About the
Authors
Steven Philip Guerriero, PhD
Steve with his wife Joy have called Spofford, New Hampshire home since 1980. The couple raised their son, Réjean and daughter, Sarah, in a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse beside Pisgah State Park’s nearly 14 thousand acres of forest and trails. In these environs, one realizes the most important aspects of lifework are found in the family, community and the natural world.
A lover of the humanities, Steve grew to embrace an interdisciplinary approach to learning. By incorporating social, behavioral, natural and local knowledge, one’s perspective is opened to the expansive connection of ideas and possibilities, easily overlooked in a world of tightly defined disciplines. Exploring the concepts of system theories set the context for a deeper understanding of the amazing human process of meaning-making.
Steve was born and raised in northern New Jersey. He considers his middle and high school years at Delbarton School, St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, a transformational time. This truly holistic education, nurtured and unified his development of mind, body and spirit. Steve went on earn a bachelor’s degree in history from Seton Hall University and later complete masters’ degrees in management (Antioch University, AUNE) and organization development (Fielding Graduate University) and a doctorate in human and organizational systems (Fielding Graduate University).
His career path is filled with variety. Starting in social services, then entrepreneurial businesses in the food and hospitality industry and ending with a long career in higher education as a faculty member and administrator.
Steve would often say to his adult graduate students, “a career needs more than money, status and influence. It needs meaning and when that stops, it’s time to transition.”
Steve is former chair of the graduate management program at AUNE, as well as teaching courses in the master’s and doctoral program in Environmental Studies. He served as vice president for academic affairs at AUNE and later as graduate dean, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.
Now when not traveling to see their children and grandchildren, Steve and Joy continue to savor (with a few more aches and pains) their small family farm; witnessing the seasonal beauty from starry winter nights to vibrant summer gardens and more birds and wildlife than you can imagine.
Mary Catherine Bateson, PhD
In the last chapter of her life, we find Catherine doing what she loved, learning along the way and she welcomed opportunities to do so; sharing insights and aspirations with a room full of kindergarteners or doing the same with a room of prison inmates. This is where she laughed and learned.
Catherine led by example asking questions that expanded possibilities.
Whether in conversations at the Sloan Center on Aging and Work, the American Society for Cybernetics, Generations United, the American Anthropological Association or the National Center for Atmospheric Research, her message was consistent, be rigorously curious and open to the world around you.
A Professor Emerita from George Mason University, Catherine lived all over the world, taught at MIT, Harvard, Spellman, Anteneo de Manilla and many others. She founded institutions of learning, and taught graduate level courses in Arabic, Farsi and Tagalog as well as English. Her own love of learning came through in her engaging and accessible style of sharing knowledge. She had recomposed her life so many times she was an expert at building ensembles for learning, creativity and communion.
Catherine loved her home at RailAcres in Hancock NH. Sitting with her family at her harvest table carved from a single tree, looking out the windows for the one branch that turned red before any other was even considering turning yellow, or a fox crossing the meadow.
She might be found walking to Norway Pond, down a path through the woods resplendent with mushrooms contemplating the thousands of miles of mycelium connected underground. Back home, she hosted book groups, passing out mismatched mugs of tea, drawing threads from the Hebrew Bible, the Koran, the Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita and leaning in to learn more about her friends.
She finished her fourteenth book Thinking Race: Social Myths and Biological Realities and was working on her fifteenth, inspired by a series of lectures at Boston College titled Love Across Difference and the title of this book.
Her literary legacy is catalogued at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Some other books by Mary Catherine Batson.
Please support your local independent bookstore.
