Fall 2007 Newsletter
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Faculty Accolades

Tazim Kassam has recently been appointed by Dean Cathryn Newton to a three-year term as Chair of the Department of Religion (2006-09). In addition, Professor Kassam has been centrally active in the development of a Muslim Cultures Program for the SU Programs Abroad/London program, and, together with Gustav Niebuhr and others, been instrumental in the proposing, reception and implementation of a Luce Foundation grant for ca $375,000 to fund a three-year initiative on “Religion, The Media, and International Relations” for graduate students in International Relations – with the possible development of a formal program to follow.

Marcia Robinson has been awarded a First Book Grant for Minority Scholars from the Louisville Institute, a Lilly Endowment program for the study of American religion. She will be on leave during the 2006-2007 academic year to finish the research and writing for a book on the religious thought and activism of African-American abolitionist and poet, Frances E. W. Harper. The book is provisionally entitled, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Black Christian Abolitionist Among the White Anti-Slavery Women of Maine.

Patricia Cox Miller has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year. She will be on leave to finish the research for and to write a book provisionally entitled *Signifying the Holy: The Corporeal Imagination in Late Antiquity.* The book will focus on a late Roman and early Byzantine religious sensibility that reconfigured the relation between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.

Edward Mooney's On Søren Kierkegaard: Diaglogue, Polemic, Lost Imtimacy, and Time, has just appeared from Ashgate (2007). George Pattison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Christ Church, Oxford, writes, "Ed Mooney has long been known as one of the more textually sensitive, philosophically nuanced and existentially insightful of contemporary Kierkegaard commentators. He alerts the unwary to often unnoticed dimensions of Kierkegaard's writing, both to its prayerful silences and to its fairground bombast and self-mockery. Anyone who cares about how the classics of modern thought can help us live better human lives will be encouraged, given heart, by this book, and led to see familiar texts and questions in a subtle but penetrating new light."

The Department is well-placed, through faculty members Professors Ann Grodzins Gold and Philip Arnold, to be a major participant in the recent College-secured Mellon grant for $1,028,000. One of the five "thematic clusters" or subject areas and topics for which the grant will be used is "Cultures and Religions" in a global context. This thematic focus will emphasize the interrelationship of diverse religions as practiced and located in larger socio-cultural contexts, and will - in the near term - focus on American religion and culture, South Asian religion and culture, and Native American religion and culture.

The Mellon grant and the work of the five thematic clusters will feature interuniversity and interdisciplinary professional, academic work within a "Humanities Corridor" made up of Cornell, University of Rochester, and Syracuse University. The Department of Religion at Syracuse University is proud to be a part of this imaginative project.

Dr. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana, 2006) has received the 2007 AAR Book Award for excellence in the study of Religion, "Constructive-Reflective Studies." Dr. Caputo's most recent books are: After the Death of God, co-authored with Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, and edited by SU's Jeffrey Robbins (Columbia UP, 2007); and What would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Baker Academic Press, November 1, 2007). An edited volume (Mark Dooley, editor Albany: SUNY Press, 2003) has been published recently in his honor entitled A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus. Dr. Caputo, who joined the department as the Thomas J. Watson Professorship in Religion and Humanities in the Fall, 2004, is noted for his seminal work in the Continental Philosophy of Religion, and for his numerous publications and awards.

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