Joseph F. Roccasalvo (born December 9, 1940) is an American author, academic, and retired Catholic priest. He is best known for writing books and articles discussing theology, spirituality, and literature. Roccasalvo has also been affiliated with multiple academic institutions, including Manhattanville College, Fordham University and Loyola University Chicago.
Roccasalvo was born in Brooklyn, New York to an Italian-American family and resided in the neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. He attended the Jesuit Brooklyn Preparatory School and graduated in 1958. [1]
After his secondary education, Roccasalvo joined the Society of Jesus, completing his novitiate years at Bellarmine College (now Clinton Community College [2] ) in 1962. He enrolled in Fordham University and finished degrees in Classics and English Literature in 1964, along with a graduate degree in English literature in 1965. [3] From 1965 to 1968, he taught French and theology at Brooklyn Preparatory School during his regency years, followed by three years of theology studies to obtain his MDiv in Theology at Woodstock College. [4] [5]
Roccasalvo applied to and gained admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1972 where he resided at the Center of the Study of World Religions. [6] There, under Masatoshi Nagatomi, he completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Religion in 1978; his dissertation being entitled "The Anatta Doctrine: A Textual and Contextual Interpretation". [7] [8] For part of his program, he lived in Thailand to do research and taught at Mahidol University. [9] His academic publications during his early career were in exploring the religious contrasts and correspondences between the two philosophies of Moheyan and Kamalaśīla in the Council of Lhasa. [10]
He served as a priest at Loyola University Chicago where he was also an adjunct associate professor of comparative religion for the summer session at the Institute of Pastoral Studies from 1979 through 1999. He was an assistant professor of History of Religions and Buddhist Studies at Manhattanville College from 1979 to 1985; he also held an associate professor position at Fordham University and adjunct positions at Columbia University and Queens College. [11] [12]
Roccasalvo is a hyperpolyglot, having professional working proficiency in 10 languages, including Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit and Pali. [13] He has served as a graduate student mentor and shared his experiences about mentoring with the New School Free Press. [14]
According to his website, he has published five novels including Fire in a Windless Place, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Odor of Sanctity and The Devil’s Interval. Two novellas, The Powers That Be and Beyond the Pale were printed as Double Entendre. There followed three books of short stories: Outward Signs, The Mansions of Limbo, and Triple Sec. Two solo performances, Waging Waugh [15] and Gospel Limericks, appeared as Two for One and were followed by two memoirs, As It Were and The Province of Memory. Two further novellas have been published: Island of the Assassin and Alina in Ecstasy; likewise, his collected poetry in Poems For Two Violins and It Comes in Tides. His collected short stories are entitled, Twists of Faith. [16] [17] In 2020, he won the International Association of Top Professionals (IAOTP) Top Fiction Writer of the Year. [18]
Unitarianism is a Nontrinitarian branch of Christianity. Unitarian Christians affirm the unitary nature of God as the singular and unique creator of the universe, believe that Jesus Christ was inspired by God in his moral teachings and that he is the savior of humankind, but he is not equal to God himself.
Manhattanville University is a private university in Purchase, New York, United States. Founded in 1841 as a school at 412 Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, it was initially known as the Academy of the Sacred Heart. In 1917, the academy received a charter from the Regents of the State of New York to raise the school officially to a collegiate level, granting degrees as the College of the Sacred Heart. In 1937, it became known as Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, and from 1966 to 2024 as Manhattanville College.
Avery Robert Dulles was an American Jesuit priest, theologian, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. Dulles served on the faculty of Woodstock College from 1960 to 1974, of the Catholic University of America from 1974 to 1988, and as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008. He was also an internationally known author and lecturer.
Harvard Divinity School (HDS) is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school's mission is to educate its students either in the academic study of religion or for leadership roles in religion, government, and service. It also caters to students from other Harvard schools that are interested in the former field. HDS is among a small group of university-based, non-denominational divinity schools in the United States.
Krister Olofson Stendahl was a Swedish theologian, New Testament scholar, and Church of Sweden Bishop of Stockholm. He also served as dean, professor, and professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School.
Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. is an American theologian who served as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009. Cox's research and teaching focus on theological developments in world Christianity, including liberation theology and the role of Christianity in Latin America.
