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Newsletter: Shorts
Departmental News in Brief
Carl Evans is a contributor to the new South Carolina Encyclopedia and has been invited to contribute to the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora. In August he spoke on “Issues Common to All Minority Populations” at the Minority Issues Conference of the SC Commission for Minority Affairs. He was elected to the boards of the Ecumenical Institute of the Carolinas and of the SC Christian Action Council. He serves as vice chairman of the SC Council on the Holocaust, appointed by the Speaker of the SC House of Representatives, and continues to chair the Solomon-Tenenbaum Lectureship in Jewish Studies committee.
Hal French was invited for the third time to offer a five-day course, “Learning Non-Violence from Gandhi and Friends,” in March 2006 at the Ammerdown Retreat Center in Bath, England. On the same trip he presented three lectures (on Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Gandhi) at a 75th anniversary gathering in celebration of the founding of the World Congress of Faiths in London. In the spring semester he taught for the Honors College a proseminar “The Cultural and Spiritual Heritage of Greece and Turkey,” followed by a Maymester on-site exploration. He and his thirty students visited Biblical and classical sites in Greece, then Ephesus and the islands of Crete, Patmos, Mykonos, and Santorini.
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| Cliff Hospital and Hal French |
In October 2005 Cliff Hospital was presented the Distinguished Service Award by the Alumni Association of Queen’s Theological College of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, “in recognition of outstanding service and commitment” to the College. He taught at Queen’s, 1971-2001, serving as Principal of the Theological College, 1983-1992, and as Head of the Department of Religious Studies, 1983-1990. At a symposium honoring the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2001) held at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, he presented two papers: “Thinking about India: my Debt to Wilfred Cantwell Smith” and “Transcendence: the Hidden Key”—to be published in a forthcoming volume of proceedings edited by John Ross Carter.
 Donald Jones preached on “The Breath of God” at a Lenten Service in March 2006 and taught a three-week series on the Gnostic Gospel of Judas in October at Trenholm Road United Methodist Church. He lectured on “Christianity and Emperor Worship from Hadrian to Constantine” for high school students attending Classics Day at USC in October. In January he will conduct a workshop on Gnosticism for UMC Directors of adult Christian Education in South Carolina, and he continues to organize the annual Hall Lectureship, featuring Amy-Jill Levine, March 29 and 30, 2007.
With fellow board member Becky Lewis, Kevin Lewis presented a paper, “Games, Newbolt, and the Girls,” at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Annual Meeting (March 2005). In April 2005 he presented “Hanan ‘Ashrawi’s Generosity to the ‘Other’: An Exception to the Rule in Palestinian Poetry of Resistance,” at the English Dept. conference, “Communities in Crisis: Isolation, Desecration, Transformation. In August he won a First Place prize of $100 in the Lake Murray Magazine writing contest for the poem “Easter Noon.”
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| Kevin Lewis consults with graduate student, Elizabeth Leverette |
On sabbatical in Jordan in Fall 2005, he published an op-ed column, “Whose America?” in The Jordan Times (Sept. 26) and “Religion and the Aims of Higher Education” in the University of Jordan semi-annual magazine, Campus News (July-Nov.). At the conference, “America in the Middle East/ The Middle East in America,” at the American University of Beirut in December he presented a paper, “Is ‘Civil Religion’ Possible, Helpful?.” He published a review of John Barbour’s The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography in a/b:Auto/Biography 20:1 (Summer 2005). In Spring 2006, Lewis gave a seminar on “Deploying William James and Rudolf Otto: A Case Study in Religious Criticism,” for PhD candidates in the Center for Study of Literature, Theology, and the Arts, Divinity School, University of Glasgow (March 2) and a Wolfson College [Cambridge] Research Colloquium, “American Cultural ‘Lonesomeness’: An Exploration of ‘Loneliness’ Transcended” (May 25). He presented a paper, “Religion in the Middle East: Implicit and/or Invisible,” at the annual conference on implicit religion at Denton Hall, Ilkley, Yorkshire (May 5).
Divine Wisdom (World Wisdom, 2006), the first of twenty-three projected volumes-in- translation of the The Collected Works of Frithjof Schuon, has been published by James Cutsinger. His article, “Perennial Philosophy and Christianity,” appeared in Christianity: The Complete Guide, ed. John Bowden (Continuum, 2005). In February 2006 he gave a workshop for the St. Helena Convent in Augusta, GA, on “Perennialism and World Religions,” and in November 2006, with Imam Muhammad Alhomsi, another for St. Paul Lutheran Church, Aiken, on inter-faith dialogue. At the Sacred Web Conference in Edmonton in September, he presented a paper, “The Noble Lie.”
Stephanie Mitchem made a second trip to Salvador, Brazil, this past summer to continue research on women, religion, and justice. Her host organization, the Instituto de Educacao Teologica da Bahia (ITEBA), was founded by twelve churches and religious organizations to promote understanding of the role played by theology in constructing dialogical identities, to contribute to the exercise of citizenship through critical, humanistic education, and to prepare fully modernized individuals and groups for the world of work in an ecumenical spirit that respects cultural and religious differences.
Waleed El-Ansary attended and spoke at the conference with the Dalai Lama in San Francisco in April 2006. He presented a paper, “An Islamic View of the Interconnections between Religion, Conflict, and Peace,” at a meeting of Muslim scholars at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, in August 2006.
Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary and Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Jack Rogers, gave a lecture, “Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church,” at USC on October 2, 2006.
Public Lecture
Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary and Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Jack Rogers, gave a lecture, “Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church,” at USC on October 2, 2006.
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