Dr. Diana Eck
An Opportunity for Greater Human Connectivity

Professor of Religion Diana Eck speaks about our need to seize the unique opportunity of our time. While our challenges our many, she articulates ways in which globalization affords us new frontiers and new possibilities for interfaith and intra-religious connection.

"What is defined as a religious issue is no longer just theological questions or issues to do with spiritual practice. The availability of clean water, refugees, homelessness are all religious issues and are what religious people now need to be addressing."

Biography

Diana Eck is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University and also serves on the Committee on the Study of Religion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Widely recognized for her work on religion and shifting global perspectives, in 1998 Eck was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work on American religious pluralism. In 2002, she received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion and in 2003 the Governor's Humanities Award from the Montana Committee for the Humanities.

Eck has authored or co-edited several books on India and comparative religion including Banaras, City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, and Speaking of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion, and Social Change, among others. She’s delved into the question of religious difference and religious diversity in the context of Christian theology and the comparative study of religion. Her work, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras won the 1994 Melcher Book Award of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the 1995 Louisville Grawemeyer Book Award in Religion, an award given for work that reflects a significant breakthrough in our understanding of religion. Eck's most recent book, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation addresses the challenges for the United States of the more complex religious landscape of the post-1965 period of renewed immigration.

Since 1991, Diana Eck has headed Harvard University’s research team for The Pluralism Project, a study of growing religious diversity and the increasing presence of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and other Asian communities in America, funded by the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. And among other noted posts, Eck served as President of the American Academy of Religion from 2005-6.

Resources:

www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty/eck.cfm