Newsletter: Shorts 2003

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


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Newsletter: Shorts 2003

Departmental News in Brief

Carl Evans

Carl Evans' previously published essay, "The Church's False Witness Against the Jews," has been published in Voices from the Religious Left, ed. Rebecca Alpert (Temple Univ. Press, 2000) and selected for inclusion on religion-online.org. He presented a paper, "Why Were Divine Images Proscribed in Ancient Israel? Population Movements and the Social Origins of Aniconism," at the international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Cambridge, England. In November he will present a two-day workshop for Atlantische Akademie in Boppard, Germany, on the theme, "Religious Diversity in the United States and South Carolina." As primary organizer of the interfaith discussion project in South Carolina, Partners in Dialogue, he has met with several delegations from abroad sponsored by the US Department of State and the Columbia Council for International Visitors to explain this work.

Anne Blackburn

Anne Blackburn has left the department to take an appointment in the department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Hal French

Hal French and Board of Trustees member Michael Mungo, sponsor of Mungo Scholarship aid for students planning to attend seminary.

Hal French's essay, "Religion and Football: The Cult of the Fighting Gamecock," was published in a collection of selected papers presented over a twenty-year period at conferences on "Implicit Religion" in England (The Secular Quest for meaning in Life, Mellen, 2002). He gave a plenary lecture at a conference on "The Continuing Relevance of Swami Vivekananda for the Modern World" at UMass/Dartmouth, and led a day workshop, "Gandhi, King, and the legacy of Non-Violence," at the Ammerdown Retreat center outside Bath, England, in 2003. He is serving a three-year term as Program Chair for the North American Interfaith Network.

Donald Jones

Donald Jones with Preston College students, Marianne Parrish and Josh Watson.

Donald Jones continues to chair the Hall Lectureship in New Testament and Early Christianity: filled by Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale University, Spring 2003, and to be filled in Spring 2004 by John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University. He taught a four-week series on the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas at Trenholm Road Methodist Church in October, 2003.

Jim Cutsinger

In addition to the publications mentioned in the article on Jim Cutsinger, he has published "Colorless Light and Pure Air: The Virgin in the Thought of Frithjof Schuon" (Maria: A Journal of Marian Studies, 2002), "The Mystery of the Two Natures" (Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man, ed. Barry McDonald [World Wisdom, 2002]), "The Ladder of Divine Ascent: The Yoga of Hesychasm" (Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart in the Eastern Church, ed. Bernadette Dieker and Jonathan Montaldo [Fons Vitae, 2003]), and "On Earth as It Is in Heaven" (Science and the Myth of Progress, ed. Mehrdad M. Zarandi [World Wisdom, 2003]). He has been promoted to full professor.

Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis published two more entries, "Kosinski, Jerzy" and "Sexton, Anne," in the new 4th edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. He presented papers at the Tenth Annual Holocaust Conference in Jerusalem ("Remorseless Entertainment"), the 2001 meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference ("American Lonesomeness in Hopper"), the 2003 meeting of the southeast section of the American Academy of Religion ("The Weightless Magic of Amazing Grace"), and the 2003 meeting of the South Carolina Academy of Religion ("Liberal Calvinism Meets Religious Pluralism: A High-Wire Act"). He has been elected to the governing board of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and served as moderator of panels on "Islam in the South" and "Gay People and Organized Religion" at two spring forum events sponsored by the Center on Religion in the South at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.

Jon Michael Spencer

Jon Michael Spencer

Jon Michael Spencer presented three invited lectures in Yugoslavia in the fall of 2002: "What is Black Music: The Perspective of Theomusicology" in the Academy of Arts at the University of Novi Sad and at the Music Information Centre in Belgrade; "The Blues Nature of African American Culture" at the Culture Centre of Novi Sad and at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade; and "The Experience of Learning" in the Faculty of Music at the University of the Arts in Belgrade.

Jan Love

Jan Love published "At What Price Unity? The Politics of Prayer" in Zion's Herald (June 2003), "Can We All Agree? Governing the WCC by Consensus" in Christian Century (November 6-19, 2002), a longer version of which appeared subsequently in The Ecumenical Review (January 2003) and in Okumenische Rundschau (Spring 2003); and "The Decade to Overcome Violence: Harvest from an Ecumenical Journey" in The Ecumenical Review (April 2001). She published "Issues Affecting Christian Women" and "Women and Ethnic, Racial and Religious Differences" in Women and International Human Rights Law, Vol. 3, eds. Kelly Askin and Dorean Koenig (Transnational, 2001).

Randy Akers

"Randy Akers, Mystagogue"

Randy Akers, Executive Director of the Humanities Council of SC, is again this fall teaching RELG E111: Biblical History and Literature as an adjunct professor.

Lecturship Speakers

Fr. Donald Cozzens

Fr. Donald Cozzens, professor of pastoral theology at John Carroll University, filled the Joseph Cardinal Bernadin Lectureship in the fall of 2002, taking part in a panel discussion and speaking on "Dying and Rising: The Priesthood in Peril." Jossi Klein Halevi, Israel correspondent for The New Republic, widely published columnist, and author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (William Morrow, 2001), presented the Solomon-Tenenbaum Lecture in 2002 on "After the Collapse of the Left and the Right: Toward a new Israeli Consensus on Territories and Peace."

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