The Gloria L. and Charles I. Clough School of Theology and Ministry (CSTM) is a Jesuit school of graduate theology at Boston College. It is an ecclesiastical faculty of theology that trains men and women, both lay and religious, for scholarship and service, especially within the Catholic Church.
Jacob Kehinde Olupona is a Nigerian-born American professor, writer, and scholar of religious studies. He is a professor of African Religious Traditions at the Harvard Divinity School with a joint appointment as Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Olupona was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2023.
Mark S. Massa, SJ is the Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. From 2010 to 2016 he was Dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.
Elizabeth A. Johnson is a Roman Catholic feminist theologian. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theology at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York City and a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood. The National Catholic Reporter has called Johnson "one of the country's most prominent and respected theologians."
Francis Xavier Clooney is an American Jesuit priest and scholar in the teachings of Hinduism. He is currently a professor at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Roger Haight is an American Jesuit theologian and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He is regarded as a knowledgeable and pioneering theologian, whose experiences with censorship have led to widespread debate over how to handle controversial ideas in the Catholic church today.
Lynn de Silva's theology began at an early stage in Lynn de Silva's ministry, when his interest in Buddhism and its culture began to increase. He believed that the credibility of Christianity depended on its ability to relate to Buddhism, which was the faith of the majority of the Sri Lankan population. His objective was to develop a richer appreciation of the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, in particular, to communicate the Christian message in a manner that the Sri Lankan culture understood, and to construct a theology that is focused towards the Buddhist cultural environment. To this end, he used Buddhist concepts to communicate Christian beliefs in a language understood from the Buddhist context, and he aimed at extending Christian theology with Buddhist concepts in order to gain a more thorough understanding of Christianity. In his book The Problem of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity, de Silva states the following:
There is a growing body of opinion within Christianity that its theology is shop-soiled and needs drastic revision in order first, to re-root it in the basic biblical teaching, secondly, to bring it into harmony with new insights and modes of thought coming from other faiths, ideologies and modern science and thirdly, to relate it to social realities... What I have attempted is to help this process of transformation in Christian thinking. However, theological thinking in order to be meaningful and relevant must be contextual. The context of this book is Buddhism.
Davíd Lee Carrasco is an American academic historian of religion, anthropologist, and Mesoamericanist scholar. As of 2001, he holds the inaugural appointment as Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin America Studies at the Harvard Divinity School, in a joint appointment with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Carrasco previously taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Princeton University and is known for his research and publications on Mesoamerican religion and history, his public speaking as well as wider contributions within Latin American studies and Latino/a studies. He has made statements about Latino contributions to US democracy in public dialogues with Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and Samuel P. Huntington. His work is known primarily for his writings on the ways human societies orient themselves with sacred places.
Georges B.J. Dreyfus is an academic in the fields of Tibetology and Buddhology, with a particular interest in Indian Buddhist philosophy. In 1985 he was the first Westerner to receive the Geshe Lharampa degree, the highest available within the Tibetan scholastic tradition.
Yoshinobu Miyake is a Japanese Shinto priest and scholar. Rev. Miyake was appointed the Superior General of Konko Church of Izuo in 2006 and appointed chair of the Board of International Shinto Studies Association in 2013.
Mark D. Jordan is a scholar of Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. He is currently the Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and Professor of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
John Allen Grim is the co-founder and co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, alongside his wife Mary Evelyn Tucker. He teaches at Yale University, where he holds appointments in the Yale School of the Environment, the Divinity School, and the Department of Religious Studies. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Bucknell University. He specializes in Native American religions and has studied the Salish people of Washington State and the Crow/Apsaalooke people of Montana. He has also undertaken field work with healing practitioners in East and Southeast Asia and with religious leaders in Vrindaban and New Delhi, India.
Taylor G. Petrey is an American scholar of religion and the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought since 2019. He is a professor at Kalamazoo College. In 2016–17, he was a visiting associate professor at Harvard Divinity School and research associate at the Women's Studies in Religion Program. He specializes in gender studies, Early Christianity, and Mormonism. His 2020 book Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism has won numerous awards, including "Best Book Award" from the Mormon History Association and a "Choice Outstanding Academic Title" award.
Cheryl J. Sanders is an African-American professor and scholar of Christian Ethics. Her work on womanist ethics has been influential in the development of the field. She teaches Christian Ethics at Howard University School of Divinity. Her books include Ministry at the Margins, Saints in Exile: The Holiness Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion, and Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African American Social Transformation.
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