Robert A. Evans 1959 B.A., 1963 M.Div.

Robert A. Evans, '59 B.A., '63 M.Div., Executive Director of the Plowshares Institute in Simsbury, CT, was chosen for the William Sloane Coffin Award for Peace and Justice.

The Plowshares Institute seeks to promote a more just and peaceful world community through research and education, service to developing communities, and innovative training in conflict transformation.

As executive director, Evans leads intensive traveling seminars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and conducts national and international seminars on skills training in conflict transformation. He serves as a senior fellow at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, South Africa and as senior trainer at the Centre for Empowering for Reconciliation and Peace based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The William Sloane Coffin Peace and Justice Award honors the long-time Yale chaplain and civil rights activist. In presenting the award to Evans, Allison Stokes, '76 M.Phil, '81 M.Div., '81 Ph.D., said, In Robert Evans we have a person who embodies the spirit of William Sloan Coffin.

Over the course of his career, Evans has written extensively on peace building and has taught and developed peace skills for community leaders and mediators around the world. His techniques of conflict transformation have impacted the peace process from post-apartheid South Africa to the brutal Indonesian resistance to East Timor 's independence, from the slums of Peru to the streets of inner-city Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Hartford.

Evans, who served as an assistant to Coffin as a student, said he was thankful for the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of William Sloane Coffin in some minor way. He offered his own definition of the axis of evil concept that has become so much a part of the American political vocabulary of terrorism. The real axis of evil, Evans said, includes poverty, war, and environmental degradation.

Evans also studied at the universities of Edinburgh, Berlin, and Basel and received his doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  An ordained Presbyterian pastor, he has served churches in the U.S. and Europe.