Sometimes it seems that our politicians, policy experts, and scholars devote excess energy to seeking answers before reflecting critically on the questions. Our February luncheon speaker urges us to reexamine the often unspoken assumptions that drive our intellectual inquiry and advocacy alike. His title: “On Asking the Right Questions.”

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, associate professor of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, is an activist scholar whose life and work are focused on addressing the political, economic, faith, and foreign policy dimensions of hunger and poverty.

He has worked continuously since 1978 as a writer and public speaker addressing peace and justice issues. A few sample titles from among his thirteen books illustrate his intellectual range—Authentic Hope: It’s the End of the World as We Know It but Soft Landings Are Possible; Saving Christianity from Empire; Harvest of Cain (a mystery novel set in El Salvador); Water More Precious than Oil; and Brave New World Order: Must We Pledge Allegiance?

Nelson-Pallmeyer has long operated in the boundary zones between academia and the public sphere, and his experiences have been as broad as his interests. Within academia, in addition to more than two decades of offering courses under the Peace and Justice, Political Science, and Theology rubrics at St. Thomas, he has taught at Metro State University and Augsburg College. He has also led travel seminars to Mexico, Southern Africa, and Central America for Augsburg’s Center for Global Education (CGE); co-directed CGE’s James Mayer House of Studies in Managua, Nicaragua; and led a St. Thomas January term to Cuba.

Outside the academy he has served as national coordinator of the Politics of Food Program, Clergy and Laity Concerned, New York; program director of the American and Lutheran Church in America’s Hunger and Justice Project in Minnesota; member of the board of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum; and consultant to Social Action Ministries and Small Christian Communities, Pax Christi Catholic Church, Eden Prairie. He founded the Minnesota Arms Spending Alternatives Project and made runs for Congress—in 2006 for the Fourth District DFL nomination and in 2007–08 for the U.S. Senate seat.

Nelson-Pallmeyer’s priority concerns include: how and why the United States became a permanent warfare state with few seeming to care; alternatives to violence; climate change and ecological challenges; inequality; and pathways to meaningful social change. In his view, all of these areas illustrate failure to ask the right questions. In preparation for his luncheon session with us, he asks UMRA members to think about other examples from their own experience.

— Chip Peterson, UMRA president-elect and Program Committee chair