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Archive for the ‘"Grawemeyer Award"’ Category

Today, the University of Louisville announced that an American Muslim of Indian heritage is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.

Eboo Patel has focused his career onworking with young people to encourage religious cooperation. In 1991, he founded Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit promoting interfaith work. And he wrote the 2007 book Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation.

Patel says he decided to make building religious cooperation his life’s work in the mid-1990s.

“I made the sudden realization that every time I saw religion on the evening news, it was a story about violence,” he says. “And every time there was a story about religious violence, it was a young person who’s the foot soldier of that violence.”

Eboo, who was born in India and grew up in Chicago, sees a growing emphasis on interfaith issues at universities.

“College campuses are very much talking about becoming models of interfaith cooperation,” he says, “places that start to take the issue of religious diversity seriously and say: What percentage of our students would stand up against religious prejudice? What percentage of our students has a positive experience or relationship with body from a different religion who they can speak clearly about?”

In his 2007 book, Patel writes that religion will be the defining issue of the 21st century. He says that the involvement of religious groups in the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the 9/11 attacks has shaped his thinking.

Besides working with the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, Patel also serves on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He says experience in both has shown him many people of various faiths eager to cooperate with those from other religious backgrounds.

“I really believe that the interfaith service movement can be like the environmental movement or like the human rights movement or like the civil rights movement,” he says, “which is to say something that fires the imagination of a generation.”

The Grawemeyer Foundation at U of L gives awards each year for religion, outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology and education.

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Today, the University of Louisville has announced the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for education. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.

In an era when standardized tests are highly regarded, one cognitive psychologist points out that they don’t measure rational thinking. Keith Stanovich is that psychologist and he gets the award for his 2009 book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. In it, the University of Toronto professor of human development and applied psychology finds answers to the question of why some people with high IQs don’t seem so sharp. His research shows standardized tests measure intelligence but not rational thinking.

Stanovich says his scientific research showed strong results early on.

“One of the things that jumped out at me when I started doing that research and became clearer, was that it was surprising how poorly standard intelligence tests actually predict performance on what a cognitive psychologist would call a test of rational thinking,” he says.

According to Stanovich, many people have the wrong ideas about standardized tests.

“When a lay person thinks of an IQ they’re prone to think that that an IQ test measures colloquially good thinking,” he says. “But most of us would tend to agree that good thinking encompasses good judgment and decision making, i.e. rational thought, the type of thinking that helps us achieve our goals.”

Stanovich says he hopes his findings leads other researchers to explore ways that could change our culture’s dependency on standardized tests.

“It could well cache out into more explicit attempts to develop measures,” he says. “And in our research we’re trying to contribute to that in the form of presenting a framework that will induce other researchers to take up this endeavor.”

Stanovich says his doesn’t completely dismiss standardized tests, but warns they have limits.

Each year, the Grawemeyer Foundation at U of L gives awards for education, outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology and religion.

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Today, the University of Louisville has announced the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for psychology. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.

People often say pain is all in your head — and Ronald Melzack has spent his career researching just how true that is and how pain works. Melzack is a professor at Montreal’s McGill University and developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire. It  measures sensory and emotional aspects of pain and is used by medical establishments worldwide. He says he began working on it after taking note of patients using a wide vocabulary to describe their pain.

“I had more then 100 words that described pain and began to sort them into groups,” he says. “Then at MIT I met a superb statistician, we put the words into groups and gave the words a value: how much pain is involved.”

He also developed the Gate Control Theory of Pain that proposes pain is felt in the brain and not at a point of injury. Melzack says the theory considers both the physical and psychological aspects at work when one feel’s pain, and it proposed that people could change their pain by using emotional processes.

“Our psychological concept of the pain and what we think of it or if we think it’s going to kill us or what — that has an impact on how much pain we feel,” he says.

The theory led him to define two types of pain, acute and prolonged and the role of psychology in perceiving pain.

“The psychological features are very important,” he says. “It is not like a telephone system, where you simply dial in pain and the bell rings up in the head. That was the prevailing view when I first started to work in the field.”

Malzack’s work helped better understand phantom limb pain experienced by amputees and illnesses like fibromyalgia.

Each year, the Grawemeyer Foundation at U of L gives awards for psychology, outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, education and religion.

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Today, the University of Louisville announced the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.

Trita Parsi is president of the National Iranian American Council and wrote Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. He receives the award for the ideas in his book about achieving Middle East peace.

Parsi says it can be reached through comprehensive diplomacy that works to improve relations between Iran and Israel.

“The entire arena has come to be defined by the rivalry between the United States and Israel vis a vis Iran,” Parsi says. “So, as a result, unless you have a comprehensive approach to the region you will most likely repeat the failures of the past in which we were trying to resolve every conflict in separation of the others.”

Parsi characterizes the rivalry between Iran and Israel as a quest for regional power rather then one based on ideology, even though both have purposely focused on ideology.

“Both Iran and Israel have seemed to have the preference of casting this as ideological because of their calculation,” he says, “an erroneous calculation in my view, but nevertheless, the calculation that that is the best way for them to strengthen their position.”

Parsi conducted extensive interviews with dozens of officials of the three countries and illustrated instances when the U.S. did not pursue prospects for compromise. This happened, he says, because of flawed assumptions his book highlights.

“The critical contribution was to show that this is a strategic conflict that has a solution and it rejected the idea that this is an ideologically driven contestation that inevitably will lead to conflict,” he says.

Last year, Parsi’s book won an award from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Each year, the Grawemeyer Foundation at U of L gives awards for ideas improving world order, outstanding works in music composition, psychology, education and religion.

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Today, the University of Louisville has announced the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in music. WFPL’s Elizabeth Kramer reports.

The music of Spheres by German composer York Hoeller was chosen from more than 100 entries worldwide. In his music, Hoeller often uses electronic sounds with live instruments. This is the first time a German composer has received the Grawemeyer Award for outstanding work in music composition.

In 2006. and the midst of five years working on the 40-minute piece, his wife, Ursula, died. Hoeller says the loss was devastating.

“I was close to the decision not only to stop the composition of that piece,” he says, “but maybe to stop composition in whole.”

Hoeller says he later continued work on the piece after encouragement from Semyon Bychkov, the chief conductor of the West German Broadcasting Corporations’ symphony orchestra in Cologne.

“I received a telephone call and he supported me very intensively in continuing the composition even more,” Hoeller says. “And I came to the idea to add a sixth movement, which referred to the death of my wife.”

Spheres was first performed last year by the orchestra in Cologne. (Listen to the sixth movement here.)

Hoeller says composers who have influenced his work include Debussy and Stravinsky as well as Ligeti, who is known for the music in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Grawemeyer Foundation at U of L gives awards each year for outstanding work in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, education and religion.

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