In the book, Busby explains how the combination of state capacity, political exclusion and international assistance determine the degree to which the impacts of climate change affect security for a country’s citizens.

“The effects of pollution from burning fossil fuels have fundamentally altered our climate and will get worse until we move to cleaner energy,” Busby said. “Even as we transition away from fossil fuels, we have to prepare for climate impacts, some of which are inevitable at this point.

“Countries with weak government capacity, where political institutions exclude some people from power and where foreign assistance is blocked or delivered to some groups and not others are likely to have the worst outcomes, including humanitarian emergencies and violent conflict,” he said.

“But the hopeful story of my book is that the worst consequences of climate change are not inevitable. Governments, even very poor ones, can take steps to protect their populations from climate harms and prevent large-scale loss of life from exposure to climate-related extreme weather, including cyclones and droughts. With a little bit of outside help, governments have been able to reduce their vulnerability to climate disasters and concerted action can prevent climate shocks from escalating to violence.”

Charles E. Ziegler, University of Louisville professor of political science, University Scholar and director of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, said Busby’s book examines the crucial global governance topic of confronting the negative implications of climate change in the realm of security.

“Busby’s carefully conducted case studies allow for comparison of neighboring states that are confronted with similar climate hazards, yet experience very different outcomes,” Ziegler said. “The policy implications for confronting the security costs of climate change are clear and particularly timely given controversy about how to deal with the global climate crisis.”

The Grawemeyer Award for World Order has been given annually since 1988.

“I am thrilled and humbled to have the book recognized this way and to join the august company of previous winners of this award,” Busby said.

Busby will visit Louisville in April 2026 to give a free talk on his winning ideas and accept his award.

About the Grawemeyer Awards

Each year the Grawemeyer Awards honor the power of creative ideas to improve our culture via music composition, world order, education, religion and psychology. Business executive and philanthropist H. Charles Grawemeyer established the awards in 1984 at the University of Louisville.

Academics and community members choose among nominees from around the world to ensure that each winning idea is both innovative and accessible. The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary announce the winners in December and present the awards at a ceremony the following April. The five award winners receive $100,000 each, which they may use, if they choose, to develop and accelerate the spread of their powerful ideas. Learn more at��

Not only younger people with apparent disabilities, but also all those who manage to grow old — and everyone who loves a member of either group — will appreciate the ideas Belser set down in her book “Loving Our Own Bones,” which also won a National Jewish Book Award. In it, Belser uses disability theory and her own experience to rethink Biblical texts and rabbinic literature. The result is a rereading of Biblical characters such as Moses, Isaac, and Jacob, leading to an engaging analysis of ableism, and a refreshing political and social view of disability.

“Instead of grounding her work in the standard question of what the Jewish and Christian traditions say about disability, Belser asks how disability experience can serve as a ‘generative force,’ a ‘source of embodied knowledge’ about our spiritual lives,” said Grawemeyer Religion Award Director and Interim Dean of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Tyler Mayfield. “’Loving Our Own Bones’ and Rabbi Belser are worthy additions to our revered list of Grawemeyer winners.”

The first Grawemeyer Religion Award went to E.P. Sanders in 1990 for his provocative book “Jesus and Judaism.” Acclaimed author Marilynne Robinson won the 2006 Grawemeyer Religion Award for “Gilead“ – the only time a novel has won. Rabbi Belser also joins the company of distinguished professors Stephen L. Carter (“The Culture of Disbelief”) and Diana Eck (“Encountering God“) in winning the Grawemeyer Religion Award.

Charles Marsh, who won the 1998 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for “God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,” later described the impact the prize had on his career: “The Grawemeyer Award encouraged me to imagine concrete strategies for integrating the lessons I had learned into the practices of academic teaching and research of a new generation. It inspired me to think creatively of ways I might encourage other scholars to make journeys of their own.”

Rabbi Belser will accept her award at a ceremony in Louisville on April 10.

About the Grawemeyer Awards

Each year the Grawemeyer Awards honor the power of creative ideas to improve our culture via music composition, education, religion, psychology, and world order. Business executive and family man H. Charles Grawemeyer established the awards in 1984 at the University of Louisville in collaboration with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Academics and community members choose among nominees from around the world to ensure that each winning idea is relevant to society at large. The University of Louisville announces the winners in December and presents the awards at a ceremony the following April. Each award winner receives $100,000, which they may use, if they choose, to develop and accelerate the spread of their powerful ideas. Learn more at .

Halton, associate rector at Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, argues in his 2021 “A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God” that embracing a God with human qualities can deepen our theological connection and inspire moral growth.

This perspective earned him the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, presented by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville. The award recognizes those who have presented ideas with the potential to bring about change in the world through religion.

