A book analyzing the dangers of ill-planned, poorly executed and misdirected foreign aid has won the 2001 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Janine Wedel, an anthropologist affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs who has studied the evolving economic and social order in Eastern […]
French composer and champion of 20th Century music Pierre Boulez has won the 2001 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The $200,000 Grawemeyer Award is considered the top prize in international music composition. Boulez received the award for “Sur Incises,” a 40-minute chamber work written for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists. […]
The eve of a new millennium brings with it concerns about “the end times,” judgment, death and the afterlife. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, however, looks toward the last days with optimism rather than dread. That message of hope, delivered through his book “The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology,” has earned Moltmann the 2000 Louisville Grawemeyer […]
Margaret E. Keck, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., looks at political issues from the perspective of a political scientist, a journalist and former resident of several different nations. She taught political science at Yale University from 1986 to 1995, and before that served as a faculty fellow at […]
Thomas Adès has experienced a meteoric rise to international musical prominence. Since his first public piano performance in 1993 at the age of 22, his versatility as pianist, conductor and composer has inspired comparisons to Beethoven, Mozart, Purcell and Britten. His four-movement, large-scale orchestral work “Asyla” earned him the $200,000 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award […]
The violent struggle over civil rights in 1964 Mississippi shows what happens when God’s will is interpreted through radically different filters of beliefs. In his book “God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,” Charles Marsh takes an in-depth look at one historical moment when those beliefs clashed violently. Marsh’s work has earned the […]
Through his opera “Marco Polo,” composer Tan Dun takes his audience along for the explorer’s legendary travels from Italy to China. He also takes the audience on a spiritual quest reflecting the three states of the human being — past, present and future — and the cycle of nature. And he takes the listener on […]
Larry L. Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, won the 1997 award for the book Earth Community, Earth Ethics. The $150,000 Grawemeyer prize is presented jointly by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville. Rasmussen shows through the book how the current environmental […]
Long-standing international disputes often seem unsolvable because the parties involved are too deeply invested in their positions. However, a third party may help them to focus on the basic concerns underlying their positions, and thus to reframe the issues in ways more amenable to negotiation. Herbert C. Kelman describes the process, which he calls interactive […]
An orchestral work inspired by the poems of a Holocaust survivor captured the 1997 award. British composer Simon Bainbridge intertwined his music with the poetry of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in “Ad Ora Incerta — Four Orchestral Songs from Primo Levi,” which was selected from among 181 entries for the $150,000 Grawemeyer prize. The work […]