Faculty Lunches

April 6, 2015
Faculty Lunches

Much of the programming of the Center is public, and we are delighted when our audience includes visitors from campus and the larger community. Some events, however, are by invitation, for select groups, and are aimed at cultivating longer-term conversations that are interesting in themselves and also enhance our sense of intellectual community, as we meet and talk about issues of substance and interest.

Among our regular more focused events are monthly lunches for our regular faculty. We have found that with our many projects and duties, in the classroom and outside, we rarely have a chance to talk with one another about our work in progress, larger issues pertaining to religion and to the role of theologians and scholars of religion in today’s world, etc. When we do meet, most often it is necessarily to talk about the immediate demands of school business, curricular issues, and the like. Accordingly, even a brief time together for quality conversations is much appreciated, and I decided that the Center could and should offer the to host such conversations.

Topics have ranged across a wide array of issues. Presentations this year have included: “Liminal Encounters at the Edges of a Sabbatical,” “Alchemy and Ecology: Talking about Anthroposophy to Unitarian Universalists and Harvard Scientists,” “Wilfred Cantwell Smith and ‘Orientalism’,” “T.E. Lawrence’s Confession of Faith,” “Muslim theology at German Universities: Establishing Equal Status of Religions in German Academia,” and “The Making of Science-and-Islam: Identity and Progress in the Colonial and Postcolonial Middle East.” Since our fields are so diverse, the conversations are wide-reaching and stretch toward more general insights and applications, leaving to specialist technical gatherings on and off campus the details of the research.

For convenience, these lunches are held before each regular faculty meeting, and therefore on Mondays once a month, about six times an academic year. Our final lunch will occur in early May, and will be on the timely theme, “Religion and the Recent Nigerian Elections.”

While these lunches are not open to the wider community, I hope that you find it interesting to know that on occasion HDS faculty put aside their regular work and school business, just to talk with one another about ideas that matter.

—By Francis X. Clooney, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions