Robert A. Rees is an educator, scholar and poet. Since 1998 he has been Director of Education and Humanities at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California. Rees conducts training and does workshops throughout the United States.

Current

Rees's social commentary on Glenn Beck.

• “Glenn Beck: Rough Stone Rolling,” Sunstone No. 159 (June 2010), 9-27.

Biography

Rees received his undergraduate education at Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...

. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison

University of Wisconsin–Madison

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...

. He was for many years a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles

University of California, Los Angeles

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

. He was also a bishop of the Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

 1st Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Rees served for a time as a Fulbright

Fulbright Program

The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...

 Professor of Vytautas Magnus University

Vytautas Magnus University

Vytautas Magnus University ) is a public university in Kaunas, Lithuania. The university was founded in 1922 during the interwar period as an alternate national university...

 in Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

.

Rees and his wife Ruth served as education, humanitarian, and service missionaries

Missionary (LDS Church)

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most active modern practitioners of missionary work, with over 52,000 full-time missionaries worldwide, as of the end of 2010...

 in the Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

 and Baltic States

Baltic states

The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

 Missions

Mission (LDS Church)

A mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical administrative area to which church missionaries are assigned. Almost all areas of the world are within the boundaries of an LDS Church mission, whether or not Mormon missionaries live or proselytize in the area...

 of the LDS Church. In October 1992, Rees and his wife became the first LDS Church missionaries to work in Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

 since the fall of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

.

Education

• Ph.D. (Literature and Philosophy) University of Wisconsin, 1966
• M.A. (Literature) University of Wisconsin, 1962
• B.A. (English and French) Brigham Young University, 1960
• Certificate (French Language and Literature) Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, 1959
• Certificate Center for Educational Leadership, Los Angeles, 1972
• Certificate (Inner-Quality Management) Institute of HeartMath, Boulder Creek, CA, 2001

Teaching

Rees has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin, UCLA (for twenty-five years), UC Santa Cruz, Vytautaus Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania), and California State Universities at Northridge and Los Angeles. He has taught thirty different courses in the Arts and Humanities and has taught at the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education levels. Rees has lectured at universities in China, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Kaliningrad. Recently he held the position of visiting scholar at the Centers for Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University (1994-95). Currently he teaches religion at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Courses taught: 1964-2010

• The American Dream
• Americans in a Changing World
• American Literature, 1801 1865
• American Literature, 1866 1912
• The American Novel
• The British and American Short Story
• British Literature, 1660 1832
• British Literature, 1832 present
• The Devil in American Literature and Thought (seminar)
• Fiction and Film: The American Short Story
• Introduction to Drama
• Introduction to the Fine Arts
• Introduction to Methods of Literary Research (graduate)
• Introduction to Mormonism (graduate)
• Introduction to Poetry
• Introduction to Short Fiction
• James Joyce's Dubliners (seminar)
• Literature and Film (graduate)
• Major American Authors
• Modern American Literature
• Modern American Poetry
• Modern Fiction
• Modern Moral Problems (freshman honors)
• Prosody
• Reading Texts (graduate course in Shakespeare and modern texts)
• The Book of Mormon (graduate; scheduled for spring 2011)
• Time and Timelessness in American Literature and Thought (seminar)
• 20th Century British and American Poetry
• 20th Century British Poetry and Short Prose
• The Vanished Garden: Nature and Ecology in American Literature (seminar)

International Education

Rees has extensive experience in international education. He established and was the Director of Studies for three UCLA Extension programs in England--with Cambridge University and with the Royal Colleges of Art and Music. He was also involved in education initiatives in London, Paris and the former Soviet Union and led two delegations of distinguished American writers to China. Between 1992-1996, Rees was a visiting professor of American Literature at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, where he also served as a Fulbright Professor of American Studies (1995-96). He has lectured at universities in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Kaliningrad.

Humanitarian Service and Interfaith Work

For the past twenty years Rees has been active in humanitarian and interfaith work. He was Director of Humanitarian Services for Deseret International Charities in the Baltics (1994-96), President of the University Religious Council at UC Santa Cruz (1998-2000), and member of the Santa Cruz Interfaith Council (1998-2001). Currently he serves on the Advisory Board of S.A.F.E. (Save Council (1998-2001). Currently he serves on the Advisory Board of S.A.F.E. (Save African Families Enterprise), a non-profit organization providing antiviral drugs to HIV positive pregnant women in Zimbabwe; is a founding member and Vice-president of the Liahona Children’s Foundation, an organization that provides nutrition and education to children in the developing world; and is a director of the New Spectrum Foundation.

Publications

Following are some of Robert Rees' publications, a more complete list is forthcoming. He has also contributed to the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and pointed out many flaws in the automatic writing

Automatic writing

Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...

 theories of the origins of the Book of Mormon

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2600 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr...

.