At a , Halton presented examples of God’s emotions, such as regret. He reasoned that the modern interpretation of the rainbow focuses on love and promises after devastation, but scripture actually states God regretted destroying everything except Noah’s Ark.

“In the story I had always assumed, I was supposed to look out in the world and see the rainbow and I am supposed to be reminded of God’s love and care and provisions,” he said. “That’s not what the book of Genesis says. It says God made the rainbow to remind God to never do that again.”

Halton believes a deeper understanding of God’s human-like depictions in the Old Testament, when combined with traditional theology, offers a richer perspective.

“The God of Genesis experiences emotion, changes their mind, has regret, makes promises to be better in the future,” Halton said. “This is a God who is on a moral arc. It’s a God who is in relationship with creation. It’s a God who is in the process learning, even about God’s self, within this relationship with God’s creation. The more God learns about itself, the more God wants to change and be more kind, more loving, more charitable and embracing of God’s creation.”

By emulating this evolving God, Halton encourages individuals to find inspiration for their own understanding of how to move in the world.

The $100,000 Grawemeyer prizes also honor seminal ideas in , ,�������Ի���. Winners visit Louisville to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

UofL presents the annual prizes in music, world order, psychology, education and religion and gives the religion prize jointly with the seminary. All of the 2024 winners will visit Louisville in April to give free, public talks on their winning ideas.

The winners are:

• Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Serbian-American composer who won the music prize for a chorale work transcending a single language, culture or religion to express how all life is interconnected
• Neta Crawford, a University of Oxford international relations scholar who won the world order prize for analyzing the Pentagon’s carbon footprint and its effect on climate change
• Ann Masten, a University of Minnesota child development scholar who won the psychology prize for finding that resilience comes from “ordinary magic” within us and our supportive connections with others
• Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, two University of California sociologists who co-won the education prize for exploring the racial consequences of funding cuts at public universities
• The Rev. Charles Halton, an Episcopal priest in Lexington, Ky., who explained how embracing God as a being with human qualities can inspire us to become better people

“The Grawemeyer Awards recognize highly constructive ideas with world-changing potential and that’s certainly true of the ideas we’re honoring this time.” said Marion Hambrick, the awards program’s executive director.

Vrebalov shows how music can unite us despite our differences, while Crawford sheds new light on the U.S. military’s role in climate change. Masten explains why some people recover quickly from major setbacks when others don’t. Hamilton and Nielsen call for a fairer way to fund the nation’s public universities and Halton offers a fresh perspective on spiritual growth.

UofL graduate Charles Grawemeyer created the Grawemeyer Awards in 1984 with an initial endowment of $9 million. The first award, music composition, was presented in 1985. ����ֱ�� was added in 1989, religion in 1990, world order in 1998 and psychology in 2000.

Grawemeyer distinguished the awards by honoring ideas rather than lifelong achievement, also insisting that laypeople as well as professionals take part in the selection process.

Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate and former seminary trustee, launched the awards program in 1984 to emphasize the impact a single outstanding idea can have on the world.

The winners are:

• Olga Neuwirth, a Viennese composer who won the music composition award for her opera showing that humanity matters more than gender
• Mona Lena Krook, a Rutgers University scholar who won the world order award for analyzing the problem of violence against women in politics
• Terrie Moffitt, a Duke University professor who won the psychology award for discovering two types of antisocial behavior in juveniles
• Rucker Johnson, a University of California-Berkeley professor who won the education award for assessing the merits of school integration
• Duncan Ryuken Williams, a University of Southern California scholar who won the religion award for exploring how U.S. Buddhists kept their faith during World War II

“All of the 2022 winners offer important new insights into some of today’s most compelling issues,” said Marion Hambrick, Grawemeyer Awards executive director.

“Their ideas show how gender can be fluid, how violence against women in public life can be stopped, how courts can treat juvenile offenders fairly, how school integration can benefit students of all races and how religious inclusiveness can lead to peace, he said.

UofL presents the annual prizes in music, world order, psychology and education and gives the religion prize jointly with the seminary. All of the 2022 winners will be invited to visit Louisville in April to give free, public talks on their winning ideas.

Duncan Ryuken Williams, a religion professor who directs the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California, won the prize for ideas set forth in “American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War,” his 2019 book published by Harvard University Press.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government forcibly relocated more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry and imprisoned them in detention camps on U.S. soil. Two-thirds were practicing Buddhists.

Some were sent to live in former fairgrounds where stables were hastily converted into living quarters. Others were crowded into dwellings of tarpaper-roofed, Army-style bunkers. Many lost their homes, farms and businesses along with their possessions.

As reviewed diaries and other records of their stay in the camps, he learned Buddhists continued to worship even in confinement. One family celebrated Buddha’s birthday by pouring coffee over a carrot carved in his likeness when they could not perform the traditional ritual of pouring tea over a Buddha statue.

