Recent Grant Recipients

Faculty Grants, 2009-10

In 2009-10, the Center for the Study of World Religions will provide funding for the following projects of Harvard Divinity School (HDS) and Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) faculty:

Postcolonial-Gender-Race-Queer Theory in Practical Theology Consultation

Susan Abraham, Assistant Professor of Ministry Studies, HDS, will convene one or two closed consultations to examine the significance of critical theory, particularly developments arising from considerations of gender, race, sexual orientation, and colonialism as they intersect the teaching of Christianity in the formation of ministry students in a pluralistic world. Collaborators on the project include Wonhee Anne Joh, Garrett Evangelical Theological School; Kwok Pui-lan, Episcopal Divinity School; Stephanie Mitchem, University of South Carolina; Mayra Rivera, Pacific School of Religion; and Laurel Schneider, Chicago Theological Seminary.

Translating the Tiruvaymoli of Satakopan: Preliminary Collaboration

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, HDS, will collaborate with Archana Venkatesan, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature and Religious Studies Programs, University of California, Davis, in translating Tiruvaymoli from Tamil to English. This important medieval Hindu text, consisting of 1102 verses in Tamil, is the most important work of Srivaisnava Hinduism, with significance for the larger Indian devotional tradition. It covers a wide range of themes and genres, including philosophical reflection on the nature of God and language about God, ways of approach to God, divine action in myth and avatara, holy temples and pilgrimage sites and, using the genre of ancient Tamil love poetry, the experience of a woman and her beloved as illumining the drama of the divine-human relationship. A good English translation, both accurate and poetic, has long been desired, and this collaborative project aims at meeting the need.

Teaching Pluralism: Case Studies for the Theological and Religious Studies Classroom

Diana L. Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, FAS, member of the Faculty of Divinity, and the Pluralism Project staff in consultation with others will continue work funded by an earlier faculty grant on using the case-study method in teaching pluralism. The grant will fund student research on four additional cases and two workshops and include collaboration with Rabbi Justus Baird of Auburn Theological Seminary and other religious leaders. 

Christianity Along the Silk Road

Charles Stang, Assistant Professor of Early Christian Thought, HDS, will develop new curricula in world Christianity, focusing on the history of the Church of the East, with attention to premodern Christian communities in Persia, India, Central Asia, China, Tibet, and Mongolia. The grant will fund research assistance, research travel, and visits to Harvard by Dr. Christoph Baumer, Dr. Sidney Griffith, and others. Professor Stang will give a public lecture on the so-called Nestorian monument, an eighth-century Chinese stone commemorating a seventh-century mission to China by East Syrian Christians. A facsimile of the monument hangs in the CSWR lobby. Professor Stang eventually hopes to extend his research to other religious traditions along the Silk Road.

Highlights From Recent Years

Faculty projects funded by Center for the Study of World Religions grants in previous years include:

Revisiting Village Christian and Hindu Culture

John Carman, Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Religion Emeritus, HDS, collaborated with Dr. Chilkuri Vasantha Rao of the Andhra Christian Theological College in Hyderabad to study the interaction between Christians and Hindus in villages in the Wadiaram Pastorate, Church of South India. The project, primarily consisting of interviews with villagers, explored developments in daily life, religious activities, and spiritual beliefs to update the 1959 research captured in the book Village Christians and Hindu Culture, by P. Y. Luke and Carman. The findings of the study was also the basis for a collaborative spring 2009 HDS course entitled "Christian-Hindu Interaction in South Indian Village Society," cotaught with Dr. Vasantha Rao, CSWR Senior Visiting Fellow for that semester. (2008-09)

Televised Redemption: Media and Social Change in the African Diaspora

Marla Frederick, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of the Study of Religion, Department of African and African American Studies, FAS, traveled to South Africa to observe the first globalized Mega Fest Conference organized by televangelist T. D. Jakes to further her research on the influence of African American televangelists in the African diaspora. Additionally, she will host a four-day meeting at the CSWR with anthropologists John Jackson, Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Rouse, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, on their collaborative book project on religious broadcasting. The meeting to be scheduled during the academic year 2009-10 will conclude with a public brown bag luncheon panel discussion. (2008-09)