Mormon Studies

• Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons (forthcoming from Signature Books, December 2010)
• “How the Nephites Sustained Two Hundred Years of Peace,” (forthcoming in a collection to be published by the Maxwell Center, Brigham Young University)
• “Glenn Beck: Rough Stone Rolling,” Sunstone No. 159 (June 2010), 9-27.
• “Toward a Mormon Feminist Midrash: The Prodigal Daughter and Other Imaginative Readings of Scripture,” Sunstone Symposium, 2009; submitted to Sunstone
• “The Midrashic Imagination and the Book of Mormon,” forthcoming from Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
• Pillars of My Faith, editor. a collection of personal essays on faith (in preparation), to be published by Signature Books.
• New Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poetry, editor, with Joanna Brooks (in preparation), to be published by Signature Books.
• “Alma the Younger’s Seminal Sermon at Zarahemla,” Festschrift in Honor of Kent Brown (forthcoming from Brigham Young University Press)
• “How Mormons Could Help End the Genocide in Darfur,” Sunstone 152 (Dec. 2008), 26-29.
• “The Goodness of the Church,” Dialogue 41:1 (Summer 2008) 162-173.
• The Reader’s Book of Mormon, co-ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008).
• “Mormons and the Cross,” Sunstone Symposium, 2007.
• “The Cost of Credulity: Mormon Urban Legends and the War on Terror,” Sunstone 144 (Dec. 2006).
• “The Book of Mormon and Automatic Writing,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15:1 (2006), 4-17, 68-70.
• “‘Lord, To Whom Shall We Go?’ The Challenges of Discipleship and Church Membership,” Dialogue (fall 2006), 103-114.
• “An Open Letter to Nathan Oman,” Dialogue, 39:2 (Summer 2006), 173-177.
• “The Possibilities of Dialogue,” Dialogue 39:2 (Summer 2006), 97-99.
• “Seeing Joseph Smith: The Changing Image of the Mormon Prophet,” Sunstone 140 (December 2005), 18-27.
• “Introduction,” Proving Contraries: A Collection of Writings in Honor of Eugene England, ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), xiii-xx.
• “Why Mormons Should Celebrate Holy Week,” Dialogue 37:3 (Fall 2004), 151-167.
• “America’s War on Terrorism: One Latter-day Saint’s Perspective,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36:1 (Spring 2003), 11-32.
• “Irony in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (fall 2003), 20-31
• “Joseph Smith and the American Renaissance,” Dialogue 35:3 (Fall 2002), 83-112.
• “Forgiving the Church and Loving the Saints: Spiritual Evolution and the Kingdom of God” Sunstone 16:1 (February 1992), 18-27.
• “Monologues and Dialogues: A Personal Perspective” Dialogue 20:2 (Summer 1987)
• “Ammon,” in The Book of Mormon: It Begins with A Family (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983), 79-89.
• “‘Cooperating in Works of the Spirit’: Notes Toward a Higher Dialogue” Dialogue 11:1 (Spring 1978), 13-17.
• “The Possibilities of Dialogue” Dialogue 9:3 (Autumn 1974)
• “The Gospel, Mormonism and American Culture” Dialogue 8:2 (Summer 1973)
• “A Continuing Dialogue” Dialogue 6:1 (Spring 1971)
• “’Truth is the Daughter of Time’: Notes toward an Imaginative Mormon History,” Dialogue 4:3/4 (1971), 15-22.
• “Articles and Essays in Mormon Studies” Dialogue 1:4 (Winter 1966)
• Melville's Alma and the Book of Mormon," Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 43 (II Quarter 1966), 41 46.

Poetry

• “Wedding Flower,” Dialogue 40:2 (fall 2007)
• “Black Handkerchief,” 40:2 Dialogue (fall 2007)
• “Gene at Wilder Beach,” Proving Contraries: A Collection of Writings in Honor of Eugene England, ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), xi.
• “El Cordero de Dios,” Dialogue 38:2 (Summer 2005), 186-87.
• “Baptism,” Dialogue 38:2 (Summer 2005), 188.
• “Heart Mountain,” Dialogue, 37:3 (Fall 2004), 138-39.
• “Blind Tears,” Dialogue 37:3 (Fall 2004), 168-171.
• “The Cedars of Lebanon,” Dialogue, 37:1 (Spring 2004)
• “Yellow Crane Tower,” “Spring Comes to the Ming Tombs,” “Liu Shahe,” and “Tai Chi in Xian”—in Kenneth Lincoln, A Writer’s China (Capra Press, April 1999)
• “Hearing the Han Shan Bell,” Lithuanian Association of North American Studies, 1 (1996), 30-33.
• "At St. Bartholomew the Great," Wasatch Review, 1993.
• "The Creatures We Kill," West/Word, Fall 1992.
• "Modern Poetry," Onthebus, Winter 1990.
• "Salamander," Sunstone, August 1989.
• "Fishers," Dialogue, January 1984. Named outstanding poem for 1984 by the Association of Mormon Letters. Reprinted in Final Harvest (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989)
• "The Dancing Beggar of London," BYU Studies, Spring 1984.
• "Once at La Jolla," Sunstone, 1984.
• "In St. Paul's Cathedral," BYU Studies, Spring 1982.
• "Gilead," Sunstone, Jan. Feb. 1981. Awarded prize for Best Poem by the Association of Mormon Letters. Reprinted in Final Harvest.
• "Somewhere Near Palmyra," Dialogue, Fall 1980. Reprinted in Final Harvest.

Media

• Producer, "The Golden Angel Over the City," a documentary film for Lithuanian State Television. Aired 18 February 1996.
• Producer, Director and Writer, "Spires to the Sun: Sabatino Rodia's Towers in Watts
  Simon Rodia
  Sabato "Simon" Rodia was an Italian-American architect. Rodia created the Watts Towers, one of the most famous landmarks in Los Angeles.-Biography:...
  
  ." A documentary film sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities which had its premier showing on Public Television Station KCET on 10 May 1992. Also shown on TELE-3, Lithuania, March 1993.
• Writer (with Ken Kemp) of a script entitled "Crucifixion of Innocents: The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer." Optioned by Artemis Films.
• Writer (with Ken Kemp) of an original screenplay entitled "A Perfect World.”
• Writer (with Raphael La Rosa) of a script, "Sabatino Rodia: the Artist Nobody Knows," for KCET Public Television.
• Executive Producer, "I Hear Tell: Storytelling in American Cultures," a projected documentary film on storytelling, funded through the planning and script development phases by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Designer, writer, and editor of a tele-course on the American Short Story, produced by Coastline Community College.

Sources

• Short bio of Rees
• Neal A. Maxwell Institute listing of works by Rees