Social Sciences Section of the AAR. Stassen served as the president of the Pacifi c
Coast Section of the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) and represented the SCE on the Council on the Study of Religion. He co-chaired the Strategy Committee of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the 1980s. For almost 20 years, he co-chaired the Arms Race and International Confl ict Committee of the Louisville Area Council on Peacemaking. Since 1999, Stassen has been a the Board of Editorial
member of Glen Stassen
Advisors for both Sojourners magazine and Creation
Care magazine. He is a former board
member of Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and the Abbey of Gethsemane Center for Ethics; as well as a member of the Peacemaking Study Group of the National Council of Churches Apostolic Faith Commission. He was named Baptist of the Year for 2012 by
EthicsDaily.com. Stassen was infl uenced by his father, Harold Stassen, president
of the American Baptist Convention (now American Baptist Churches USA) in the 1960s, governor of the state of Minnesota from 1939-1943 and a contender for the US presidency in the 1940s. Harold Stassen helped draft the charter establishing the United Nations in 1945 and joined the 1963 march on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. Glen Stassen earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in physics
from the University of Virginia, a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a PhD
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