Seminar to Conclude Center’s First Year

Signaling a growing academic interest in religion’s role in society, the fledgling Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA is completing a successful first year while hoping to someday become a department on campus.

UCLA has traditionally been hostile to the academic study of religion, said David C. Rapoport, director of the center. As such, UCLA was virtually the sole holdout among Southern California private and public universities that have offered religious studies programs.

“Once, people thought religion was dead and had no political importance, but with religious revivals exercising political muscle, things began to change,” said Rapoport, who is a professor of political science.

The change was also prompted by increased scholarly study of Eastern cultures, which are hard to observe apart from their religious elements, and the broadening ethnic makeup of faculty and students on campus, he said. “You find cultures that are not secularized,” he said.

UCLA undergraduate students have been able to patch together a religion major at the school since the 1980s despite having neither a department nor any professor specializing in religious subjects. Nearly 35 students are now religion majors.

By pulling together professors whose specialties overlap into religion, the center was able to have 25 colloquia for faculty and graduate students this school year on topics from voodoo to the Russian Orthodox Church.

An average of 25 to 30 people attended the colloquia, “but we got a huge turnout for one on the Christian patriot movement,” Rapoport said.

Lectures and one-day conferences open to the public have ranged from Dead Sea Scrolls controversies and the classic theological problem of evil to a comparison of Indian and European philosophy.

The final public event of the inaugural year will be a conference Sunday on comparisons of the historical Buddha and the historical Jesus.

Two professors with specialties in Asian religions from Loyola Marymount University, Christopher Chapple and James Fredericks, will join Ananda W. P. Guruge, formerly of Northwestern University, in discussing Gautama Buddha, who lived 500 years before Jesus. Scott Bartchy of UCLA’s history department, James Goss of Cal State Northridge and Ray S. Anderson of Fuller Theological Seminary will talk about the founder of Christianity.

The conference will begin at 1 p.m. No admission will be charged, but parking is $5. For more information, call (310) 825-8948.

CONFERENCE

Sociologists of religion know it; pastors know it; so does the Presbyterian who easily switches to a Methodist or a nondescript Christian church without batting an eye: It’s the fading allegiance of churchgoers to one denomination.

The “post-denominational church” will be explored next week in a conference at Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena.

Convened by C. Peter Wagner of Fuller Theological Seminary and his Global Harvest Ministries, the meeting--rather than bemoan the trends--will look optimistically at ways churches might adapt to the movement.

Luminaries in the charismatic and conservative Christian world are among the speakers, including Ken Foreman Jr. of San Jose’s Cathedral of Faith, Bobbye Byerly of Women’s Aglow International, evangelist Morris Cerullo of San Diego and Steve Richards of Overlake Christian Church in Kirkland, Wash. Speakers Elmer Towns of Liberty Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg, Va., and John Vaughn of Church Growth Today in Bolivar, Mo., have followed the growth of mega-churches in this country.

The symposium will begin with a service at 7 p.m. Monday and end on Thursday night. Registration is $150. (818) 584-5290.

DATES

Charles Colson, who has emerged as a major evangelical leader through his books and columns in the last two decades, will speak Friday night in Pasadena at a fund-raiser for Prison Fellowship, the 20-year-old ministry he founded after serving prison time for his role in the Watergate scandal. Tickets for the 7:20 p.m. dinner at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel are $50. Prison Fellowship has 250 volunteers in Southern California with regional offices in Chino. (909) 465-5853.

* In a lecture intended to debunk New Age ideas of the scientific basis for ESP, psychic power and alternative healing methods, Victor J. Stenger, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, will speak at 2 p.m. Sunday on “Quantum Quackery.” The lecture, sponsored by the Altadena-based Skeptics Society, will be in Baxter Lecture Hall on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Tickets are $8 for nonmembers. (818) 794-3119.

* Missouri Synod Lutherans, who once formed mostly German American churches in Southern California, are celebrating their growing racial and ethnic diversity Sunday with a “One in the Spirit” musical-spiritual celebration at South Gate Municipal Auditorium. Of the 276 congregations in the denomination’s Pacific Southwest District, 62 are either predominantly Latino (23), African American (13), Korean (7) or other non-European heritages, said a spokeswoman for the Irvine-based district. Anticipating 500 participants, organizers sold 1,000 tickets and turned away other requests.

* A Buddha’s birthday celebration will be held at 8 tonight in El Monte at the new Waken Ray Tseng Temple, 11657 Lower Azusa Road, which describes itself as part of a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sect. Master Allen Hou will lead the services in Mandarin with Cantonse and English translations available. A free dinner at 6 p.m. will precede the ceremony. (818) 455-0077.

* Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, will talk on “The Radical Religious Right” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Neighborhood Church, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena. The sponsors include the Unitarian Universalist Project Freedom of Religion and the American Jewish Congress. There is no admission charge.

* The spiritual path of “letting go” as practiced by 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart will be described May 25 at Mount St. Mary’s Doheny Campus in four presentations by Jim Finley of Santa Monica, a clinical psychologist and Eckhart specialist. The reflective program from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. will be at the college campus in downtown Los Angeles at 10 Chester Place. Preregistration is $35. (213) 746-0450.

* Sacred music, ranging from an 11th century chant to contemporary compositions, will be performed at 8 p.m. today at St. Cross by the Sea Episcopal Church, 1818 Monterey Blvd., Hermosa Beach. The concert will feature Greg Maldonado, founder-director of the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, with an ensemble of period instruments and choirs from the host church. Admission is $10. (310) 376-8989.

* Knox Presbyterian Church, now at 5840 La Tijera Blvd., Ladera Heights, will observe its 100th birthday at its 10:30 a.m. service Sunday with an Air Force lieutenant colonel and chaplain as guest pastor. The chaplain, the Rev. David E. Markwalder, was ordained at the church in 1974. The anniversary service will include reviews of the church’s past, including its beginnings 100 years ago at 30th and Figueroa streets in Los Angeles.

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