Dear friends of the Center for the Study of World Religions,
Greetings on this lovely fall day.
Much unseen work prepares the way for any new academic year. Schedules need to be arranged, times and places found for regular and special events, and special efforts made to avoid conflicts in timing with other events of interest on campus. The Center is no exception; we have been working hard since the late winter and spring to schedule events for the 2015–16 academic year. As it turns out, our hard work has paid off. The Center will have many events on its calendar, including many of general and wide interest.
We began the year's programming on Tuesday, September 15, at noon, with the first of our occasional "Religion in the News" series. These lunchtimes events seek to address, in as timely as possible a fashion, topics of import—religion in the news, religion as news—where differences in opinion are likely, and thus where productive conversations can occur. Our first topic was "The Curious Case of Kim Davis: Public Service vs. Private Belief."
As you know, Ms. Davis is the Kentucky County Clerk who refused to issue any marriage licenses to same-sex couples because she refused to "violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage." She was put in jail for contempt of court and is now out, but still at the center of controversy about how religion and conscience, the law and her job, were in conflict. Some online reports inquire into her character and personal life. The larger issues still matter: how such dilemmas are to be sorted out in American society, and whether we ourselves have been or will be faced with similar challenges of conscience. I am sure other (good and bad news) topics will occupy lunchtime conversations throughout the entire year.
Later in the week, we have an event of wide relevance and interest, a panel on race and religions: "Races and Religions: Does Knowing Globally Help Us At Home?" Its thesis, open to debate, is that how we know globally affects how we think (and act) locally. Does attention to cultures and religions around the world give us a fresh perspective on the problems facing society and religions here in the United States? Does looking at religious and social structures in East or South Asia or the Middle East, for example, help us to think differently about religious and social structures here? Does knowledge of Hinduism or Islam help us to see differently Christianity’s place in relation to race and religion in the U.S.? Will knowing more about religion, race, and society in Africa or East Asia, help us to be better able to speak intelligently and effectively when the next Ferguson or Staten Island or Charleston erupts somewhere in the U.S.?
We have for this discussion a very fine panel of speakers: Arthur Kleinman, Director of the Asia Center; Ali Asani, Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program; Michelle Chaplin Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Theology at HDS; and Ayodeji Ogunnaike, PhD candidate in African Studies and Religion at FAS. Given the Center's current vision as a crossroads for the many conversations occurring at the Divinity School, I am confident that this panel—helping us to link the conversation on race and the study of religions and cultures—will lead to other such conversations during the year.
We also have the first two of our distinguished lectures this semester. On October 1, at 5:15 pm, Steven Kepnes, Director of the Chapel House and Professor of Religion at Colgate University, will deliver this year's Albert and Vera List Fund for Jewish Studies Lecture on "Jewish Liturgy as Jewish Theology." On October 19, at 5 pm, Dr. Richard Grounds, executive director of the Euchee/Yuchi Language Project, will deliver this year's Dana McLean Greeley Lecture for Peace and Social Justice on "Reparations for Native American Languages? Churches, Governments, and Cultural Genocide."
Lectures in the fields of religion in Korea, and Comparative Theology, will occur in the spring. Plus, our newest addition, the Annual Hindu View of Life Lecture. The spring will also see a small workshop on sacramental theology in a comparative context; and plans are under way for an October 2016 conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Ecology and Religions conferences—and subsequent volumes—that occurred at the Center beginning in 1996. Check the CSWR website for more on these events as the year progresses.
Every year we have events celebrating the release of new faculty books. Among the events this year, we discuss new books by former Director John B. Carman, Christians in South Indian Villages, 1959-2009, on November 5; Matthew L. Potts, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories on November 16; Ahmed Ragab, The Medieval Islamic Hospital, on December 3. Book events still to be scheduled during 2015-16 include books by Giovanni Bazzana, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, and Janet Gyatso. Our website will carry full details on all these events.
Some of our events are fine-tuned, aimed at particular audiences—faculty or doctoral students, for instance, MDiv and MTS students, or visiting fellows at the Center and Divinity School, or Center residents. For instance, we have four faculty/graduate student colloquia beginning in the next several weeks (Comparative Studies; Material Religion; Orientalism and Religion; Theological and Religious Thought), and three junior fellow projects, undertaken by residents of the Center, as contributions to our programming (Comparative Theology; Gender and Religion in the Japanese and Korean Contexts; Religion and Business). Honoring an old tradition of the Center as a residential community, the 20 or so residents gather for a sharing of work in progress almost every Wednesday evening.
I could go on, listing other activities, but the above list gives you an idea of how the Center is functioning today. If we step back from the details, we can see that all of these activities contribute to the fulfillment of the Center's mission statement, newly affirmed in recent months, “to promote the study of the world's religions in their classical and historical forms, drawing on traditional and contemporary disciplines of learning; to further understanding of the complex roles that religions play in today's cultures, economies, and political structures; to foster community of life and intellectual exchange among the faculty, students, and staff of the Divinity School, particularly through the unique resource that is the Center's residential community; to facilitate the interaction of the Divinity School's faculty and students with colleagues around the university, as well as institutional collaboration with other schools and centers; to convene conversations among scholars and practitioners across the global network that is the Center's heritage and future.”
There is much to be done, but 2015-16 will, I am confident, signal very well how our programming and our mission cohere in service of the School and University.
Many of the events I have mentioned are open to all interested persons. When you notice the advertisements for them on this site, please mark them in your calendar and come if you can. If you would like to be on our mailing list and receive weekly updates, please contact us. And do drop in at the Center when you are in the area, and visit our beautiful building and garden.
Sincerely,
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Director