Luther College welcomes best-selling guidebook author Rick Steves on April 27

Editor’s Note: The “Rick Steves: Travel with a Norwegian Sensibility” event on April 27 is sold out. Thank you to everyone who purchased tickets. Check out other events taking place at Luther College by visiting tickets.Luther.edu. 

Luther College is pleased to announce that Rick Steves, a popular public television host, a best-selling guidebook author, and an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel, will be speaking at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 27 at the Center for Faith and Life Main Hall.

Rick Steves

“We are excited to welcome Mr. Steves to campus this spring,” said Maren Johnson, director of the Torgerson Center for Nordic Studies and associate professor of Nordic Studies. “His life’s work has focused on the power of human connection through travel. As the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, his message and life’s work align with Luther’s commitment to study away and global education.”

His lecture titled “Travel with a Norwegian Sensibility” will reflect on his own heritage and the importance of continued connections across a global society. Steves will share photos, stories and insights from more than 50 years of traveling outside of the United States. Steves was 14 years old when his parents, Dick and June Steves, took him to visit his relatives in Norway.

“Visiting the house of my great-great-grandmother’s birth, I imagined the courage it must have taken to leave Norway and her entire family for America a century ago,” Steves wrote in “How Travel Pried Open My Hometown Blinders.”

As the first U.S. college founded by Norwegian immigrants, Luther is proud to host this event as part of a yearlong commemoration of the first organized migration from Norway to North America 200 years ago.

“As Luther commemorates the bicentennial of Norwegian immigration to North America, Mr. Steves’ visit will be a great kick off to reinforce the power of human connection in the global society,” Johnson said.

This event is sponsored by Luther College and the Torgerson Center for Nordic Studies, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, and Minnesota Public Radio, with support provided by the State Historical Society of Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.