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Home > Annual Newsletter 2000-01
Faculty Footnotes
Catherine L. Albanese published “The Aura of Wellness: Subtle-Energy Healing and New Age Religion” in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 29-55. She also published “The Culture of Religious Combining: Reflections for the New American Millennium” in an invitational Fiftieth Anniversary Double Issue of CrossCurrents 50, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 16-22. In November 1999, she traveled to Boston for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, where she responded to papers by Conrad Cherry, Amanda Porterfield, and Betty DeBerg on the theme “Research on Campus: An Ethnographic Study of Teaching and Practice.” (This was their report on a year-long ethnographic study on religion on campus supported by the Lilly Endowment and to be published as a book.) In March 2000, she participated in an invitational conference at the Center of the American West on religion and the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, giving a presentation of her paper “Reconsidering Nature Religion: Animal Communication as Metaphysics.” In April 2000, Prof. Albanese traveled to Rice University in Houston, Texas, to deliver the invitational Rockwell Lectures. These were two lectures on the theme “Reconsidering Nature Religion”: the first, “The Turn to Politics and Ethics,” and the second, “The Turn to Metaphysics.” They will be published in the coming year as a short book under the title Reconsidering Nature Religion by Trinity Press International. Also in April, she traveled to Chicago to attend the annual meeting of the invitational American Society for the Study of Religion. Prof. Albanese has an anthology in press, American Spiritualities: A Reader, being published by Indiana University Press. And, of course, she single-handedly defeated Sweet William (aka Bill Powell) in a tai chi hand-sparring demonstration event at the department’s end-of-year “Collective Effervescence” in June 2000. (Now he might not agree with that interpretation, but…)
Juan E. Campo has served as director of the University of California Education Abroad Program’s Study Center in Delhi, India since June 1998. It is a summer/fall program, which means he spends six months there, and returns to teach at UCSB in the winter and spring quarters. During his time in India, he has been studying Islam in its South Asian setting and doing research for his next book, Pilgrimages in Modernity (forthcoming). He says that one of the highlights of this experience has been learning about the phenomenal popularity of the pilgrimage to Sabarimala, a sacred site in the mountains of Kerala. The pilgrimage is mainly Hindu, but also involves Muslims and Christians in a significant way. He joined the trek as a pilgrim/scholar in December 1999, and has visited temples of Ayyappa, the main Sabarimala deity, in Delhi, Madras, and Singapore. He has delivered guest lectures in India and South Africa based on his pilgrimage research. Juan spearheaded the successful restructuring of the EAP program at the University in Delhi, and has just inaugurated a new study center at the Central University of Hyderabad (in Andhra Pradesh). His most recent publishing activity is as chief editor/consultant for the Islam articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica/Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Religions. In January 2001, Juan returns to full-time teaching at UCSB, offering new courses on Islam in South Asia. In spring 2001 he will be joining with Magda Campo to teach a new course on food and culture in the Middle East. He will also begin serving as the department’s director of graduate studies in the new millennium.
Phillip Hammond had a fulfilling 1999-2000; it was quite a smorgasbord year for him. His co-authored book on Soka Gakkai was translated into Japanese, and he and David Machacek were invited to the Tokyo “launch” party, a reception and banquet for about 150 people, where they gave speeches. He gave lectures in Maine and at Arizona State, and his first grandchild, Elly, came into the world just before his sabbatical leave during spring quarter. During this leave he was the external reviewer of Chico State’s Religious Studies Department. He also spent most of a month in Europe, lecturing at the Universities of Sussex and Munich, visiting the Smarts in their new home outside of Lancaster, and driving to Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest. In June, Oxford University Press published a volume of his essays under the title The Dynamics of Religious Organizations: The Extravasation of the Sacred and Other Essays. None of this helped his golf game, which seems to be deteriorating.
Barbara Holdrege has received a Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellowship for 2000-2001 to support the completion of her book Body Building and Body Mapping: Hindu Constructions of Embodiment. She is also editing Beyond Hubert and Mauss: Genealogies of Sacrifice in Hindu and Jewish Traditions, a collection of essays by scholars of South Asia and Judaica that critically reassesses prevailing theories of sacrifice. She is the Project Director of the recently established Center for the Analysis of Sacred Space in the Department of Religious Studies, which has received a grant from the Wabash Center, a program funded by the Lilly Endowment, to develop a geospatially-referenced multimedia website for the study of sacred sites in Asia that will provide a research and instructional resource for scholars of Asian religions and cultures throughout the world. In her capacity as the newly appointed Chair of the South Asian Studies Committee in the Global and International Studies Program, she will work with over twenty-five faculty members in nine departments across campus to establish a multidisciplinary South Asian Studies program at UCSB. In her broader work as a comparative historian of religions, she has been involved in a number of different research projects. Her recent articles include “Beyond the Guild: Liberating Biblical Studies,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush (Continuum International, 2000); “Dharma: Contending Hierarchies in Hindu Value Systems,” in Hindu World, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene R. Thursby (Routledge, forthcoming); and “Forging Connections between Hindu and Jewish Worlds: Shifting Paradigms in Comparative Studies,” to be published in an international volume on the interconnections among Western and Indian cultures edited by Frederico Squarcini.