Buddhist Resources for Womanist Reflection

Charles Hallisey, Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures, HDS, held an invitational weekend workshop, where womanist writers, black Buddhists, black humanists, and Buddhism scholars read and discussed selected Buddhist texts collectively for the purpose of exploring how they might complement and enrich womanist concerns and studies. Building on this workshop, Hallisey will produce a volume of Buddhist texts and interpretive essays on them in collaboration with a womanist colleague, Melanie Harris, Assistant Professor, Texas Christian University. (2008-09)

A New Global History of Christianity

David Hempton, Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, HDS, conducted research on Christianity from 1650 to 1830 for the volume he is contributing to the new seven-volume History of Christianity. The volume is comprehensive and multidimensional in scope, covering Christianity throughout the world as practiced by persons from all social strata and including women and children. The extensive use of secondary sources required the work of a research assistant. Professor Hempton presented some of his thinking for the book at an informal CSWR faculty session. (2008-09)

Navigating the Past: Firstness and Secondness as Antipodean Tropes

In Australia and New Zealand, indigenous peoples typically invoke notions of first settlement in making claims for recognition and social justice. Such arguments reflect a universal strategy of giving legitimacy to present claims and convictions by prioritizing the past as cause, genesis, or origin. The same thinking finds expression in adopted children’s desire to know their birth parents, in narrative sequencing, in our preoccupation with genealogical, geographical, and genetic backgrounds, and in our notion of childhood as formative years. In the course of conversations with his antipodean interlocutors, Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor in World Religions, HDS, was led to ask whether there is really something about first experiences that makes all that follows pale in comparison. The field research from this project suggests that we conserve the past even as we bring the new into being, and that analytical models that make hard and fast distinctions between cause and effect, fate and free will do not do justice to the complexities of the human struggle to strike a balance between that which we can and cannot change. This project continues Jackson’s exploration of questions of separation and loss with particular focus on indigenous communities and will form the basis of new HDS courses and a book. (2008-09)

Historical and Contemporary Responses to Battering: A Comparative
Religious Perspective

Beverly Kienzle, John H. Morison Professor of the Practice in Latin and Romance Languages, HDS, collaborated with Nancy Nienhuis, Dean of Students and Community Life, Andover Newton Theological School, and HDS students to research contemporary narratives of violence against women, the role of religious texts in those narratives, and the response of religious communities. The scholars extended their previous work concentrating on Christianity to include Muslim and Jewish communities in the United States. They convened a panel on the topic open to the community, with local ministers from those three religious traditions. The research will also be used to complete a book draft and a proposed HDS course. (2008-09)

Religious Leadership in Central European Democracies: Rethinking
Collaboration and Resistance

Ronald F. Thiemann, Bussey Professor of Theology, Harvard Divinity School, travelled to Toronto, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic to examine religious leadership in the Czech and Slovak Republics prior to the 1989 "Velvet Revolution" in order to undertake a reconsideration of the ethical categories of "religious resistance and collaboration." The project documented the ethical behavior of key religious figures in pre-and post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia and further refined the ethical categories used to analyze that behavior. Professor Jan Sokol, one of the sources for this research, was named the CSWR Senior Visiting Fellow for fall 2009. (2007-08)

Medical Ethics in Pastoral Care

Cheryl A. Giles, Peabody Professor of the Practice in Pastoral Care and Counseling, Harvard Divinity School, hosted a spring 2008 roundtable discussion of religious leaders and scholars from the U.S. and Germany in order to examine the critical ethical issues facing healthcare chaplains and providers across major religious and spiritual traditions. Collaborating with the pastoral care department at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Frankfurt, Professor Giles has helped form a task force to examine this important topic. She expects an edited volume on medical ethics in healthcare chaplaincy to be published by LIT Publishers in early 2009. (2007-08)

Cheryl A. Giles, Peabody Professor of the Practice in Pastoral Care and Counseling, HDS conducted collaborative research and a roundtable discussion meeting of religious leaders and scholars from the U.S. and Germany, examining the critical ethical issues facing chaplains and clergy within the context of the major religious and spiritual traditions. One fruit of this work is a collection of essays, Medical Ethics in Health Care Chaplaincy, published in 2009. 