“Their imprisonment became a way to discover freedom, a liberation that the Buddha himself attained only after embarking on a spiritual journey filled with obstacles and hardships,” he said.

The Buddhists’ steadfast devotion to faith in such conditions showed it was possible to be both Buddhist and American and helped launch a less sectarian form of the religion in the United States, Williams found.

“Williams’ work opens the way for a discussion that values religious inclusion over exclusion,” said Tyler Mayfield, who directs the Grawemeyer religion award. “He shows how Japanese Americans living in a time of great adversity broadened our nation’s vision of religious freedom.”

The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give the religion prize.

Recipients of next year’s s were named this week pending formal approval by university and seminary trustees. The $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology and education. Winners will visit Louisville in April to accept their awards and give free talks on the winning ideas.

UofL presents the annual prizes for innovative ideas and works in music composition, world order, psychology and education and gives a religion prize jointly with the seminary. Award recipients will be named at 10 a.m. EST on the following dates:

• Music Composition, Dec. 6
• Ideas Improving World Order, Dec. 7
• Psychology, Dec. 8
• ����ֱ��, Dec. 9
• Religion, Dec. 10

All recipients will be asked to visit Louisville in April to accept their $100,000 prizes and give free talks about their winning ideas.

Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate, former seminary trustee and philanthropist, set up the awards program in 1984 to recognize the power of creative thought and underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world. He also asked that laypeople be involved in award selection to ensure broad understanding of the winning ideas.

Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate and former seminary trustee, launched the awards program in 1984 to underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world.

The winners are:

• , a San Diego composer who won the music composition award for his orchestral work evoking the threat climate change poses to humanity
• , an American University professor who won the world order award for his book challenging the United Nations to rethink how it handles environmental problems
• , a King’s College, London, behavioral geneticist who won the psychology award for explaining how DNA influences how we work with the world around us
• , two scholars who co-won the education award for their study of how to encourage deeper learning in U.S. high schools
• , a Willamette University professor who won the religion award for showing how an early Christian creed urging human solidarity applies in modern life

“All of the 2020 winners offer important new insights into some of today’s most significant issues, which is exactly what we seek to reward with these prizes,” said Charles Leonard, Grawemeyer Awards executive director.

“Two winners focus on the threat posed by climate change even though they work in very different fields, while the others broaden our grasp of how genes affect behavior, how American high schools can better prepare students and how an ancient religious creed can help us deal with bigotry, racism and sexism.”

UofL presents the annual prizes in music, world order, psychology and education and gives the religion prize jointly with the seminary. All of the 2020 award recipients will visit Louisville in April to give free, public talks on their winning ideas.

Those ideas earned their creators 2019 , $100,000 prizes recognizing how powerful concepts can change the world. Award recipients were named Dec. 3-7.

The winners are:

• , music composition, for writing the non-traditional concerto “Nomaden”
• , ideas improving world order, for designing a framework to help nations expand human rights
• , for developing a theory explaining how drug addiction works in the brain
• , for explaining how white Protestant dominance of U.S. politics and culture is ending

“As is so often the case, our award recipients have addressed important issues of the day in a highly creative manner,” said Charles Leonard, Grawemeyer Awards executive director.

“From shedding new light on opioid addiction to charting a vast political and cultural change, from improving the well-being of people worldwide to welcoming diverse cultures into Western classical music, all of their ideas have potential to enrich our lives.”

UofL presents the annual prizes in music, world order, psychology and education and gives the religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

No education award was given this year because “jurors could not single out an idea likely to advance our field in a highly significant way,” said Marion Hambrick, an associate professor in UofL’s College of ����ֱ�� and Human Development, who directs the award.

The late Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate and former seminary trustee, set up the awards in 1984 to underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world. He also asked that laypeople be involved in selecting the awards to ensure broad understanding of the winning ideas.

All of the Grawemeyer Award recipients will visit Louisville in April to give free, public talks on their winning ideas.

The Grawemeyer Awards have been a longstanding tradition at the University of Louisville, created to honor those who have impacted the world with just a single idea. UofL graduate, former Louisville Seminary trustee, and philanthropist Charles Grawemeyer founded the awards program in 1984 to pay tribute to the power of creative thought.

The awards draw nominations from all over the world, recognizing pioneers in five fields – Music Composition, Ideas Improving World Order, ����ֱ��, Religion and Psychology. Past winners have included those who have studied the promise of public education in America, developed potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, sought ways to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East, explored why Christianity has failed in its attempts to heal racial divides, and used native, traditional music to pay tribute to victims of Cambodian genocide.

