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Harvey Cox, Hollis Research
Professor of Divinity
"Harvey Cox is the most important liberal theologian of the last half-century because he could see around corners," wrote E. J. Dionne, Jr.,
the Washington-based political commentator and former student of Cox's.
He was alluding to Cox's unusually wide-ranging curiosity about
religious movements and his ability to recognize them during their
incubation phases.
In 1965, the year he began teaching at Harvard, Cox published The
Secular City amidst many predictions that religion was fading in the
Western world. It will survive, even prosper, in a highly secularized
environment, he argued; it will reside in the people and in religious
culture even if certain religious institutions fade. The book sold over
a million copies.
Critics later argued that the global rise of
evangelical and fundamentalist movements was a repudiation of his view,
but his analysis was accurate both for Western Europe and for the
"mainline" churches that were the principal definer of American religion
in the 1960s.
In the 1960s, Cox could be found participating in civil
disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement inspired by his friendship
with Martin Luther King, Jr., which began in the 1950s. He regards the
address he gave to the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1966, at
King's invitation, as the most important speech of his life.
In the same
decade, he could also be found in the pages of Playboy magazine during
its serious cultural commentary phase under Hugh Hefner, or at Esalen
Institute at Big Sur, California, where the human potential movement was
being refined, or at Ivan Illich's seminars on radically restructured
education in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
In 1969's Feast of Fools,
Cox wrote about the tension between the newly revived celebration of the
ecstatic and the expressive in religion, on one side, and the more
cerebral aspect long dominant in Protestant culture.
In the 1970s, Cox caught the leading edge of the surge of interest in
Eastern religions with the publication of Turning East, and he
developed a connection with Buddhism at the Naropa Institute, founded by
Tibetan monk Trungpa Rinpoche. Earlier in the decade, Cox published The
Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion, which featured a
substantial autobiographical section about his own early life and his
introduction to religious life. His interest in Japan would lead to his
making four extended trips there during his four decades at Harvard.
In Religion in the Secular City (1984), Cox paid attention to a
variety of religious movements emergent from "the bottom and the edges"
of societies—movements often overlooked because of our tendency to view
religious movements from top down in pyramidal institutions. Later in
the decade, Cox published Many Mansions, about his fruitful encounters as
a Christian with other faiths. He also explored the other side of the
coin, the oppressive and arrogant side of institutionalized religion, in
The Silencing of Leonardo Boff (1988), about Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's (now
Pope Benedict XVI) response to Boff's articulation of liberation theology.
Throughout the 1990s, Cox taught one of the most popular
undergraduate elective courses ever at Harvard, "Jesus and the Moral Life," with
enrollments as high as 1,000 students. He wrote about the
course and what he learned from the youthful generation in When Jesus
Came to Harvard, published in 2004.
Cox has enjoyed teaching in partnership
with his colleagues; the most unusual collaboration was his teaming with the
late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and then with Alan Dershowitz of
Harvard Law School to teach "Thinking About Thinking,"
2001-03.
In 2001, Cox turned back to personal experience in Common Prayers as
he reflected on his marriage to a Jewish professor of Russian history at
Wellesley College, Nina Tumarkin, their joint efforts in raising their
son Nicholas in the traditions of Judaism, and how his understanding and
appreciation of Judaism was deepened.
In the first decade of the new
millennium, Cox has immersed himself deeply in dialogues between
Christians and Muslims. Throughout his career, Cox has been a penetrating
appreciator and analyst of popular media. As his tenure in the Hollis
Chair ends, he is returning to the big picture again in The Future of
Faith (HarperCollins, 2009), which discerns a swell of spirituality that eschews
doctrines, creeds, and beliefs in favor of a commitment to faith as a
way of life grounded in the needs and issues of the present moment.
Thomas Hollis would be astounded by the breadth of Professor Cox's
interests as the ninth holder of the Chair in Divinity, which Hollis endowed in
1721. Though, no doubt he would be pleased.
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