 Photo Credit: Mary Lee/Harvard News Service |
Harvey Cox served briefly in the Merchant Marine after high school on relief ships carrying horses and cattle to Europe. Returning to the United States, he received his B.A. with honors in history in 1951 from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his first degree in theology from Yale Divinity School in 1955, and was ordained to the American Baptist ministry in 1956. He served as a campus minister at Temple University and at Oberlin College, and then enrolled in the doctoral program at Harvard University. After studying with James Luther Adams and Paul Tillich, he completed his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of religion at Harvard in 1962. After receiving his doctorate, Cox left immediately for Berlin (then divided by the Wall) and served for a year as an Ecumenical Fraternal Worker, traveling almost daily through Checkpoint Charley in an effort to maintain contact between the two sides of the divided city. Upon his return he worked actively with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was one of the founders of the Boston chapter of the SCLC. In the fall of 1963 he was arrested for participating in a civil rights demonstration and spent a few days in jail in Williamston and Washington, North Carolina. In 1965, Cox published The Secular City, which became an international bestseller and was translated into fourteen languages. In 1999 the Protestant Theological Faculty of Marburg University in Germany selected The Secular City as one of the two "most decisive" Protestant theological books of the twentieth century. (The other was Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans.) That same year Cox joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he is now Hollis Professor of Divinity, offering courses both in the Divinity School and in the Religious Studies Program of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He has taught, among other courses, one on "Contemporary Interpreters of Jesus," on "Religious Values and Cultural Conflict," and on "Thinking About Thinking" with Professors Alan Dershowitz and the late Stephen Jay Gould of the Harvard Law School and the Department of Paleontology, respectively. In addition to When Jesus Came to Harvard and The Secular City, Professor Cox has published several books, including On Not Leaving It to the Snake,The Feast of Fools, The Seduction of the Spirit (which was a runner-up for the National Book Award), Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths, Religion in the Secular City, Fire from Heaven, and, most recently, Common Prayers. A tenor saxophonist, Cox plays with a Boston jazz-and-swing ensemble called Soft Touch, and in November 1999 was featured as guest saxophone soloist with Mark Harvey's jazz orchestra Aardvark at the national meeting of the American Academy of Religion. |
