by Dr. Steven J. Friesen
The university libraries have just finished digitizing some old interviews I arranged in the early 1990s.
One of the byproducts of retiring is the discovery of buried treasures as you clean out the office. Last summer I discovered old videotapes from my post-doc at the East-West Center in Honolulu in the early 1990s in outdated video formats. The tapes contain interviews Tu Weiming conducted with Huston Smith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and several other interesting people not named Smith. One is on indigenous religions with four specialists–a Papua New Guinean professor, a Native Hawaiian professor, a Maori professor, and a Shinto priest. The other three are about “spirituality of matter” and are one-on-ones with Raimon Pannikar, Huston Smith, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith.
My name is on the listings as “author,” but “editor” would be more accurate. With the help of Shiela Winchester, Katherine Thornton, Mirko Hanke, and the University of Texas Libraries, the interviews are now digitized and available to the public.
- http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/44537
- http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/44538
- http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/44535
- http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/44536
Dr. Steven J. Friesen is the former Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a B.A. from Fresno Pacific College. Prior to arriving at UT-Austin, he taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he served as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He also held a three-year fellowship in the Cultural Studies Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
Friesen’s research field was early Christianity, with particular interests in the book of Revelation, poverty in the Roman Empire, and archaeology of religion in the eastern Mediterranean. His publications include Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins and Twice Neokoros: Ephesus, Asia, and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family. His research examined the economic ideas and practices of the apostle Paul and his communities.
Dr. Friesen is recently retired, but taught undergraduate courses on New Testament and Biblical Studies, as well as theory and method in the study of religion. These include “Introduction to the New Testament,” “Revelation and Apocalyptic Literature,” and “What is Religion?”
