The Pluralism Project at Harvard UniversityThe Pluralism Project: Religious Pluralism and Civil Society, Spring 2003
Participants
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Interfaculty Group Leader: |
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Diana L. Eck Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Director, The Pluralism Project http://www.pluralism.org |
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Collaborating Faculty: |
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Leila Ahmed Professor of Women's Studies in Religion, Harvard Divinity School "Specializing in women and gender in Islam, [Leila Ahmed's] current interests include developments in feminist and post-colonial thought and, in particular, issues in Islam and in feminism, religion and gender in cross-cultural perspective." (Divinity School Website) http://www.hds.harvard.edu/registrar/catalog/faculty.html |
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Dorothy Austin Associate Minister, The Memorial Church, Harvard University Rev. Dr. Austin writes, "Cultural and ethnic diversity within the broadly conceived Christian tradition is increasingly apparent in the life and ministry of The Memorial Church, given the unique role that the Church plays in the life of the College and University; and we welcome it. In my own area of scholarly interest and training, in religion and psychology, and medicine, in the healing arts, generally speaking, issues of immigration and pluralism are of vital importance to clinical training and practice and the education of health care practitioners and religious practitioners alike. Even something as fundamental as teaching psychiatry residents how to take a 'religious history' in today's religiously pluralistic world, and the clinical significance of that data for therapeutic treatment, is the sort of issue that interests me as we think about the clinical education of health care professionals and clergy." |
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Linda Barnes Lecturer, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Director, Spirituality and Child Health Initiative, Boston Medical Center Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine Professor Barnes writes, "My work builds on a model that integrates the culturally grounded religious worldviews and related approaches to healing (what we might also conceptualize as complementary and alternative medicines, once these groups are in the United States), on the part of immigrant groups and other racial ethnic minorities. I am currently planning an urban ethnographic project, inspired by and modeled on the Pluralism Project, to study the landscape of healing practices in the African Diaspora communities served by Boston Medical Center. My other research and writing explores the social history of American responses to Chinese healing practices, beginning with the earlier expeditions to China and the Americas and moving to the present." |
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Nathan Glazer Professor of Education and Social Structure, Emeritus "Nathan Glazer, Professor of Education and Social Structure, Emeritus, was born in New York City, and attended The City College of New York. He worked on the magazine Commentary as an editor from 1944 to 1953, was a book editor at Doubleday and Random House, traveled in Japan and wrote books (American Judaism, The Social Basis of American Communism, Beyond the Melting Pot), received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and entered academic life at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, coming to Harvard as a professor in the Graduate School of Education in 1969. His most recent books are Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964- 1982; Clamor at the Gates, an edited work dealing with immigration issues; The Public Face of Architecture, another edited collection, and The Limits of Social Policy. His interests include: ethnicity, the sociology of American Jews, social policy, urbanism and architecture. He is connected with the quarterly dealing with public policy, The Public Interest, which he has edited with Irving Kristol since 1973. Although recently retired, he is available to see students." (Sociology Department website) http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/glazer/ |
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Douglas A. Hicks Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Religion at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond "Dr. Douglas A. Hicks is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Religion at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, in Virginia. During the spring of 2003, he is serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School. He holds an A.B. with honors in economics from Davidson College, an M.Div. summa cum laude from Duke University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in religion, ethics, and economics from Harvard University. His articles have appeared in The Leadership Quarterly, The Journal of Religious Ethics, World Development, and The Journal of Ecumenical Studies and he contributed to the CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he is author of two books, Inequality and Christian Ethics (2000) and Religion and the Workplace (2003, in press), both published by Cambridge University Press. He is an editor, with J. Thomas Wren and Terry L. Price, of the three-volume reference work The International Library of Leadership (2003, in press). In 2001 he received a summer research stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has participated in seminars in Jordan, South Africa, Kenya, Guatemala, Mexico, and India. He holds leadership positions in the Society of Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion and is a member of the Association of Social Economics, the International Leadership Association, and the Academy of Religious Leadership." |
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Swanee Hunt Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government Director of Women and Public Policy Program "Swanee Hunt is Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she teaches. Prior to that appointment in 1997, she focused a decade on American domestic policy, followed by four years as the American Ambassador to Austria, where she led a dialogue about the security structure of a new, united Europe. At the Kennedy School, Hunt leads a new program emphasizing women's role within the public policy process as citizen initiators of the policy agenda, as policy-makers in the process, and as clients affected by the outcome. It supports research, enhances teaching and materials on women and public policy, and organizes conferences and courses to advance women's leadership in the public arena (with special attention to women of color), strengthen the advocacy power of grassroots women, and mobilize activists around policy initiatives of concern to women." (WAPPP website) http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/wappp/what/shunt.html |
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Peggy Levitt Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Assistant Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College Professor Levitt's research interests include: International migration; Latin America; Transnationalism; Democratization and Civil Society; the Sociology of Religion. |
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David Little T.J. Dermont Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict Faculty Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs "David Little is a student of religious ethics and sociology of religion, with a special concentration on international religious freedom, and human rights and ethno-religious conflict. As a senior scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, he has been engaged in a multi-year study of religion, nationalism, and intolerance." (Divinity School website) http://www.hds.harvard.edu/registrar/catalog/faculty.html http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/01.20/little.html |
