This year's Surjit Singh Lecture by Philip Wickeri will be a part of a two-day GTU symposium, Learning as Collaborative Conversation: Celebrating the Scholarship and Teaching of Judith Berling. The Singh Lecture will be part of the afternoon session on the first day of the event, at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, May 25. Watch live streaming video of the lecture here.
The annual Surjit Singh Lecture in Comparative Religious Thought and Culture seeks to foster interreligious and cross-cultural communication and understanding, without compromising the integrity and essential telos of a religion or a culture. This endowed lectureship brings to the GTU a distinguished scholar/church leader to address religion and culture from a cross-cultural perspective. For the 2016 annual Surjit Lecture, The Revered Dr. Philip Lauri Wickeri will speak on the contributions of Judith A. Berling, GTU faculty member and a leading scholar in interreligious and comparative religious studies. His lecture is entitled, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Contribution of Judith Berling to Religious Pluralism in Theological Education.
The Revd Dr. Philip Lauri Wickeri, Ph.D., D.D, is Advisor to the Archbishop on Theological and Historical Studies, the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (Anglican-Episcopal), and Provincial Archivist for the HKSKH. He teaches at Ming Hua Theological College and serves as Honorary Chaplain at St. John’s Cathedral (Anglican). Wickeri is Adjunct Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California (USA), and Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Shanghai University, China. He is concurrently a member of the Presbytery of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A).
His most recent book is Christian Encounters with Chinese Culture: Essays on Anglican and Episcopal History in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2015) He is the author of the award winning Reconstructing Christianity in China: K. H. Ting and the Chinese Church (Orbis Books, 2007). He is also co-editor of Chinese Religious Life: Culture, Society and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011), which also came out in a Chinese edition in 2011. He has also written more than one hundred essays, in Chinese and in English, and is the co-author of the parish history of St. Mary’s (Anglican) Church in Hong Kong. Wickeri is on the Editorial Advisory Board of several journals, including Madang, The Yearbook of Chinese Theology and Contact/Zone Explorations in Intercultural Theology, the leading series on contextual theology.
From 1998 to 2009, he was the Flora Lamson Hewlett Professor of Evangelism and Mission at San Francisco Theological Seminary (San Anselmo, CA) and the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, CA). From 1985 to 1998, Wickeri served as the Overseas Co-ordinator for the Amity Foundation, based in Hong Kong. Prior to that, he served the church in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Wickeri has taught and lectured widely in Asia, North America and Europe. He was Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology (2005-2006) and was awarded a Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, by the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 2005. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1985, magna cum laude. Wickeri is a graduate of Colgate University (1965) and he grew up in Pelham, N.Y., outside of New York City.