CORRECTION APPENDED

Brian Palmer may have only taught Religion 1529 for one semester, but it provided him with enough raw material to publish the 256-page compilation “Global Values 101.”

According to editor and former Lecturer on the Study of Religion Brian C.W. Palmer ’86, “Global Values 101” is a compilation of 16 interviews conducted with guest speakers as part of Religion 1529: “Personal Choice and Global Transformation.”

The course, taught by Palmer in Spring 2004, was attended by more than 600 students. During each lecture, students grilled prominent activists and world leaders—including physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer, well-known sociologist Juliet Schor, and left-leaning historian Howard Zinn—about their work and their visions for social change.

“Global Values 101” has “a feel of spontaneity, intimacy, open-hearted quality...human quality that I like very much,” Palmer said. “It’s more interesting to read a conversation between Robert Reich and 600 students than to read one of Reich’s books.”

Fellow editor Kate Holbrook, who was a teaching fellow for Religion 1529, said she fears that people will not read the book because they have already read works by the speakers or because they feel they will disagree with the content.

But Holbrook said that the format of the book should interest any reader.

“I think one of the exciting things [about preserving] the interview format was that readers can still have the kind of spontaneous, authentic experience that students got in the course,” Holbrook said.

Former Religion 1529 students praised Palmer and expected that the book would influence its readers profoundly.

Erinn Wattie ’06 said that although the book cannot replace what she described as an incredible in-class experience with the guest speakers, it “will stretch their world. People will read these interviews and see a life-changing, out-of-the-box thing that is going on in the world.”

Fellow student Susan Lieu ’07 said that the interviews “reinforce the possibility of defying impossibility.” Lieu said that she used the inspiration and knowledge she gained from the speakers in her work at a refugee camp in Africa last summer.

According to Palmer, while each speaker takes the book in a different direction, two important themes that link together the individual interviews are courage and the “simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates.”

Elaborating on this idea of simultaneity, Palmer said that the book emphasizes “what it means to be alive and well at the same moment as others are in distress, and what we can do to respond to others’ pain...It’s so much about personal engagement and personal choice,” he said.

Palmer said he hopes readers will take away from “Global Values 101” the importance of their duty to participate in an effort to create a more humane, empathetic world. Many of the students in Religion 1529, he said, were eager to discover how they as college students could learn to be as courageous as the speakers.

“Courage is as contagious as fear. When we meet someone who has been very courageous on behalf of others, something in us wants to learn from that and become similarly courageous,” Palmer said.

He added that the book is important for individuals like college students who are just beginning their careers because it introduces readers to a wide variety of fields.

Palmer said he and his fellow editors initially came up with the idea of making a film based on the course, but were approached by a publisher who suggested compiling a book instead.

“This material really was so rich that it would be of interest to people elsewhere in the country or the world and we should do something to bring it together in a convenient form.”

Palmer, who left Harvard in 2004, now lives in Stockholm, Sweden, and is a professor at the University of Uppsala where he teaches courses similar to those that he taught at Harvard. He is also in charge of designing a Core curriculum for the university that will take inspiration from Harvard’s Core curriculum but place more emphasis on social ethics and citizen engagement.

—Staff writer Emily J. Nelson can be reached at ejnelson@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION

Brian Palmer taught Religion 1529, "Personal Choice and Global Transformation," twice: in the fall semester of 2001 and again in the spring semester of 2004. The Feb. 5 news article "Ex-Religion Course Spawns Book" incorrectly said that Palmer taught the course only once.