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John Mansfield John H. Watson, Jr., Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Professor Mansfield's research interests include comparative law, constitutional law, and evidence. In the Spring of 2000, Professor Mansfield taught a course entitled "Church and State" and the seminar "Law and Religion in India." http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/facdir.php?id=39 |
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Martha Minow Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Member of the Faculty of Education Co-Chair of Social Science Research Project, "Free Exercise of Culture" Professor Minow writes, "As Co-Chair of a Social Science Research Project affectionately known as the ‘free exercise of culture,' I am working with other scholars to study how western democracies respond to religious and culture practices that depart from those established in public institutions and laws; how members of minority groups respond to the risk of conflict with informal and formal social rules; and how legal and cultural norms should change. My own work focuses especially on the issues raised in childrearing practices." http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/people/affiliates/minow.html http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/facdir.php?id=45 |
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Richard Parker Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government Senior Fellow, Shorenstein Center Professor Parker writes, "Having grown up in Southern California, in a community with significant Mexican, Mexican-American, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean minorities, my own adolescent introduction 40 years ago to civil rights came not simply through the struggles of African Americans in the geographically-distant South, but of these other minorities in my own home town. From the lives of my friends, I learned about a world that otherwise eluded the understanding of a white, middle-class boy. That experience led me in the Sixties to the South, where I spent time as both a civil rights worker and a teacher, even as I pursued my undergraduate degree. It has kept me involved in both my work as a journalist (as cofounder of Mother Jones, managing editor of Ramparts, and nowadays as editorial board member of The Nation), and in my political consulting work in the Eighties working for Sen. Kennedy and others. These days, I find it expressed most often not only in my teaching at the Kennedy School but also in my personal involvement in the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. In my work at the Shorenstein Center, I'm especially interested in work on the press and its coverage of a variety of economic issues that, particularly in looking at questions of inequality and growth, go to central questions involving immigration, job markets, and cultural diversity. As an economist, I'm particularly interested in adaptive labor market questions that underpin America's increasing integration in global capital and job structures." http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/wzFacByFullName/ParkerRichard |
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Christopher Queen Dean of Students and Alumni Relations for Continuing Education Lecturer on the Study of Religion, Faculty of Arts and Sciences "My work on contemporary Buddhism focuses on the transformation of the tradition as native practitioners, immigrants, and new converts attempt to apply traditional teachings and practices to social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. The emergence of "engaged Buddhism" may be traced to the conversion of India's untouchables from Hinduism to Buddhism since the 1950s, and to the peace activism of Vietnamese monks and laypeople in the sixties and seventies. In North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa, Buddhist immigrants and converts are also addressing the dislocations of social change and globalization with new insights and strategies. The resulting blend of Buddhist teachings and western values has been analysed in a series of volumes I have edited: Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (with Sallie B. King, 1996), American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship (with Duncan Ryuken Williams, 1999), Engaged Buddhism in the West (2000), and Action Dharma: New Essays on Engaged Buddhism (with Charles Prebish and Damien Keown, forthcoming). I am working on a book of stories from the Buddhist conversion movement in India among the followers of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956). |
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Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco Professor of Education, Harvard University Graduate School of Education Co-Director, Harvard Immigration Project Chair, Interfaculty Committee on Latino Studies at Harvard Professor Suarez-Orozco writes: "The Harvard Immigration Project is involved in a number of new initiatives in the comparative study of immigration. We are now, for example, conducting a large scale study of immigrant families and children in the United States. The study — the largest of its kind — is interdisciplinary, comparative and longitudinal. We have researchers currently working in approximately 50 sites — both coasts. Our basic question is quite broad: what does immigration do to families and children in terms of their long-term adaptations to the new land. Our work now focuses on Afro-Caribbean, Latino, and Asian immigrant communities." http://hugse7.harvard.edu/gsedata/resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=330 http://www.radcliffe.edu/murray/data/ds/ds1115.htm |
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Donald Swearer Visiting Professor, Harvard Divinity School Charles and Harriet Cox McDowell Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College "Don Swearer will be a visiting professor at the Harvard Divinity School for the academic year 2000-2001, occupying the new Hershey Chair in Buddhist Studies. He is the Charles and Harriet Cox McDowell Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College, where he has chaired the Department of Religion and is also on the Asian Studies and Environmental Studies faculties. Dr. Swearer's principal area of research has been Southeast Asian Buddhism." http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/fellowships/swearer.htm |
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Reed Ueda Professor, Department of History, Tufts University Co-Editor, New Americans, Harvard University Press Special Project Steering Group, Inter-University Committee on International Migration Reed Ueda writes, "My area of scholarship is social and immigration history of the United States. I am involved in editing the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and running the Boston Seminar on Immigration and Urban History at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I love talking about any aspect or period of history, in any region." http://ase.tufts.edu/history/faculty/rueda.html |
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Mary Waters Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Harvard College Professor Mary Waters writes, "My current research interest is in young adults whose parents were immigrants to the US--the second generation. I am studying people whose parents came from China, the West Indies, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Korea, Russia, and the Dominican Republic. I am interested in economic, cultural, and social assimilation, and issues of ethnic and racial identity." http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/waters/ |