Raimon Panikkar, Professor Emeritus, has recently won the Premio Espiritualidad in Spain with his new book El mundanal silencio (The Worldly Silence, Martinez Roca, Madrid, 1999). The title is a reminder of one of the most popular verses written by the Renaissance Spanish poet Fray Luís de León: “Que descansada vida la del que huye del mundanal ruido” (“What a peaceful life the one’s who escapes away from the worldly noise”). Prof. Panikkar changes the meaning of the verse, obviously not to try to “improve” Fray Luís de León but to point out that we don’t need to deny the worldly life and reality to attain a true spirituality. He is preparing an English version with the title Sacred Secularity. Roland Roppers has edited a book titled Raimon Panikkar: Gott, Mensch und Welt. Die Drei-Einheit der Wirklichkeit (Verlag Via Nova, Petersberg, 1999) which contains a selection of Panikkar’s articles concerning different issues such as relations between Hinduism and Christianity, the cosmotheandric intuition, the power of silence, the new religiousness, etc. An Italian translation of Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics (Mito, fede e ermeneutica, Jaca Books, Milano, 2000) has been published; it is a new and revised edition of an old book which is now out of print. Entre Dieu et le Cosmos, entretien avec Gwendoline Jarczyk (Albin Michel, Paris, 1998) is the title of another book that consists of a long conversation about religion, cosmology, science, and human beings. Prof. Panikkar participated last December in a meeting that took place in the sanctuary where the Buddha preached his first sermon, near Varanasy. He has also been appointed as UNESCO’s consultant for Interreligious Dialogue.
Birger Pearson, Professor Emeritus, taught his Christian origins course at UC Berkeley during the fall semester of 1999. He did not teach it in fall 2000, but is scheduled to teach a course on the Graeco-Roman “mystery religions” in the spring. He has also published several articles and reviews during the past year. He presented a paper at the national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (Boston, 1999), and lectured at the Biblical Archaeology Society’s meeting in Nashville this year (2000). In April he reported on the Coptic inscriptions in the old church at the Monastery of St. Antony in Egypt at the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt held in Berkeley. The inscriptions will be published by Yale University Press as part of a book on the restoration of the church and its paintings. On September 25, 2000, he presented the annual Sigmund Mowinckel Lecture in the Theological Faculty of the University of Oslo. He also lectured at the universities of Bergen, Norway; Lund, Sweden; and Uppsala, Sweden.
Wade Clark Roof published Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton) and edited a two-volume encyclopedia, Contemporary American Religion (Macmillan) this past year. He gave lectures at Kalamazoo College, Furman University, Northwestern University, and at the National Cathedral Forum in Washington, D.C. In September he gave the keynote address to the Religion Newswriters Association meeting in San Francisco.
Ninian Smart was in the U.K. and Italy from April 2000 until his return to Santa Barbara in the fall; during that time he suffered from unusual ennui (the doctor said it was a hangover from the radiation…). In 2000 his edited Atlas of the World’s Religions has come out in various foreign editions: Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, etc. He is about to launch a series with Routledge of brief but authoritative books on themes in religion; people like Jonathan Z. Smith, Lawrence Sullivan, Ursula King, and David Chidester will be involved. In June he was in Finland and visited the site of the headquarters of Marshall Mannerheim (during the Winter War, 1939-40) and the continuation war against the Russians. As a child and youth he followed both closely. At a public lecture in Helsinki he was inducted into the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He gave the Presidential Address at the Nashville Convention of the AAR, in which he talked about the future of the academy; appropriate in the year 2000. He and Libushka are (alas) leaving Santa Barbara in January 2001. As he reports, “Nobody leaves Santa Barbara rationally. Our family in Europe calls. We’ve been very happy here. Our colleagues and friends will be a part of Lancaster (where we shall settle). Phil has already visited there. May you all.”
B. Alan Wallace reports that this first year of the new millennium has been filled with activities, including public speaking, publishing, and teaching. Over the course of the year, he has presented lectures and participated in panel discussions at the University of Colorado, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Arizona, the University of Virginia School of Medicine and Center for South Asian Studies, and a conference entitled “Future Visions: Engaging the Scientific and Spiritual Imaginations,” which was part of the State of the World Forum in New York City. One of the highlights of the year took place in March, when he served as co-moderator and interpreter for a five-day conference on destructive emotions with H. H. the Dalai Lama and Western cognitive scientists and philosophers in Dharamsala, India. Here in town he has given presentations at the annual Santa Barbara Health Classic, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara City College, and has given book-signings at Borders Bookstore and the Book Den. At UCSB, in addition to his regular teaching schedule, he has delivered two public lectures. One was entitled “The Retinal Blind Spot in the Scientific Vision of Our Origins,” presented in the Veritas Forum Lecture Series entitled “Our Journey: Origins and Destinations,” and the second was entitled “Vital Energies and Healing: Ancient and Modern Perspectives,” presented at the 3rd Annual UCSB Conference on Global Medicine. This year also saw the publication of two books he has translated from the Tibetan, Healing from the Source: The Science and Lore of Tibetan Medicine, by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, and Naked Awareness: Practical Teachings on the Union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, by Karma Chagmé. And finally, his own most ambitious book on which he’s been working for ten years, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness, was published this fall by Oxford University Press.
David White has been appointed to the position of Education Abroad Program Director for Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Paris, France for 2000-2002. He will return to teaching at UCSB in the fall of 2002. He is the editor of a collective volume entitled Tantra in Practice, which was published by Princeton University Press in July 2000. Bringing together the contributions of 37 specialists from all over the world, the book is intended to fully reorient scholarly and popular approaches to this much-misunderstood subject.