Teaching Pluralism: Case Studies for the Theological and Religious
Studies Classroom

With the aid of the Pluralism Project staff, Diana L. Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Member of the Faculty of Divinity, distilled some of the research and thinking of the Pluralism Project into case studies for the theological and religious studies classroom. Professor Eck also convened two mini-conferences on using the cases for teaching. Case studies such as those examining controversies over construction of a mosque in a Midwestern town and requests for accommodation for the religious beliefs of Somali taxi drivers enable students—and teachers—to grapple with some of the important issues that society faces in confronting the challenges of religious pluralism. This work will continue through a grant from the Ford Foundation and has been used at Harvard and at Auburn Seminary. (2007-08)

Sacred Knowledge, Sacred Power and Performance: Ifa Divination in West Africa and the African Diaspora

Jacob K. Olupona, Professor of African Religious Traditions at HDS with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, convened a multidisciplinary conference in the spring 2008 with multiple sponsors—including the CSWR and the Committee on African Studies—in order to explore the corpus of knowledge and meaning in the Ifa divination practice and tradition of the West African and African diaspora communities. Ifa divination process and textual materials provide an overarching paradigm for understanding Yoruba political, social, economic, artistic, and religious life. The conference investigated how the interpretation of Ifa divination may generate new insights into African cosmology, ritual practices, healing, arts, and the very meaning of transcendence and the sacred in African culture and society. (2007-08)

Curriculum, Canon, and Interpretive Authority in the Madrasahs of Pakistan

Shahab Ahmed, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Committee on the Study of Religions, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, studied the curricula of madrasahs in Pakistan to identify what constitutes canonical bodies of knowledge within those curricula. He also explored how the respective canons create competing authoritative claims about normative Islam in the public sphere and the attitude of madrasahs to interpretive difference. Professor Ahmed reported on his research in a talk at the CSWR in the fall of 2008. (2007-08)

Justice and Mercy in Jewish and Christian Tradition and American Criminal Law

Sarah Coakley, former Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at HDS, and Carol Steiker, Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professor of Law and special advisor for public service at Harvard Law School (HLS), collaborated on a joint research, teaching, and publication project to investigate the religious roots and points of interaction of religion with contemporary legal issues of mercy, justice, punishment, and atonement. The project, co-funded by HLS, included one public lecture and a one day conference, held in spring 2007. The connection to the study of religion was focused on the concept of "mercy," its religious connotations, and its increasing importance in contemporary legal debate. (2006-07)

From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē: A Conference on Religion
And Archaeology

Laura Nasrallah, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at HDS, convened an interdisciplinary conference focused on questions of social, political, and religious life in Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē, foregrounding material culture. With additional support from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the University of Texas, Austin, the May 2007 conference brought together Greek archaeologists, international specialists on the topic of Thessalonikē in antiquity, and scholars in the classics, the religions of antiquity, and New Testament Studies. (2006-07)

Race and Ethnicity and Early Christian Studies: A Symposium

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Stendahl Professor of Divinity, HDS, convened a conference on race and ethnicity in New Testament and Early Christian studies in collaboration with Laura Nasrallah, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, HDS. The spring 2007 conference and its proceedings generated new data and new methods for the study of race and ethnicity; encouraged reconsideration of the discipline of Early Christian studies and New Testament; and underscored the importance of the categories of race and ethnicity to the study of religion as a whole, both in antiquity and today. (2006-07)

Maori and Biotechnology: The Logic of Belief and the Theory of Practice

Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor in World Religions, HDS, researched the ways that New Zealand Maori experience biotechnological interventions in their everyday lives, including the interplay between actual practices and core beliefs concerning the sanctity of life-forms whose essences should not be mixed. (2005-06)

The Harvard Divinity School Study on Teaching About Religion in the Schools
(H-STARS)

Diane Moore, Professor of the Practice in Religious Studies and Education and director of the Program in Religious Studies and Education at HDS, collected data about the incorporation of the study of religion in secondary school curricula. With the assistance of Ali S. Asani, Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture, Harvard University, she also facilitated a training initiative for local educators to introduce them to the academic study of religion through the lens of Islam, paying particular attention to the diversity of political, cultural, social, and religious expressions that are represented in the tradition. (2004-06)

Towards An Intellectual History of Religion in Southern Asia: Kashmir at the End of the First Millennium, 800-1100

Parimal G. Patil, Assistant Professor of the Study of Religion and of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University, created this lecture series as the first part of a project that seeks to understand the ways in which intellectuals belonging to different sectarian groups, primarily Hindu and Buddhist, interacted with each other in premodern South Asia. (2005-06)