Christian Perspectives on Animal Treament
By Matt Mason
on Oct 23, 2009 at 10:47 PM in Religion
SANTA BARBARA - A five-person panel of experts will discuss “Christian Perspectives on the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Factory Farms and Scientific Laboratories” Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 3:30 p.m. in Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge. The discussion is free and open to the public.
Panelists include: Christine Gutleben, director of faith outreach for the Humane Society of the United States; Bob Wennberg, Westmont distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy; Tom Fikes, Westmont professor of psychology and neuropsychology; Maurice Lee, Westmont assistant professor of religious studies; and Westmont alumna Amanda Sparkman, a post-doctoral fellow at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.
Gutleben is accompanying The Humane Society’s “All Creatures” nationwide music tour, speaking to audiences at more than 35 clubs and Christian colleges. The Humane Society, the nation’s largest animal protection organization, fights for the protection of all animals through advocacy, education and hands-on programs.
Wennberg, who taught philosophy at Westmont for 37 years, has authored several books, including “God, Humans and Animals: An Invitation to Enlarge Our Moral Universe” and “Faith at the Edge: A Primer for Doubters,” which is due out next month.
Fikes, who has been teaching at Westmont for 11 years, focuses his research on perception and learning in humans and rats. He contributed to “NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality, Religious Experience” and “Evolutionary Psychology as Computational Theory in the Cognitive Sciences” in Journal of Psychology and Theology.
Lee, who earned his doctorate in religious studies from Yale University, earned one of two master’s degrees in computation and neural systems at California Institute of Technology and published “A Computer Modeling Approach to Understanding the Inferior Olive and Its Relationship to the Cerebellar Cortex in Rats.”
Sparkman, who graduated from Westmont in 2003, earned a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Iowa State University in 2009. She studies life history evolution in reptiles and mammals in the biology department at Trent. She will join the panel by videoconference.
The discussion is expected to start following a 25-minute documentary, “Eating Mercifully,” which examines critical findings of a Pew Commission report on U.S. industrial animal agriculture, and considers factory-farming practices from several Christian viewpoints.
