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August 2009
Renowned Harvard Professor Claims
Privilege of Grazing Cow In Harvard Yard
Contact:
Donald Cutler, 978.745.4600;
Jonathan Beasley,
617.496.6004
On Thursday, September 10, a jubilant event will celebrate
Harvey
Cox's retirement as Hollis Professor of Divinity after 44 years
of teaching at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard College.
(Read bio)
The Hollis Chair is the oldest endowed chair in American higher
education. A well-known legend attests to the Hollis Professor's
privilege to graze his cow in Harvard Yard, and Cox will assert that
right on September 10, borrowing a Jersey cow named Faith from the Farm
School in Athol, Massachusetts, a working farm widely known in the sustainable
farming movement.
At 4 pm on September
10, Faith will graze in the Tercentenary Theatre adjacent to the Memorial
Church in the Yard, the very site where almost three centuries earlier,
Edward Wigglesworth, the first Hollis Professor, and his son, the second
Hollis Professor, grazed their cows.
At 4:30 pm, Peter
Gomes, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of
Christian Morals, will lead a half-hour ceremony honoring Cox,
summarizing the historical evidence for the grazing privilege, and
acknowledging the signal role of religion at Harvard from the
seventeenth century to the present. In keeping with early Harvard
practice, there will be a (humorous) Latin oration by Travis Stevens, a
doctoral candidate at Harvard.
The celebrants, audience, and cow will then process to Harvard
Divinity School, where Dean William A. Graham will open a second half-hour ceremony at 5:30
pm. Speakers will include William Martin,
Emeritus Chavanne Professor of Religion and Public Policy at Rice
University (and Professor Cox's first graduate student advisee at
Harvard), and Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian
Studies and director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, who will
reflect on the significance of cows in world religions. The cow will
then receive its evening milking.
A reception following the ceremonies will feature jazz and swing
classics played by Soft Touch, a 17-piece band in which Cox plays
tenor sax.
HarperCollins has adjusted the publication date of Cox's forthcoming
book, The Future of Faith—which forecasts a new Age of the Spirit
of global scope—to coincide with the events of September 10.
Thomas Hollis, a wealthy London merchant and a Baptist, endowed the
Hollis Chair in 1721 and asked that there be no doctrinal requirements
for appointments to it. Harvard's greatest patron in the eighteenth
century, he also gave substantial contributions to the library,
scholarships for tutors and students, a powerful telescope, and a second
endowed chair in science. Cox is the ninth to hold the Chair in
Divinity, and the second Baptist.
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