2007 Lectures

Paths to Unity

Peace, Ecology and Spirituality

in the 21st Century

Matthew Fox
Spiritual Awakening and Planetary Survival

Karen Armstrong
Islam, Peace and the West

Satish Kumar
Earth As Community

Saturday, September 22nd at Leeds Town Hall

Paths to Unity
Peace, Ecology and Spirituality in the 21st Century

Humanity in the 21st century faces unprecedented global challenges in the fields of ecology, international cooperation and peace, and economic justice.  The premise of the 2007 Leeds Schumacher Lectures was that the key to overcoming these challenges lies in transforming the values and attitudes that govern our society, for it is here that the root causes of the problems are to be found.
Too often the debate over spiritual and moral values is dominated by extremes.  Dogmatic and fundamentalist religious views are opposed by atheistic materialism and moral relativism, leaving no space for real dialogue.  This day of lectures and dialogue aimed to bring to this debate an inclusive spiritual perspective, based on the universal values of compassion and reverence for life, that can embrace a diversity of religious views and practices while recognising the validity of the scientific understanding of Nature.

Speakers

Satish Kumar
Satish Kumar has been for nearly 40 years the editor of Resurgence magazine, called by the Guardian 'The spiritual flagship of the Green movement'.  Appointed as the magazine's editor by Fritz Schumacher, and now Programme Director of Schumacher College in Devon, he has played a leading role in articulating the distinctive philosophy of ecological spirituality associated with the Schumacher community.  A former Jain monk, Satish worked with Vinobha Bhave, Gandhi's spiritual successor, in India before coming to the West in the 1960s.

Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong is internationally recognised as an authority on the history of religion, particularly Islam, and has written extensively on the problems of inter-religious understanding and fundamentalism.  Her analysis of fundamentalism as an inevitable reaction to the exclusion of religion and spirituality from secular society has made a major contribution to the understanding of these problems.

Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox is one of the outstanding figures in contemporary Christian theology and the author of 28 books exploring all aspects of spirituality.  The new Creation Spirituality movement which he has brought into being represents a profound and vibrant alternative to evangelical fundamentalism within the Christian tradition.  His support for feminism, liberation theology and social justice movements, and his acceptance of the validity of other faith traditions have brought him into sharp conflict with conservative tendencies in the Catholic church.

Photography by Olivia Brabbs