Faculty

Gray taught previously at Middle Tennessee State University and Earlham College before joining COA fulltime in 1994. He grew up on MDI and was a guinea pig student in COA’s first experimental classes in the summer of 1971. He also served atCOA as an admissions officer for COA from 1974-76.

Gray’s teaching has ranged widely over the last 20 years with philosophically grounded courses designed to prepare students to collabora te effectively in interdisciplinary projects dealing with human ecological problems in a wide variety of complex contexts and cross-cultural settings. He continues to do research on ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, peace studies, language learning, artificial intelligence and futures studies. He uses Spanish, French and German in teaching, research and music and has led programs abroad in Mexico and France. He is a singer-songwriter who has put out four CDs with songs dealing with love, peace, social justice and lullabies that put babies to sleep with visions of a world transformed. They are available at: https://graycox.bandcamp.com/.

Gray is a cofounder and current clerk of the Quaker Institute for the Future, a non-profit organization promoting research on social and environmental concerns out of the spiritual tradition of the Religious Society of Friends. (www.quakerinstitute.org). Gray has collaborated in a variety of projects in community organizing, peace work, election observation and sustainable development. These have included, for example, serving as the Principal Investigator on an NSF grant studying cultural aspects of residential heating behaviour in Maine and serving as a translator for a community based ecological film project in San Crisanto, Yucatan.

Gray’s publications include three books: The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy (University Press of America, 1983), The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action (Paulist Press, 1986) and A Quaker Approach To Research: Collaborative Practice and Communal Discernment (Quaker Institute for the Future 2014). He has also published a wide variety of articles and book chapters on a on social theory, ethics, philosophy, peace studies and artificial intelligence, the most recent of which are: Reframing Ethical Theory, Pedagogy, and Legislation to Bias Open Source AGI Towards Friendliness and Wisdom (Journal of Evolution and Technology, November, 2015) and “Gandhi’s Dialogical Truth Force: Applying Satyagraha Models of Practical Rational Inquiry to the Crises of Ecology, Global Governance, and Technology” (Contemporary Studies in Gandhian Philosophy, Routledge Press, forthcoming).

At the Hope Festival in Orono, Maine, and at College of the Atlantic, In April of 2017, he and and a diverse team presented “sing throughs” of his draft work in progress, “Fire in the Commons”. It is a full length musical in the tradition of old time Camp Fire Shows with lots of community collaboration and sing alongs envisioning a dramatically better future.