Dana Sawyer

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Dana Sawyer
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Dana Sawyer
Born(1951-07-04)July 4, 1951
Jonesport, Maine, United States
OccupationProfessor of Religion
Known forAuthor of Aldous Huxley: A Biography, author of the authorized biography Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper: Living The World's Religions
SpouseStephani Briggs
Children(from previous marriage) Sophie Sawyer and Emma Sawyer

Dana Sawyer is professor emeritus of religious studies and world religions at the Maine College of Art & Design and an adjunct professor in Asian Religions at the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. [1] He is the author of numerous published papers and books, including Aldous Huxley: A Biography, [2] which Laura Huxley described as, "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked."

Contents

Huston Smith, Wisdomkeeper, Sawyer's authorized biography of world religion scholar Huston Smith, was published in 2014. [3] [4] [5]

Huxley and Smith were close friends and were leading advocates of the perennial philosophy, which describes an underlying reality to material existence. Huxley's 1945 book, The Perennial Philosophy , argues that the concept is revealed in the mystical branches of all the world's religions. Sawyer's updated account of the perennial philosophy, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded will be published in July, 2024. [6]

Biography

Dana Sawyer was born in Jonesport, Maine in 1951 to Waide and Joanne Sawyer, and after the age of nine grew up with a younger sister, Cynthia, and brother, Paul, in the nearby village of Milbridge, where his father was a wholesale lobster buyer.

He has been involved in fund-raising activities for the Siddhartha School Project in Stok, Ladakh, north India, for more than ten years. [7] This project has resulted in the construction of an elementary/ middle/high school for underprivileged Buddhist children that has been visited twice by the Dalai Lama, who holds it as a model for blending traditional and Western educational ideals. Much of his work for this project has involved translating at lectures for (and teaching with) the school's founder, Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan, who is the abbot of the Panchen Lama's monastery near Mysore, India. [8] [9]

Sawyer's interest in the phenomenon of Neo-Hindu and Buddhist groups in America led him to become a popular lecturer on topics of interest to these groups. He has taught at the Kripalu Center (Lenox, Massachusetts), the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (Barre, Massachusetts), the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Hollywood, California), the Esalen Institute [10] in Big Sur, California, and other such venues. This work has also brought him into contact with several important figures in this field, including Stanislav Grof, Andrew Harvey, Huston Smith, Laura Huxley, Stephen Cope, Jeffery Kripal, and Alex Grey.

Sawyer has been to India eighteen times, most recently while leading the study abroad program in India for the Maine College of Art & Design in 2019, and has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent: Nepal, Pakistan, Sikkim, Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Related to academic work Sawyer has lectured at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Banaras Hindu University, the University of Riga, Latvia, the Huntington Library, and at colleges and conferences throughout the United States (interview footage of Sawyer from the Riga conference was featured in a British documentary, "Brand New World," on the dangers of consumer culture). In August, 2005, Sawyer was a participant in the by-invitation-only conference on "Government, Education, and Religion" at the Oxford Roundtable, Lincoln College, Oxford University. He is a member of two academic societies: the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP) and the International Aldous Huxley Society, centered at the University of Munster in Germany.

Selected publications

Interviews with Dana Sawyer

Education

Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa, School of Religion, Iowa City, Iowa (comprehensive examinations, May 1988). Major: History of Asian Religions with a primary focus on religion in modern India. Dissertation unfinished, though much of it has been published.

M.A., University of Iowa, School of Religion, History of Asian Religions, 1993.

Oxford University, Oxford, England. Accepted by the Oriental faculty to study for the Department of Philosophy, with Richard Gombrich as advisor. Attended during the Michelmas term, 1980.

University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Graduate courses in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy (with Bimal Motilal), Fall 1978.

M.A., University of Hawaiʻi, Department of Asian Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1978. Major: The Religions of India.

B.A., Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, Connecticut 1973. Major: World Literature. Minor: philosophy.

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References

  1. Faculty Listing Archived 2010-12-29 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Izzo, David Garrett (June 2008). Huxley's Brave new world: essays. McFarland. pp. 145–. ISBN   978-0-7864-3683-5 . Retrieved 17 May 2011.
  3. Archived 2015-09-11 at the Wayback Machine
  4. “Front Matter.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26417785. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.
  5. Reinders, Eric, and Dana Sawyer. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, pp. 132–33. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26417812. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023.
  6. Announcement of The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded release .
  7. Article about Siddhartha School in Ladakh, India Two Young Graduates Return to Ladakh, Looking to Give Back
  8. Sawyer's official website Official Website
  9. Official website for the Siddhartha School
  10. Esalen faculty listing
  11. Sawyer, D., & Humes, C. (2023). The Transcendental Meditation Movement (Elements in New Religious Movements). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009365482
  12. Advaita Vedanta and Monistic Tantra
  13. 'What Is the ‘Unitive Mystical Experience’
  14. Link to Redressing a Straw Man article
  15. Article about Siddhartha School in Ladakh, India Two Young Graduates Return to Ladakh, Looking to Give Back
  16. Obituary for Huston Smith in Tricycle
  17. Reinders, Eric. “Review: Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions by Dana Sawyer.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 127–28. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2015.19.2.127. Accessed 29 Nov. 2023. Review of Wisdomkeeper
  18. Tricycle article, How Hinduism Seeped into American Soil
  19. Tricycle Article Downeast Roshi
  20. Lin, Lidan. “Aldous Huxley in the Age of Global Literary Studies”. International Fiction Review, vol. 31, no. 1, Jan. 2004
  21. Tricycle Article Aldous Huxley’s Truth Beyond Tradition
  22. Spirit Matters Interview
  23. Buddha at the Gas Pump - Dana Sawyer on Huston Smith
  24. The Indie Spiritualist with Chris Grosso - Interview with Dana Sawyer