On The Front Lines
The Rutherford Institute Partners with Barnes & Noble to Launch Speaker Series Featuring Political & Cultural Gadflies
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The Rutherford Institute is pleased to partner with Barnes & Noble to launch a speaker series featuring a broad array of political and cultural gadflies from a cross-section of cultural, philosophical and legal backgrounds who will address issues ranging from civil liberties post-9/11 and criminal justice reform to the dissolution of the print media, religious freedom in America, TSA scanners and threats to the Fourth Amendment, and what Americans can do to guard against attacks on the Constitution. The first of the series, scheduled for Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 6 pm EST in Charlottesville, Va., will feature Jim B. Tucker, M.D., a board-certified child psychiatrist who directs research into children’s reports of past-life memories at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, speaking about his new book, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives. A book signing will follow the event, which is free and open to the public.
“In Return to Life, Jim Tucker painstakingly and meticulously documents the recycling of memories from beyond the barrier of physical death,” stated author Deepak Chopra. “He then rigorously offers a scientific theory to explain how our consciousness transcends space/time and is, hence, eternal. This book is an important milestone of an emerging scientific paradigm that suggests that consciousness conceives governs constructs and becomes the universe or perhaps multiple universes.”
Jim B. Tucker, M.D., worked with Dr. Ian Stevenson, the founder of research into children’s reports of past-life memories at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, for several years before taking it over upon Dr. Stevenson’s retirement in 2002. Dr. Tucker was born and raised in North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA degree in psychology in 1982, followed by a Medical Degree four years later. He then received training in general psychiatry and child psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After he completed his training, he stayed in Charlottesville and began a successful private practice in psychiatry. After being in practice for five years, he was reading one of Dr. Stevenson’s books when he saw in a local newspaper that the Division of Perceptual Studies was starting a new study of near-death experiences. He contacted the division to see if help was needed in interviewing patients for the study and thus began spending very limited time at the division on a volunteer basis. Dr. Tucker, who was raised Southern Baptist, had never seriously considered the idea of reincarnation before reading Dr. Stevenson’s book, but he became intrigued both by the children’s reports of past-life memories and by the prospect of studying them using an objective, scientific approach. In 1999, he began working half-time at the division, focusing on the children’s cases, and a year later, gave up his private practice completely to work at the university. Dr. Tucker is the Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. His first book, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, has been translated into ten languages.
