In 2007, the first William Sloane Coffin Award honored two professors on April 12, the one year anniversary of Coffin's death.

Professor Robert Bellah:
Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor Emeritus of Sociology and a leading scholar of religious life. We honor him for his dedication to raising the public consciousness of the role of religion in American life and politics, the importance of community to democracy, and the injustices of an economy unguided by strong democracy. He demonstrated the moral commitment to go beyond simply doing good research and became a leading public intellectual bridging academe, religion, and the well-being of society.
President Clinton honored him with the National Humanities Medal in 2001. He is the author of books on religion in Japan, religion in America, and the use and abuse of religion and its symbols in American politics. He will forever be renown for heading the team of sociologists and anthropologists who wrote Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985 and republished several times since then). He is an informed critic of the injustices of market economies unguided by strong democracy.
He forcefully argues for more community and less individualism while making it clear that communities too must be judged by the ethics they promote. He traces his concern for the oppressed to both the Hebrew tradition and the New Testament. In a recent interview for the Berkeleyan, Bellah concisely laid out a part of his philosophy:

Professor Bellah (right) and Professor Scheper-Hughes (center) after the ceremony.

"Criticism without any substance ultimately is self-destructive. It undermines everything and leads to nihilism. But substantive belief without any critical perspective also suffers the fate of disaster, because it tends toward actions which are out of the control of reason."

Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes:
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Medical Anthropology where she directs the doctoral program in Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. We honor her for the moral courage she has shown by focusing her ethnographic Work on the hidden Violence of everyday life. She has repeatedly taken both personal and academic risks to pull back our illusions of progress and unveil the atrocities of modern social and economic transformations.
Her Work on structural and political violence, of what she calls "small wars and invisible genocides," has been broadly applied to medicine, psychiatry, and to the practice of anthropology. Scheper-Hughes, driven by her Working class Czech Catholic family background and exposure to liberation theology in Brazil as a Peace Corps volunteer, has conducted research, written on, and been politically engaged in topics ranging from AIDS and human rights in Cuba, death squads and the extermination of street kids in Brazil, the Catholic Church, clerical celibacy, and child sex abuse, to the repatriation of the brain of a famous Yahi Indian, Ishi (kept as a specimen in the Smithsonian Institution) to the Pit River people of Northern California.
Her most recent research is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global traffic in humans for their organs, the subject of her next book: The Ends of the Body: the Global Traffic in Organs. She is co-founder and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project and she is currently an advisor to the World Health Organization (Geneva) on issues related to global transplantation.

Committee:
The committee that selected these two professors from the pool of nominations consisted of faculty, staff, students and members of First Congregational Church of Berkeley (FCCB):

  • Richard B. Norgaard, Chair – Prof. Energy and Resources Group
  • Carson Baucher – Undergraduate Student
  • Hatem Bazian – Lecturer, Near Eastern Studies
  • Paul Chapman – Head, Head-Royce School
  • Shelly Dieterle – Minister of Campus Life, FCCB
  • Patricia de Jong – Senior Minister, FCCB
  • Ileana E. Dorn – Counselor & Supervisor, Office of Admissions
  • Edward Epstein – Prof. Emeritus, Business Administration
  • Justin Kidd – Graduate Student, Boalt Hall School of Law
  • Beatriz Manz – Prof. Geography and Ethnic Studies
  • William McKinney . President, Pacific School of Religion
  • Jonthan Poullard . Dean of Students, Campus Life and Leadership