Freshman class

Culture stash

James Winston Morris, professor, theology

Ph.D., Harvard University

Specialization: Islamic culture and civilization

Representative publication: “The Unique Opportunities and Challenges Facing American Muslims in the New Century,” American Muslim

My scholarly work and teaching covers many different disciplines and historical periods, and engages a wide range of very different audiences, in ways that are summarized for the general reader in my recent book Orientations: Islamic Thought in a World Civilization (Archetype, 2004). This research has two basic dimensions. First, to retrieve, highlight, and bring to life for interested contemporary audiences elements of classical Islamic civilization that are of universal human value: spirituality, ethics, devotional life, political philosophy, and all the vernacular Islamic humanities, especially spiritual poetry and music.

The second dimension is the corresponding task of communication, which includes many cooperative efforts to explore and encourage a reawakened public interest in those classic expressions of the Islamic humanities, often within primarily Muslim contexts, while simultaneously conveying these universal humanistic elements to wider interested audiences in the West.