Princeton Seminary Offers New Course on Preparing for and Preventing Disasters

Princeton, NJ, January 18, 2007–In the wake of recent events like hurricanes, tsunamis, and the 9/11 disaster, this spring Princeton Theological Seminary’s Center of Continuing Education will offer a new course titled Ministry, Conflict, and Cataclysms. The course, intended for Seminary students, clergy, leaders of nonprofit agencies, law enforcement personnel, disaster agency staff, contingency planners, and professionals in local government, will meet weekly on Monday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. beginning January 29 and ending April 23, 2007. Its goal is to prepare participants to work at the grassroots level with local leaders around the common task of engaging the community in preventing, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters of various kinds.

The course will enable participants, whether in the church or in a secular profession, to assess the degree to which a particular institution, community, or religion is disaster-prone. Participants will read the history of such disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, civil wars, acts of terrorism, genocide, and war, and will investigate the role of beliefs in apocalyptic cataclysm or providence as sources of hope or illusion. The course will investigate how the social construction of disasters by religious leaders, politicians, historians, and journalists affects the assignment of responsibility for disasters, the pursuit of social justice, and the prevention of future calamities. The course will also investigate faith communities as sources of connection, mutual aid, and leadership, or of social division, conflict, and violence.

The course will be taught by the Seminary’s Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Christianity and Society Richard Fenn, and by visiting lecturer Dana Fearon. Fenn is an ordained Episcopal priest and a sociologist of religion and social change. His research and teaching focus on secularization theory, apocalypticism, the nature and meaning of the sacred, and the sociology of time. Fearon served as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, from 1960 until his retirement in 2002. 

Fenn worked with contingency planners to develop the course, and is pleased to open the class to professionals who will be leaders in a disaster situation. “We can’t just teach this course in the faith community,” he said. “We need others in the room.” He is most concerned with the “human social factor” that can “turn a hurricane into a full-fledged disaster…. The bottom line is that nobody be left behind,” he said.

Admission to the course is subject to the approval of the instructor, and there is a registration fee of $275. For more information or to register, visit www.ptsem.edu/ce or call the Center of Continuing Education at 609.497.7990.