Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist and professor of education at Harvard University, will give a presentation titled “Balm in Gilead: On Love, Justice and the Word, ” at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 5, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., at Bates College. The public is invited to attend the 2007-08 Bertha May Bell Andrews Lecture, sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain, free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-8272.

In her lecture honoring Bertha May Bell Andrews, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot will tell the life story of her mother, Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, the first African American psychoanalyst and the first African American woman pediatrician to be certified to practice in this country.

The daughter of an Episcopal priest and schoolteacher, Lawrence was raised in Mississippi. In the 1930s, she attended Cornell University, where she was the only Negro undergraduate, was barred from the dorms and served as a maid in professors’ homes to earn her keep. She then went on to medical school at Columbia University, where she was the only African American and one of 10 women in her class.

“Her life has been one of courageous boundary crossing; enduring the visibility and distortions of tokenism, and the double oppressions and assaults of racism and sexism,” writes Lawrence-Lightfoot. “But ‘the history,’ as Margaret would say, is much more interesting than ‘the facts,’ the interior story much more poignant than her professional persona and the public acclaim.”

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s lecture will focus on the emotional, spiritual and political landscapes of her mother’s extraordinary life and on the power of storytelling as she forged her identity as a woman, wife, mother, scholar, clinician, writer, activist and advocate for peace and justice.

Lawrence-Lightfoot has studied the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, the relationships between adult developmental themes and teachers’ work, and socialization within families, communities and schools.

A prolific author, Lawrence-Lightfoot’s book The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (Basic Books Inc., 1983), received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Addison-Wesley, 1988), won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for literary merit and humanitarian achievement. Her newest book, The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other (Random House, 2003), captures the crucial exchange that occurs between parents and presents a dialog that is both mirror and metaphor for the cultural forces that shape the socialization of our children.

A former chair of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Board of Directors, Lawrence-Lightfoot received the prestigious MacArthur Prize Award in 1983. In 1993 she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize, given for research that makes the “most valuable contribution to science” and “the benefit of mankind.”

Lawrence-Lightfoot received 26 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In 1993, the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, an endowed professorship established at Swarthmore College, was named in her honor. And in 1998, she received the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair, making her the first African American women in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

Known as a visionary cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram will give a talk titled “Wilderness and Shadowed Wonder: Some Words Against the Forgetting of the Earth” at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 3, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Bates College. The public is invited to attend the annual Bertha May Bell Andrews Memorial Lecture in Ethics and Education free of charge.

“Wherever we turn today, we discover nature in disarray as a result of society and its global surge,” Abram says, “our fellow species tumbling into extinction, the climate shivering into a fever, the whole more-than-human matrix convulsed by the effects of our disregard.” His talk will address the obliviousness of human culture to its earthly world and the means by which individuals might break free from the constraints imposed by outmoded cultural assumptions to find a new alignment with the animate Earth.

Abram received acclaim for his book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perceptions of Language in a More-Than-Human World (Vintage, 1997), winner of awards including the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “long awaited, revolutionary,” the book “ponders the violent disconnection of the body from the natural world and what this means about how we live and die in it.”

An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal and the Americas, Abram’s essays have appeared often in such journals as The Ecologist, Orion, Parabola, Resurgence, Wild Earth, Tikkun and Environmental Ethics, as well as in more than 30 anthologies.

The recipient of numerous fellowships, Abrams lectures and teaches on several continents. The Utne Reader named him one of 100 leading visionaries currently transforming the world. His work focuses upon the ecological dimensions of human culture, upon the shifting relations between science, technology and lived experience and upon the intertwined mysteries of perception and language – the ways in which these two phenomena modulate the ethical relation between humankind and the animate Earth.

Nomadic by nature, Abram and his wife, nature educator Grietje Laga, circulate between the southwest desert and the northwest coast of North America. He maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. Her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940, established the lectureship.

Kozol’s first book, “Death at An Early Age” (1967), established him as an angry and eloquent writer on behalf of children. Winner of the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion, the book describes Kozol’s experience as a teacher in a segregated fourth-grade classroom in Boston. Kozol continued to teach for the next 20 years, working at South Boston High School during the city’s desegregation crisis, in Arizona with children of farm workers and in Cleveland with illiterate adults.

Kozol published “Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America” (1988) after spending much of winter 1985-86 living in a South Bronx, N.Y., homeless shelter and befriending its residents. Called “bitterly eloquent” by Newsweek and “a searing indictment of society” by the New York Times, “Rachel and Her Children” received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and The Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Kozol’s most recent book, “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation” (1995), has been called “beautiful and morally worthy” by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Another Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, wrote: “Jonathan’s struggle is noble. What he says must be heard. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.”

Born in Boston, Kozol graduated from Harvard University in 1958 and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford University. He has held two Guggenheim Fellowships and twice has been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation.

A signature talk at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. The lectureship was established by her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940.

Dorothy C. Bass, director of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, will discuss The Fullness of Time: Patterns of Work, Rest and Renewal in Faith and Culture.

The project, a Lilly Endowment project based at Valparaiso University in Indiana, promotes the renewal of some ancient practices of the Jewish and Christian traditions as practical means to restore individuals and communities to spiritual balance and social responsibility. Such practices include the observance of regular rest periods, the exercise of hospitality as an act of community and the habit of personal fasting complemented by the act of social feasting.

Mary C. Boys, the Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary and adviser to the Valparaiso Project, will offer a response to Bass’s talk.

Copies of the book, Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, written by the Valparaiso Project participants — scholars and practitioners of faith — and edited by Bass, are on sale at the Bates College Bookstore in Chase Hall prior to the lecture.

Bass and Boys will also lead breakfast and luncheon seminar discussions of their work on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. in Hirasawa Lounge of Chase Hall and at 11:30 a.m. in the Peakes Room of Chase Hall. Those interested in attending these public seminars should register by calling the office of the college chaplain at 786-8272.

Bass is a historian of the Christian tradition who has written many essays on religion and American culture. A graduate of Wellesley College, Union Theological Seminary in New York and Brown University, she has taught at several colleges and theological schools. She is a minister in the United Church of Christ.

Boys joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1994 after 17 years at Boston College. The author of three books and numerous articles on religion and education, she serves as an adjunct member of the faculties of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and of Teachers College, Columbia University.

A fixture at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. The lectureship was established by her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews of the Bates class of 1940.

The Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community in the Four Corners area of Dorchester, Mass., one of Boston’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, will discuss Beyond Nationalism of Fools: Toward A New Agenda For Intellectuals.

Rivers will also lead a chapel service, open to the public, at 4 p.m. Feb. 4  in the College Chapel.

“Our goal is empowerment,” he said of the Azusa Christian Community, a group of approximately 30 middle-class individuals dedicated to revitalization and outreach in their community. “But the power we are fighting for does not derive its strength from the state and the institution of government. It emerges from the collective energies of ordinary folk . . . The truth of the matter is this: The solutions have to be worked out in the streets. Those who are able must devote themselves to the hard work of establishing a true sense of community in neighborhoods devastated by the harshness of urban poverty.”

A fixture at Bates since 1975, the Andrews Lecture is a memorial to Bertha May Bell Andrews, who served on the Bates faculty from 1913 to 1917 and established the women’s physical education program at the college. The lectureship was established by her son, Dr. Carl B. Andrews ’40.