As we enter the 21st century, humanity faces an array of unprecedented global challenges in the fields of ecology, international cooperation and peace, and economic justice. The premise of this year's Leeds Schumacher Lectures is that the key to overcoming these challenges lies in transforming the values and attitudes that govern our society, for it is in these fundamental attitudes and values that the root caused of the problems are to be found.

Too often the debate over spiritual and moral values is dominated by extremes, by dogmatic and fundamentalist religious views on one side and atheistic materialism and moral relativism on the other. This day of lectures and dialogue aims to bring to the forefront of this debate an inclusive spiritual perspective based on the universal values of compassion and reverence for life, that can embrace a diversity of religious views and practices while recognising the validity of the scientific understanding of Nature.

Matthew Fox
SPIRITUAL AWAKENING AND PLANETARY SURVIVAL

Matthew Fox is one of the outstanding figures in contemporary Christian theology. The author of 28 books exploring all aspects of spirituality, he has been a key figure in reviving the mediaeval mystical tradition of Creation Spirituality, which emphasises the presence of the Divine in every individual and in the natural world. His support for feminism, liberation theology and social justice movements and his acceptance of the validity of other faith traditions have brought him into sharp conflict with conservative tendencies in the Catholic church; the new Creation Spirituality movement which he has brought into being now seems the most profound and vibrant alternative to evangelical fundamentalism within the Christian tradition.

Karen Armstrong is internationally recognised as an authority on the history of religion, particularly Islam, and has written extensively on the problems of inter-religious understanding and fundamentalism. Her analysis of fundamentalism as an inevitable reaction to the exclusion of religion and spirituality from secular society has made a major contribution to the understanding of these problems, and points towards the possibility of a new, inclusive, post-modern spirituality that could help to heal the tragic religious divisions we are now seeing.

Satish Kumar
THE SPIRITUAL IMPERATIVE

Satish Kumar has been for nearly 40 years the editor of Resurgence magazine, called by the Guardian 'The spiritual flagship of the Green movement'. Appointed as the magazine's editor by Fritz Schumacher, and now the programme director of Schumacher College in Devon, he has played a leading role in articulating the distinctive philosophy of ecological spirituality associated with the Schumacher community. A former Jain monk, Satish worked with Vinobha Bhave, Gandhi's spiritual successor, in India before coming to the West in the 1960s.