Read about the latest news and publications from HDS faculty.
Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, gave the paper "Values and Ways of Knowing: Conflicts and Confluences between Buddhism and Medicine in Tibet" at Healing Texts, Healing Practices, Healing Bodies: A Workshop on Medicine and Buddhism, held at the University of California. She also participated in the Tibetan Literature Workshop at the University of Toronto.
Her recent publications include: "Looking for Gender in the Desi's Medical Paintings," Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, a themed issue on gender, health, and medicine in Tibet (2012); 'Discipline and Resistance on the Tibetan Plateau,' Cultural Anthropology (April 2012); "Discerning Tibetan Modernities: Moments, Methods, Assumptions," in Mapping the Modern in Tibet (Brill, 2011).
She will speak at Northwestern University in November 2012 and will participate in the AAR Seminar on Tibetan Religious Literature, also in November. In spring 2013, she will host a workshop on Tibetan literature at Harvard, give a paper on authorship and genre at Oxford University, respond to a panel on manuscript culture at the Association of Asian Studies, and deliver the Evans-Wentz Memorial Lecture at Stanford University.
Her forthcoming book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, is being published by Columbia University Press.
Amy Hollywood, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, published "Thin Wings," a review in the Winter/Spring 2012 issue of Harvard Divinity Bulletin of Susan Howe's book This That, and the essay "On Understanding Everything: General Education, Liberal Education, and the Study of Religion," PMLA (March 2011).
She gave two presentations at the American Academy of Religion's Annual Conference in San Francisco in November 2011: 'Derrida's Passion' and 'Reading Michel de Certeau's The Mystic Fable.'
She has given the following invited papers: 'Truth in Religion,' 'On Truth (and Lies),' a conversation series with Simon Critchley, Onassis Cultural Center, New York (May 2012); ' 'Thin Wings': On Reading, Death, and Devotion,' at Truth and Mystery: A Conference on Faith and Reason, Villanova University (April 2012); 'Love Abyss: Preaching Desire in the 13th and 21st Centuries,' the Antoinette Brown Lecture at Vanderbilt Divinity School (March 2012); 'Love Abyss: Hadewijch's Infinite Desire,' at St. Mary's College (February 2012). She also presented at the Workshop for the Companion to Hadewijch, Antwerp, Belgium (June 2012); ' 'Thin Wings': Reading, Vision, Ecstasy,' Vision Lecture Series, Lehigh University (February, 2012); and 'Song, Experience, and the Book in Christian Monasticism,' Dartmouth Hardigg Family Fund Lecture, Dartmouth College (January 2012).
Other invited talks were: 'Teaching Introduction to Theology' at the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS in March 2012; '20 Questions' on violence with Steven Pinker at Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center in February 2012; and 'Nevermind' at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, January 2012.
Along with Patricia Z. Beckman, she published The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is the author of the introduction and the essay 'Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism.'
Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies, published a new book, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2012). He also published 'Category Error,' a review essay of Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, in Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2012).
He has given the following talks: 'Discussion of Inheriting Abraham,' a presentation to the incoming fellows of the Tikvah Fellowship Program, New York (August 2012); 'God and Politics' at Jewish Thought and Enduring Human Questions, a seminar for college students sponsored by the Tikvah Project at Princeton University (August 2012); and 'Dimensions of Abraham in a Comparative Perspective,' a seminar at the Tikvah Fund post-BA Fellowship Program, New York (June 2012).
Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, participated in the discussion 'Be Bold: Unitarian Universalist Theologies and Practices of Justice' at the Unitarian Universalist Justice General Assembly in Phoenix. He published 'Faith in the Phalanx: Esotericism, Socialism, and the American Fourierist Movement,' in Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (North American Academic Press, 2012). He wrote a preface for Paul Rasor's new book, Reclaiming Prophetic Witness: Liberal Religion in the Public Square (Boston: Skinner, 2012).
Charles M. Stang, Associate Professor of Early Christian Thought, published Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: 'No Longer I' (Oxford University Press, 2012).
He is the co-editor, with Zachary Guiliano, of The Open Body: Essays in Anglican Ecclesiology, forthcoming from Peter Lang Publishing.