Diana Eck
Diana Eck, a Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, graduated from Harvard University with her Ph.D. in 1976. Although her early work was devoted to religion in India, she has increasingly devoted her attention to issues of religious pluralism, advocating tolerance, mutual understanding, and acceptance of difference by means of interreligious dialogue, especially as these all manifest themsleves in contemporary U.S. politics. She has been active in the United Methodist Church, the World Council of Churches and, since 1991, has been the Director of The Pluralism Project. This collaborative project, funded initially through the Lilly Endowment and now also funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, coordinates a network of sixty local affiliates, involving approximately 100 scholars working on affiliated projects that chronicle the changing shape of religious diversity both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
Major Works
Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (1981/1996)
Banaras, City of Light (1982)
Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (1993/2003)
A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become
the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (2001)
On Common Ground: World Religions in America (2nd ed. 2002; a multimedia
CD-ROM resource produced by The
Pluralism Project)
Quotation
"My work as a teacher ... is not at all removed from these issues
of interreligious relations. My students now include Muslims, Hindus,
Buddhists, and Sikhs as well as Christians and Jews. My colleagues on
the faculty are Buddhist, Muslim, Confucian, and Jewish. When I think
about the practical meanings of interreligious
dialogue, the theological
meaning of religious diversity, or about what some in the churches still
speak of as the 'destiny of the unevangelized,' I am thinking not about
a faceless crowd of people I do not know, but about students, colleagues,
dear friends, and teachers--in India, at Harvard, and around the world--whose
faces I know like the faces of my own family. This is the kind of world
in which all of us increasingly live."
- from Diana Eck, Encountering God (1993)
Select Web Resources on Eck
The
Pluralism Project
Diana
Eck's faculty web page at Harvard Divinity School
A
profile on Diana Eck from the the Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) Religion
& Ethics Newsweekly (June 22, 2001)
An
interview with Diana Eck from the Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) Religion
& Ethics Newsweekly (April 26, 2002)
An
American Public Media interview with Diana Eck, as part of the program
"Speaking of Faith: The Religious Roots of American Democracy"
(18 minutes; RealPlayer required to play; acquire a free download
here)
"A
Mosque in Massachusetts," by Diana Eck (an excerpt from A New
Religious America [2001]), posted at the U.S. Department of State's
web site
A
multimedia broadcast of an April 2002 lecture given by Prof. Eck teaching
on the myths, rituals, and pilgrimages centered about the Hindu god Shiva,
as part of her Harvard class, "Hindu Myth, Image, and Pilgrimage"