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SACP Announcements

Dear Members of the SACP,

I have a few important announcements, made on behalf of the Board of the SACP.

  1. In light of uncertainty about the direction of the pandemic, the 52nd annual meeting of the SACP will be postponed again until October 2023.
  2. Because this is the second postponement, we ask that anyone interested in presenting at the October 2023 meeting submit NEW abstracts by 1 February 2023, even if you wish to speak on the same topic for which you previously submitted an abstract.
  3. The 52nd annual meeting of the SACP will still be hosted by the University of San Francisco, on the theme of “One and Many,” with keynote speaker Hei-sook Kim (Ewha Womans University).
  4. My term as President ends this year (December 2021). As per the SACP bylaws, our current Vice President, Sarah Flavel, will automatically become President (1 January 2022).
  5. Finally, let us stress again that the president and other members of the SACP Board will NEVER ask you individually for money, gift cards, or credit card numbers. If you are in doubt about the authenticity of any personal email message or text, ask to speak to the person in question via phone or video chat to confirm their identity. (Read up on “phishing” if you are not already familiar with this con.)

Thank you to everyone for your help and support during my term as President!

Best wishes,

Bryan (on behalf of the Board)

 

Job Posting: CSU Stanislaus

SACP members may be interested in the following job search at California State University, Stanislaus.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY: The Philosophy Program invites applications for a tenure-track position in Philosophy at the rank of Assistant Professor. AOS: Eastern Philosophy. AOC: Philosophy of Nature, Environmental Ethics, or Continental Philosophy. Course preparations to include some combination of Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Critical Thinking, and Contemporary Moral Issues; upper division course preparations to include Eastern Philosophy, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Nature Revisited, and Environmental Ethics. This position requires a strong commitment to faculty service, ongoing research, and responsive teaching methods and practices in support of student success.

https://careers.csustan.edu/st/en-us/job/505536/assistant-professor-of-philosophy

Call for Papers: Religions of Asia 2022 AAR Western Region Annual Conference

2022 Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region
March 18-20, 2022
University of Nevada, Las Vegas 

Religions of Asia 

Promoting inclusivity and excellence in scholarship, this section invites individual papers from a variety of religious and cultural traditions that explore all aspects of Religions of Asia. This year, we are especially interested in papers related to the conference’s 2022 theme: “Grace, Mercy, and Atonement: Exploring Artistic, Ritual and Social Action through Forgiveness.” https://www.aarwr.com/conference-themes.html. For example, how have religions/religious people/religious leaders responded or how are they responding to the tumultuous social and political circumstances of their own times and ours? How have religions of Asia addressed issues of social and economic justice in the past and fostered forgiveness and reconciliation and how might they fruitfully do so in our time?  In what ways do religions of Asia and marginalization (whether based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or other characteristics) intersect, both positively and negatively? How do religions of Asia employ notions related to forgiveness, grace, mercy, and/or atonement and their relationship to social action? What is or might be the role of religions of Asia in addressing social and/or economic inequality and mutual flourishing? We encourage the submission of papers that utilize interdisciplinary and nontraditional approaches to research. Other topics and themes of interest to the Religions of Asia group include: ways in which Asian religions interacts with art, music, material culture, and ideology; the nature of religious experience; gender and religion; climate change and sustainability; and storytelling and oral tradition. The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2021. Please send 250 word abstracts as email attachments to Nancy Martin nmartin@chapman.edu and Adam Tyson atyso001@ucr.edu along with completed program participant forms, available at https://www.aarwr.com/call-for-papers.html  Participants at AARWR must be members of the AAR. AAR membership information can be found here: https://www.aarweb.org/membership/join-or-renew. We look forward to receiving your proposals.

ISCP Summer 2022

Courtesy announcement on behalf of the ISCP Executive Director, Professor Ann Pang-White

International Society for Chinese Philosophy Summer 2022 ISCP Shanghai International Conference

We all truly look forward to the Summer 2022 ISCP Shanghai International Conference (postponed from 2021 due to Covid-19) as opportunities to learn from one another and making personal connections. However, considering the ever-changing nature of the pandemic, the difficulty and safety of international travelling (visa, pre-boarding test, quarantine, flight availability and high cost associated with it, etc.), in consultation with the hosting university (East China Normal University), the board has approved holding the conference with a hybrid platform — virtual and in person concurrently. For participants within the Mainland China and scholars outside of China who can and would like to travel to Shanghai, they certainly can participate the conference in person. For those who prefer to participate virtually, they can do so.

