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The Future of Faith with Dr. Harvey Cox
March 5 at 8 pm
in cooperation with the Marble Collegiate Church

Dr. Harvey Cox is one of the most thoughtful and provocative commentators on religious life in America. His landmark book, The Secular City, was published in 1965. It became immensely popular and influential, selling over one million copies.

A long-time popular professor at the Divinity School of Harvard University, he completed his undergraduate education of the University of Pennsylvania, and he earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in the history of religion.

In his first masterpiece, Dr. Cox developed the thesis that the church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution. He argued that “God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life.” Far from being a protective religious community, the church should be in the forefront of change in society, celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world. Phrases such as “intrinsic conservatism prevents the denominational churches from leaving their palaces behind and stepping into God's permanent revolution in history” can be viewed as threatening to the status quo, and for some an embrace of the social revolution of the 1960s.

His new book, The Future of Faith, was released to coincide with his retirement from the Divinity School, and it explores three important trends in Christianity’s 2,000 years.

He views the religion’s first three centuries as the Age of Faith, when followers simply embraced the teachings of Jesus. Then came the Age of Belief, in which church leaders increasingly took control and set acceptable limits on doctrine and orthodoxy.

But the last 50 years, Dr. Cox contends, welcomed in the Age of the Spirit, in which Christians have begun to ignore dogma and embrace spirituality, while finding common threads with other religions.

One of his most interesting books is Common Prayers, which traces the Jewish year through the eyes of a Christian.

Dr. Cox's wife, Dr. Nina Tumarkin, is a professor of Russian History at Wellesley and is Jewish. Their son Nicholas is being raised as a Jew, and Cox writes lovingly about the Jewish dimensions of their home, and about preparing his son for Bar Mitzvah.