Harvey Cox

One of America’s most celebrated theologians, Harvey Cox is Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he began teaching in 1965, both at the Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. More crucially for those of us associated with the Ikeda Center is his role in the Center’s founding. We consider our founding lecture to be Daisaku Ikeda’s 1993 address at the Harvard Yenching Institute, “Mahayana Buddhism and 21st Century Civilization.” Mr. Ikeda spoke at the invitation of Dr. Cox, along with distinguished Harvard faculty John Kenneth Galbraith and Nur Yalman. In conversation after the event, Dr. Cox suggested to Mr. Ikeda that the Harvard community, as well as the Boston academic community in general, would benefit from the presence of an institute where scholars could come together outside of their normal duties, and more importantly, across disciplines, to explore the kinds of themes explored in the lecture. For 30 years now, we have endeavored to live up to the ideals of that simple suggestion. Among many books published by Cox is his dialogue book with Ikeda, 2009’s The Persistence of Religion: Comparative Perspectives on Modern Spirituality. One highlight of the book is Professor Cox’s recounting of his friendship and collaborations with Martin Luther King, Jr., which began in the late 50s when Cox invited King it speak at Oberlin College, where he was teaching, in the late 50s. In the early 60s, Dr. King asked him to found a Boston chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a request to which he gladly responded. In addition to serving as informal advisor to the Center, Dr. Cox participated in the 2008 dialogue event on intercultural understandings of death and the 2009 seminar exploring dialogue in a divided world. In 2010 he spoke with the us about themes from his book The Future of Faith. 

Photo by Marilyn Humphries