Biography
He is the second-oldest son of former United States Vice President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and his first wife, Mary Rockefeller.
Rockefeller attended prestigious Deerfield Academy and received his AB from Princeton University, where he received the Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize and was president of The Ivy Club; his Master of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary in New York City; and a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University. He is a professor emeritus of Religion at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont where he previously served as college dean and chairman of the religion department.
In 1959, he married Anne-Marie Rasmussen in Søgne, Norway; Anne-Marie was a former employee in the Rockefeller household. The couple had three children before divorcing. Steven Rockefeller remarried and had one child before the marriage ended in divorce. He then wed Barbara Bellows on May 11, 1991.
In 1976, he began an intensive study of Zen Buddhism, making frequent week-long visits to the Zen Center in Rochester, where he was a trustee.
He coordinated the drafting of the Earth Charter for the Earth Charter Commission and Earth Council. In 2005, he moderated the international launch of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) (2005–14) in its headquarters in New York, launched by UNESCO and attended by Nane Annan, the wife of Secretary General Kofi Annan. He is Co-Chair of Earth Charter International Council and has written numerous essays on the Earth Charter, available at the Earth Charter website.
He was at one time directly involved with the Wendell Gilley Museum, a small institution on Mount Desert Island in Maine that houses one of the world's great collections of wooden carvings of American birds.
Read more about this topic: Steven Clark Rockefeller
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)