The conference registration fee will be lowered because of this new hybrid format. For non-ISCP members, the conference registration fee will be US$50 (approx. RMB300¥); for ISCP members whose dues are paid up to date, it will be free. We encourage current members to renew their membership and interested colleagues to join ISCP to take advantage of this generous offer.

With this new hybrid platform, we also hope more scholars will consider submitting individual abstract or panel proposals for the conference. The submission deadline is DECEMBER 31, 2021.

General timeline remains the same:
Deadline for submission of abstracts and panel proposals: December 31, 2021
Conference Registration: January 1- May 1, 2022
Communication of acceptance: by February 1, 2022

With warmest regards,

Ann A. Pang-White
Executive Director of ISCP
Visit us: https://iscp-online1.org/

Memorial Notice

Vale Joseph Prabhu: Obituary (updated with corrections to couple of factual oversights, 3rd Oct)

Joseph Benedict Prabhu (lovingly as ‘JB’) breathed his last on Monday 27th (September, 2021) evening at their home in Los Angeles; wife Betty Bamberg and Joseph’s daughter, Tara, were by his bedside when he passed away peacefully. The first symptoms of a bladder discomfiture showed up at East-West Philosophers’ Conference in Honolulu in May 2016; by July he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After the ensuing intensive treatment through Fall 2016, Joseph made complete recovery and went about his busy life as usual, doing the rounds of conferences and various seminars, locally in the States and in Austria and Italy. He and Betty also travelled to India, Croatia, England, Scotland & Ireland and Toronto, before the COVID-19 pandemic prevented further travels. However, in March 2016, Joseph was diagnosed with metastatic brain cancer, and so the last six months of his health condition placed severe constraints on his movement and work-a-day life.

Joseph hailed from a Konkani Catholic family in Mangalore, who later moved to Bangalore. (The surname “Prabhu’ is common among the Konkani dialect-speaking Catholics of Latin Rite in Karnataka.) Born in Mangalore, raised and educated in Kolkata, he attended St. Xavier’s College studying under Belgium Jesuits who molded the early character of his life; he also served as Mother Teresa’s first altar boy in India. Joseph moved in the mid-1960s to New Delhi for undergraduate studies at St Stephen’s College (University of Delhi) and then graduate studies in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics where he met the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen; a three-year scholarship from All India Catholic Union took him to Germany and Cambridge to study philosophy. (He would often mention the influence of Jüngen Habermas during his time in Germany, where he would also begin a deeper study of G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard.) Later he moved to the US to do his PhD at Boston University and after that to teach at Cal State LA.

Joseph was a veritable polymath, known in his professional-vocational life as a prominent philosopher of religion in the cross-cultural mode, with sound scholarly handle on the works of the Catalan-Nair philosopher and reformist Catholic priest, Dr Raimon Panikkar (his key mentor and influence, who developed an advaitic Cosmotheandric theo-sophia, and claimed at once to be Buddhist, Hindu, and Secular), Hegel and Kiekergaard, M.K. Gandhi (especially Gandhian economics and political thought), Indian Ethics, and Hindu-Christian Studies. Joseph’s interests ranged to ecological studies, postcoloniality & secularism, postmodernism and a/theology, cosmology and spirituality. A regular presence at RISA (Religions in South Asia), Hinduism, DANAM, Buddhism, and Philosophy of Religion sessions of the AAR, Joseph was never shy of standing up to direct sharp questions at the speakers, whether in plenary or workshop or general sessions; and he would end the evening attending multiple receptions.

In addition, Joseph was a stalwart of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (served as SACP’s President 2008-2009), of East-West Philosophers Conference (every 4 years in Honolulu, since 1984 where I first met him). He had quite a following also in Germany among ecumenical theologians inspired by Hans Küng, the radical Catholic theologian. It follows that religious pluralism was a passionate commitment of Joseph’s.

