Robert L. Bonn has pursued a lifelong interest in studying the dynamics of human society, teaching sociology, and conducting empirical research in the diverse areas of religion, education, criminal justice and social change. During a career that spanned three decades he was the author of a major textbook, Criminology and many journal articles on the subjects of conflict resolution, the clergy occupation, and other topics in crime and criminal justice.

 

Dr. Bonn has also examined society and social change in ways that go well beyond empirical sociology. In Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel, The Elder he examined how an Old Master artist’s paintings captured the wisdom of everyday life so profoundly that even today, they still have much to tell us. It was in studying one of Bruegel’s most famous paintings, The Tower of Babel, that Dr. Bonn came to realize how the myth of the tower aptly explains the dynamics of our society by capturing the tensions between moral and material forces. By an odd coincidence Dr. Bonn was working on his Bruegel book on the very day that the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell on 9/11, the event which provided the impetus for his writing The Unfinished Tower of Babel.