Mike Ryan Lecture Series March 16

Louis A. Ruprecht (GSU)

SO 1019 12:30

Finding & Losing Your Way: Plato's Erotic Path
Dr. Ruprecht is an affiliate faculty member with the Hellenic Studies Center and the Center for Collaborative Scholarship in the Humanities. He is also a research fellow of the Vatican Library Secret Archives and a staff writer for "Religion Dispatches." He has taught and published in topics ranging from Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Religion and Culture, to issues regarding Comparative Religious Ethics, the History of Christianity, Tragedy, and various philosophic writings.

Selected Publications:
Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve, (Continuum, 1994)
Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996)
Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value, (SUNY, 1999)
Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism, (Palgrave, 2002)
God Gardened East: A Gardener's Meditation on the Dynamics of Genesis, Cascade Books (January 2008).
This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity, (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2008)
"A Shrine to the Muses: The Modern Public Art Museum, Spiritual Space for an Irreligious Age" (in progress)
"Winckelmann's Secret History: the Birth of Art History and the Vatican's First Profane Museum" (currently under review)

Mike Ryan Lecture Series February 25

Robert Buswell, UCLA (PSA Contribution to “Year of Korea”)

Korean Buddhism in East Asian Context

February 25. 2010 at 12:30 Social Science 1019

Robert Buswell earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before returning to academe, he spent seven years as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Korea, which served as the basis of his book The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (Princeton University Press, 1992). He is now a professor of Chinese and Korean Buddhist studies, and chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He founded UCLA's Center for Buddhist Studies in 2000, and was the initial faculty director of the Center for Korean Studies from 1992 to 2001. Buswell specializes in the Son (Zen) tradition of Korean Buddhism. In addition to The Zen Monastic Experience he is author of The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul (University of Hawaii Press), reprinted as Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul's Korean Way of Zen (University of Hawaii Press); and The Formation of Ch'an Ideology in China and Korea: The Vajrasamadhi-Sutra, A Buddhist Apocryphon (Princeton University Press). He is also editor of Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (University of Hawaii Press); Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, Robert Buswell and Robert M. Gimello, coeditors (University of Hawaii Press); and Abhidharma Buddhism to 150 A.D. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 7, Karl H. Potter, editor; Robert Buswell, P. S. Jaini and Noble Ross Reat, coeditors (Motilal Barnarsidass). Buswell has also authored numerous articles concerning the Korean, Chinese, and Indian Buddhist traditions and is currently the President of the Association of Asian Studies, the leading association devoted to Asian Studies in the world.