Religion, environment, activist nuns topic of discussion

“Religion and the Environment” is the focus of a lunch conversation, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Monday, March 19, in 504 Hall of Languages. Guest speaker Sarah McFarland Taylor, associate professor of religious studies at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will share her research on Catholic nuns who have become environmental activists.

The luncheon, which is free and open to the public, is hosted by the Department of Religion in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences with support from Imagining America and the Department of Women and Gender Studies in The College of Arts and Sciences. Parking is available in SU’s pay lots.

Taylor specializes in the study of religion and American culture, religion and ecology, and women’s studies in religion. Her first book, “Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology” (Harvard University Press, April 2007), received the Catholic Press Association’s first prize for Best Book on Gender Issues, and also the association’s first prize for Best Book on Social Concerns. “Green Sisters” documents the growing movement of environmental activist Roman Catholic religious sisters in North America, challenging notions of liberal and conservative in American Catholic historiography and offering a new understanding of how tradition itself works.

Taylor holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Dartmouth College and a doctorate in religion and American culture (with additional Ph.D. emphasis in women’s studies) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her honors and awards include being a senior research fellow at the Martin Marty Center Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Louisville Institute Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, a Wabash Center Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship.

She has received a Joseph H. Fichter Award for the study of women and religion, the Albert C. Clark Prize for her work on African American religions and a research award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.