At the time of his untimely passing, Joseph was Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at California State University LA and Adjunct Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He was editor of _The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar_ and co-editor (with Purushottama Bilimoria and Renuka Sharma) of _Indian Ethics: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges_ (Routledge). He contributed to the _Routledge History of Indian Philosophy_.

He authored _Raimon Panikkar, a Modern Spiritual Master_; and _Liberating Gandhi: Religion and a Culture of Peace_ (both forthcoming). He was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago. He co-chaired the Southern California Parliament of the World’s Religions and was Trustee Emeritus of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He was also a significant member of the Southern California South Asia Studies Group. California State University LA has honored him by instituting an annual lecture series in his name.

Most recently Joseph was actively involved in Interreligious/ Intercultural Dialogue, Sustainability, and Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion. In India, Joseph had a visible presence in a number of areas, from his own connections with the Catholic Church, Rev Dom Bede Griffiths, Fr Michael Amoladoss S.J., through to the Templeton Foundation project on Science and Spirituality Research in India (I established with Phillip Clayton in Bangalore). When the late Indian science laureate, Prof. Raja Ramana, was planning an All-India centre for Advanced Studies on the coattails of the Indian Institute of Science/C V Raman Research Institute, in Bangalore, he called on Paṇḍita K. T. Pandurangi, who (being my Mīmāṃsā mentor) in turn called me in and I called in Joseph (we happened to be in Bangalore then). Our joint message at the meeting in IISc to Raja Ramana was to ensure that the Humanities and Social Sciences, especially Philosophy, and if possible Comparative Religion (to be one of its kind in India), are given central focus at the Institute. He took our suggestion in humility, and at least Social Sciences and Philosophy are to this day strongly represented in what has come to be the National Institute of Advanced Studies (alas, not noted in the plaque of inauguration; although one of us did have the honour of being the Homi J. Bhabha Visiting Professor for a short while).

I spoke with Joseph some four weeks before his demise, shortly upon being released from hospital, confident in his usual esteemed spirit that he was on his way to full recovery, again. He asked, however, to be relieved of commitments on certain projects we had been engaged in, urging with a sense of urgency that he intended to devote his precious time in his current weakened capacity to completing his personal memoir – for which he would be interviewing a host of his friends and colleagues who have been part of his life’s journey. We were to meet in LA in October, but, alas, it was not to be.

On a further personal note, when I would come from Australia for conferences, my first stop was at relatives’ home in Culver City; within hours either Joseph Prabhu or Chris Chapple, or both, would arrive to greet me, and make plans for events on my return journey; I would often visit him in his Altadena home, at his college or find him in the nearby Huntington Library where he often went for his quiet studies. After delivering the key-note at the Australasian-SACP conference in Melbourne, 2004, Joseph visited the renown Venus Bay kutir, where the shitsu-terrier, Devi, fell in love with him and would keep his company the entire 4 days that we worked on the two volumes of Indian Ethics and annotations (for studies) on Hegel, Raimon Pannikar, J. N. Mohanty & Phenomenology, Ninian Smart, Wilhelm Halbfass and Fred Dallmayr. In the evenings, over a glass of nearby-Koonwarra plonk, we would read poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Sri Aurobindo. At a niece’s wedding in Los Angeles, after a couple of Amarettos, I tried to draw a sigh but athlete Joseph – and Chris Chapple who was also a guest – to the beat of Bhangra-‘n’-Rock on the floor, but to no avail; he said later he derived his rhythm-and-neela-pīlā from yoga and meditation each morning! I remain Joseph’s simulation (simulacrum), and we were often got taken for brothers, if not mistaken for each other, or apparitionally as buddhivān incarnatio. A memorable quote of Joseph’s lives on in our midst:

“Action brings insight into dynamic motion, and insight without thoughtful action, to my mind, is seriously incomplete.”

In Joseph Prabhu we have lost a scholar, colleague, friend, Gandhian Christian, husband, brother, father, uncle, and grandfather, and a decent, ever curious and caringly empathic (sorge) fellow human being : a mahottama indeed. I end this short tribute with this offering on behalf:

gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

(please join @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnP-43e0nwY).

Adieu.

Purushottama Bilimoria

(with inputs from Betty Bamberg and Jaideep Prabhu)

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