Newsletter: Shorts 2001

USC: COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE: DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES


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Newsletter: Shorts 2001

Departmental News in Brief

Carl Evans

Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Joan Hinde Steward and Carl Evans appraise a vessel from an Iron Age 1 storage chamber at Tel Rumeideh (Hebron).

Originally published in Bible Review, Carl Evans' article, “The Patriarch Jacob-An Innocent Man,” will be republished in The Family of Abraham (Biblical Archeology Society, 2000). In March he presented his research on ethnic and religious identity and categories of otherness in ancient Judah to the Faculty Research Seminar sponsored by the Walker Institute. In the fall he will begin his third term as department chair.

Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis's short memoir, “Innocence and Experience,” is included among contributions to a volume, Born Into a World at War, in which thirty-one Harvard classmates from 1965 reflect on the impact that World War II had upon their families. He published a note on Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist in Religious Studies Review and a poem, "In the Furnace of Desire" (for Maurice “Rocket” Richard) in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

In November he made a formal response to a paper, “To the Advantage of Infidelity, Or How Not to Deal with Religion in America's Public Schools” (by Richard A. Baer, Jr., and James C. Carper), in a public seminar sponsored by the College of Education. In January he gave a paper, “Lest We Forget the Devine Sarah,” to the local Loblollies Society and took up a Governor's appointment on the SC Holocaust Council. In March he presented papers on W.H. Auden (Southeast Sectional, American Academy of Religion) and on Iago's aria, Credo in un dio crudel, in Verdi's Otello (Nineteenth-Century Studies Association).

Donald Jones

Donald Jones continues to serve as associate chair of the department, providing invocations and benedictions at University public events.

Anne Blackburn

Anne Blackburn spent much of last summer at Harvard working on her translation of an 18th-century Buddhist historical text from Sri Lanka and completing three related articles. The revised MA curriculum approved by the Graduate Council in December and the new faculty associates program for the department are the products chiefly of her industry and vision.

Her book, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in the Monastic Culture of 18th-Century Sri Lanka, will appear from Princeton University Press later this spring. This semester she is teaching a new version of her course, “Introduction to Buddhism,” using American Buddhism as a foundation from which to examine the history of Buddhism in Asia.

In May she will conduct research in London and in 2001-2002 go on leave, with NEH fellowship support, to pursue the project, “Education, Devotion and Identity in Late Colonial Sri Lanka.”

Jim Cutsinger

James Cutsinger, promoted to the rank of professor last year, has been devoting much of his time to plans for the conference “Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East” (October 18-20, 2001), a major international symposium, sponsored in part by the USC Bicentennial Commission, which will bring together leading authorities on the mystical dimension of Islam and the Eastern Church. (For further information and to register online, visit www.pathstotheheart.com.) He is in the beginning stages of editing The Collected Works of Frithjof Schuon, and his upcoming lectures include “Anselm's Excitatio Mentis” at Thomas Aquinas College in April. For more, visit www.cutsinger.net.

Hal French

In January Hal French gave a keynote address, “A Place of Meeting Rivers,” at a gathering sponsored by the World Congress of Faiths and the International Association for Religious Freedom in St. Petersburg, Florida. March found him in Oxford, England, where he reported on interfaith activity in North America to the annual meeting of the International Interfaith Centre.

photo of Jon Michael Spencer

Jon Michael Spencer

Jon Michael Spencer

In the break between semesters Jon Michael Spencer traveled to India seeking influence upon his own musical compositions and to continue photographing Islamic architecture. He collected books by Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore in preparation for offering a course on Martin Luther King, Jr., and for writing a book on creativity.

associates

The department continues to enjoy the services of Mark Jones, Randy Akers, and Rabbi Sandy Marcus as instructors in courses offered in religious studies and, in the case of Marcus's two-semester sequence on the history of Judaism, cross-listed with History.

K.L. Seshagiri Rao continues as Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, a major project sponsored by the department, and as co-editor of World Faiths Encounter (the journal of the World Congress of Faiths), as well as adjunct member of this department's faculty. Dr. Rao gave a keynote address, “Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” at the St. Petersburg, Florida meeting.

photo of Anne Lucht

Anne Lucht

Anne Lucht, executive assistant

Anne (Mrs. Thomas) Lucht has served the department as executive assistant and sole staff support since 1986. She reports that son Robert is a sophomore at USC in Columbia. Son William,who is five, keeps her running.

graduate students

Congratulations to successful defenders of MA theses since the appearance of last year's newsletter: Mark Jennings (“Honor, Shame, and Patronage: A Study of the Conflict of 1st Corinthians”), Kevin Vaccarella (“Demographics and Israelite Religion: A Reevaluation of the Motivations Behind the Late Monarchic Reforms”), and Brandice Whiten (“Ethical and Religious Paradigms in Apocalyptic Womanist Science Fiction”).

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