Harvey Cox, best known for his 1965 book The Secular City, celebrated retirement from Harvard Divinity School last week by exercising the ancient privilege enjoyed by his Hollis chair, the oldest endowed chair in American higher education: grazing rights (he also played saxophone at the event).
Reports the Bostonist:
The Reverend Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, gave an invocation, praising Cox, early Harvard donor Thomas Hollis, and handsome Jersey cow Faith—all of them good Baptists. One of Cox’s students, Travis Allen Stevens, delivered a Latin oration concerning Faith’s dissertation, Ager Secularis: Movere ad Deum et Ruminare, which “questions human-centric modalities so present in contemporary theological conversations.”
Cox may be retiring, but he’s staying busy. 80 years old, he remains Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard. And he has a new book coming out, The Future of Faith. Says the publisher’s book description:
There is an essential change taking place in what it means to be “religious” today. Religious people are more interested in ethical guidelines and spiritual disciplines than in doctrines. The result is a universal trend away from hierarchical, regional, patriarchal, and institutional religion. As these changes gain momentum, they evoke an almost point-for-point fundamentalist reaction. Fundamentalism, Cox argues, is on graphic display around the globe because it is dying.
Once suffocated by creeds, hierarchies, and the disastrous merger of the church with the Roman Empire, faith—rather than belief—is once again becoming Christianity’s defining quality.
See, while you’re at it, Cox’s reply to Charles Taylor here at The Immanent Frame.
Harvey was my beloved professor first in the l970s and then when I returned
to HDS as a Merrill Fellow in the 1980s.
He is one of the most amazing beings I have ever encountered—a brilliant mind coupled with a wizard’s body, the heart of a St. Francis, and a sense of humor that transverses the universe and enlightens all who are fortunate enough to come within his sphere for however short or long a while.
May he lives long and beautifully and give us yet another book before the tale ends. I love you, Harvey, and bless your holy name!
I’ve met Harvey Cox during my Berkeley years back to late 90s and I was amazed both by his fresh theological approach on current social problems and his brilliant humor. Now teaching sociology and theology back in Greece I’d love to say “many thanks” to Prof. Cox for the best lesson he gave to me: how to listen to other people. God may bless him and bestow him many many days.