The list includes Aaron Beck, considered to be the founder of cognitive therapy, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. This year’s honorees and their ideas loom just as large. Their stories are featured below.

Music Composition

Andrew Norman, a Los Angeles-based composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music, wrote “Play” for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which premiered the piece in 2013 and released a recording on its own label. In three movements, “Play,” this year’s winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, explores the relationship of choice and chance, freewill and control.

The piece investigates the ways musicians in an orchestra can play with, against, or apart from one another; and maps concepts from the world of video gaming onto traditional symphonic structures to tell a fractured narrative of power, manipulation, deceit and, ultimately, cooperation.��

“‘Play’ combines brilliant orchestration, which is at once wildly inventive and idiomatic, with a terrific and convincing musical shape based on a relatively small amount of musical source material,” said Award Director Marc Satterwhite. “It ranges effortlessly from brash to intimate and holds the listener’s interest for all of its 47 minutes — no small feat in these days of shortened attention spans.” ��

“Play” has also been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Norman was recently named Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year.

Ideas Improving World Order

Dana Burde’s 2014 book, “Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan,” explores the influence foreign-backed funding for education has on war-torn countries and how such aid affects humanitarian and peace-building efforts. Because of her analysis on this topic, Burde, an associate professor of international education at NYU, is this year’s winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

“I argue that instead of preventing conflict, U.S. aid to education in Afghanistan contributed to it — deliberately in the 1980s, with violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula, and inadvertently in the 2000s, with misguided stabilization programs,” Burde wrote. “In both of these phases, education aid was subordinated to the political goals of strong states and used as a strategic tool — a situation made possible in part by humanitarians’ tendency to neglect education’s role in conflict.”����

Drawing on extensive research on the impact of U.S.-funded community-based education programs, Burde also makes a case for a sounder understanding of the role of education in state-building and recommends contributing to sustainable peace through expanded access to community-based education with neutral, quality curriculum. Her book was grounded in eight years of field research in Afghanistan and Pakistan and backed by two decades of work on education in countries affected by conflict.��

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Immigration. Gun control. Abortion. Gay rights. Religion. Are these and other polarizing topics too controversial to be discussed in today’s high school classrooms? According to Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, co-winners of the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in ����ֱ��, teachers should encourage conversations about difficult issues. These discussions, they opine, help students understand diverse points of view and become more politically engaged adults.

Hess and McAvoy’s 2014 book, “The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic ����ֱ��,” explores the role of teachers in perpetuating serious political deliberation in schools. The book is based on a 4-year study of 35 teachers and their 1,000-plus students.

“Teachers are beginning to worry that all controversial topics are taboo,” said ����ֱ�� Award Director Marion Hambrick. “This timely book dispels that notion and provides tangible evidence that the classroom is an unusual political place where students can learn to carefully examine divisive issues.”

is dean of the School of ����ֱ�� at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and directs the Center for Ethics and ����ֱ�� at the same university.

Religion

In “The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel,” social ethicist Gary Dorrien describes the early history of the Black Social Gospel from its 19th-century founding to its close association in the 20th century with W.E.B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dorrien’s book earned him the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, given jointly by UofL and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

“We urgently need this historical and theological account in our religious communities and public discourse,” said Tyler Mayfield, Faculty Director of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and the A.B. Rhodes Associate Professor of Old Testament at Louisville Seminary. “Dorrien’s book highlights a disremembered part of American religious history, one that holds relevance for contemporary discussions about race and U.S. religion. His compelling narration of the Black Social Gospel as a profoundly religious tradition of thought and activism underscores the crucial connections among the Black Church, social Christianity, the creation of black institutions, and the struggle for freedom.”

Dorrien, an Episcopal priest, is a professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Psychology

Marsha Linehan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which balances acceptance and commitment to change in treating mental illness, distinguishing it from previous standard interventions. Research shows DBT to be an effective treatment for conditions previously considered untreatable, such as borderline personality disorder.

Linehan’s work has earned her the 2017 Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. In developing DBT, she sought out difficult-to-treat, suicidal individuals and, by trial and error, created an effective intervention, which led to treatment for multiple disorders. She drew on her personal experiences — she acknowledged publicly in 2011 her own longtime struggle with high suicidality — and training as a spiritual director and Zen Master to develop an approach that taught patients how to regulate dysfunctional behaviors. The therapy relies on a toolkit of behavioral skills, including mindfulness practices, that were previously not common in mainstream psychology.

��“In addition to being considered the state-of-the-art treatment for chronically suicidal individuals, dialectical behavior therapy has been found to be effective for other behavioral disorders, including eating disorders, addiction, anxiety related disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression,” said Professor Woody Petry, award director.

All 2017 winners will present free lectures about their award-winning ideas when they visit Louisville in April to accept their $100,000 prizes.