Biography
Lloyd Steffen is Professor of Religion Studies, University Chaplain, and Director of the Center for Dialogue, Ethics and Spirituality. He is also director of the Humanities Ethics minor at Lehigh. He served as Chair of the Religion Studies Department from 2000-2006.
Steffen came to Lehigh in 1990, and he teaches a wide variety of courses in the field of religion. He is trained as a philosopher of religion, although in recent years his teaching and scholarship have been focused in the area of ethics. Steffen graduated as a history major from New College in Sarasota Florida, which offered an advanced three year curriculum in an experimental college setting where students received written evaluations rather than grades. He worked with the United Farm Workers in college and wrote his senior thesis on the southern abolitionist, Cassius Marcellus Clay. After college he joined the Bradenton Fire Department and was trained and certified a professional firefighter in the State of Florida. An unexpected chance to undertake graduate study in religion and theology came his way and he headed off to New England. He received two masters degrees with honors on the same day from Andover Newton Theology School and Yale Divinity School, then entered Brown University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1984. He wrote on the topic of self-deception (published as Self-Deception and the Common Life) and is considered not just by scholars but by those who know him well to be an authority on the subject. He was twice elected a Town Supervisor for the Wisconsin Town of LaPointe on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, where he lived from 1982-1987.
Steffen has written six books while at Lehigh. They are
The United Church of Christ awarded Steffen its first "Church and Society" Award for his book, Executing Justice. Steffen contributes to academic and professional journals and also writes in more widely read venues, including a local newspaper column, "Faith and Values" for The Morning Call. Steffen wrote for many years a “Spiritual Journeys” column for the Express Times, and his current research project is a book for Georgetown University Press provisionally entitled, "Our Common Agreements..."
Steffen offers a variety of courses in Lehigh's Religion Studies Department, most of them dealing with ethics and religion. In the Fall of 2007 he offered a new course, From the Black Death to AIDS: Religion, Ethics, Plague and Pandemic." The course examined the role of religion--both positive and negative--in constructing social meaning around plague and pandemic; and in the Fall of 2009 will offer a First Year Seminar on "Lincoln and the Inner Life: Religoin, Ethics and Spirituality." His most innovative course, devised with Thomas P. Kasulis, now of Ohio State University, was a freshman seminar called “The Listening Point,” which introduced students to philosophy by conversation and direct inquiry. The course used no books and going to the library was considered cheating. With the course “Practical Justice,” he put Lehigh’s first official “service learning” course into the catalogue (most recently taught in the Spring of 2009); and for a course "The Compassionate Society," which was set up as a senior thesis project, he focused on criminal justice and accompanied four students to a visit with condemned prisoners on Pennsylvania’s death row.
Steffen serves on dozens of committees, both at Lehigh and off campus. Committee service includes the IRB for Lehigh University and Haverford College, and the Ethics Committee at St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem (Fountain Hill). Steffen has recently been elected to his second term as Secretary for the Board of Directors of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in Washington, D.C. He served two terms as vice-chair and continues as that organization's NGO representative to the United Nations. He represented RCRC in the professional group that was assembled to produce the document, In Good Conscience: The Delivery of Medical Care in a Pluralistic Society. This document can be viewed on the web site of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, www.rcrc.org. He was assigned the responsibility of organizing a "year of preparation" in anticiption of the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Lehigh in July of 2008, and various academically related activities took place on campus, including visits from major Tibetan Buddhist scholars (Donald Lopez, Robert Thurman, Janet Gyatso), Naropa University President Thomas Coburn, and Zen psychiatrist Barry Magid.
Steffen is married to Emmajane Finney, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ who currently works for The United Way of the Lehigh Valley. They have much in common, including three sons, Nathan 22(now graduated from Otterbein College) , and 20 year old identical twins, Sam (Bard College) and Will (Hampshire College). Steffen plays acoustical guitar, including a twelve string, in "Religion and Cash," a cover band with Ben Wright (Religion Studies) and Bill Stanford (Financial Aid–the cash part, get it?), and contributes some original songs to the set lists. (Steffen has performed some of his original numbers at "open mic" night at Godfrey Daniels in South Bethlehem.) Among the group's venues in the Lehigh Valley and beyond have been several years running as a Main Street performance for Bethlehem's annual Musikfest and even a gig at the Society of Biblical Literature in 2005. (The band has a web site: http://myspace.com/religionandcash ).
Recent professionally-related travels have included trips to the Franklinton Center in North Carolina; Washington, D.C.; Hiroshima, Japan; Oxford, England; Salzburg, Austria and this coming summer Beijing, China.
For information about activities of the Chaplain's Office and Steffen's role as University Chaplain, please go to Chaplain's Office.