 Yr ystod, dylai, mae'n cydweud? Mae'n gyfrannu i gael ei gyd yn ysgolol o'r dda i'r ysgolol gyda'i profiadir Diane Eck o'r ysgolwch am ddau yma o'r drud yn y cyfnodau. Profiadir Eck yn ysgolwch â'r ysgolwch yn ysgolwch a'r ysgolwch yn ysgolwch maes yn ysgolwch yn ysgolwch yn ysgolwch amgylchedau ar ysgolwch yn ysgolwch. She's a member of the Department of South Asian Studies, and committee on the study of religion. Professor Eck grew up in Bosbon, Montana, where her father was an architect and professor of architecture, and her mother a State senator for almost 25 years. By her own accounts, Professor Eck was raised in an intellectually rich and challenging environment, and as a student joined the march on Washington for civil rights. Mae'r bwysig i'r bwysig i Llywodraeth Smyth Cymru yn 1967. Fyddiwch chi'n gweithio'r unrhyw bwysig, mae'r bwysig yn Fyro-Nasi ar Benares Hymde Unedig. Felly byddwch chi'n gweithio'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i Benares yng Nghymru i'r ddweud y ffaithau o'r ffordd acaddiadau. Yn 1967, ysgolwch Professor Ek rwy'n gweithio'r llwyddiad i'r ddweud yma i'r ddweud yma i Llywodraeth Swyth. Mae'r ddweud, mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau, mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau, mae'r ddweud yn gweithio'n cymwyng ymddirysig o'r bydd, er mwyn, a africa a ydyn nhw. Mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau, o'r cyfrifio cyfrifio a'r ohol o'r ddweud i'r lleig. Felly i chi'n meddwl am ychydig? Mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau mae'n gweithio'r llwyddiadau ddweud i'r gweithio'r llwyddiadau in courses by Professor Tinker, Flora Hammonddorff, Derek and Chowdry. A year before Professor X arrival at SOAS, the school had established the Centre for South Asian Studies. By another happy coincidence, we are pleased to announce that the school is launching a new Institute of South Asian Studies from the 1st of September this year. After SOAS, Professor X secured a PhD from Harvard in comparative study of religion. She was appointed a lecturer in Hindu religion at Harvard in 1976 and became a professor in 1983. Professor X's research on India has focused on pilgrimage and popular religion. It includes the book's Benares, City of Light, Darshan, seeing the divine image in India, and India, a sacred geography. Of the latter, one reviewer has described it as, quote, like listening to an old wise friend whose love and admiration of India and his people shines on every page. This empathy and the fine understanding was demonstrated most recently when Professor X accompanied Rahul Mirotra of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard to lead a 30-member team of students and professors to study the many dimensions of India's Coo Millar pilgrimage. The Coo Millar at the Confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in Northern India is the largest single gathering of pilgrims in India. In 2013, it is estimated that over 100 pilgrims visited the two-month millar. Unusially for someone working in Indian Studies, Professor X's research has provided her with an exceptional vantage point to reflect on the pressing contemporary issues such as inter-religious encounters, diversity and pluralism. Thus, a book Encountering God, a spiritual journey from Bosnia to Benares, explores issues of religious diversities that challenge Christians and people of every faith. Encountering God won the 1995 Louisville Groma Book Award in religion, given for the work that reflects a significant breakthrough in our understanding of religion. Perhaps more significantly, in 1991, Professor Eck launched the Pluralism Project to document and interpret the growing presence of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Zoroastrian communities in the US. This research project has involved students and professors at Harvard and a dozen affiliated colleges and universities in research on America's new religious landscape. The project produced an award-winning multimedia CD-ROM on Common Ground, World Religions in America. On the basis of this research, Professor Eck wrote, in New Religious America, how a Christian country has become the world's most religiously diverse nation, addressing the challenges for the United States, the complex religious landscape emerging from the post-1964 period of renewed migration. As a result of this pioneering work in 1998, Professor Eck received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Endowment for Humanities for her work on American religious pluralism. In 2002, she was a recipient of the American Academy of Religion, Martin Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion, and in the following year, the Governor's Humanities Award from the Montana Council for the Humanities. In 2005 and 2006, Professor Eck was elected President of the American Academy of Religion. Alongside this distinguished academic career, Professor Eck has maintained an active engagement in church issues. Over these years, she has worked closely with the churches on inter-religious relations, including her own United Methodist Church and the World Council of Churches. She is currently the chair of the Interfaith Relations Commission of the National Council of Churches in the United States. It is my privilege now, Chairman, to present to you Professor Eck for the award of honorary doctorate in divinity and to invite her to address this assembly. Thank you. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, members of the faculty, thank you for the honour of this award and for the chance to speak to you, the students and graduates today. I first came to SOAS as an American Fulbright Scholar 46 years ago. Yes, I loved it. I loved it here. I loved the classes. I loved the global energies of the common room where you could smoke in those days. And it also got me started on a lifetime of work. For you students, of course, 46 years seems like a long time and it actually is, but I cease to be astonished at the passing of decades in my own lifespan. What does astonish me, though, are the huge changes over these years in the world we live in. The very term globalization has signaled the enormous changes, the revolutions, really, that have made SOAS more important than ever and that make your life and your work as graduates so essential to the world we live in today. We know, for example, that the telecommunications revolution has linked the world with fiber optic cable and satellite telecommunications. It's virtually eliminated the distance between us. For example, last Saturday, just minutes after they posted the announcement of the birth on an easel outside Buckingham Palace, I happened to be driving along the interstate in Providence, Rhode Island in the US, and a giant roadside billboard announced, it's a boy. That was how I first got the news flash of the royal birth. Now, I first went to India and I first came to SOAS as a student in the 1960s, that legendary time, but in what to some of you might seem like an unimaginable time, a quarter century before the advent of the internet and the first web browser. The letter, yes, the letter with a stamp on it, was the primary mode of personal communication, taking weeks to arrive from India and an occasional telegram would communicate more urgent news. Later, through the 1980s, the Indian Telegraph Service was a kind of personal GPS as I explored the sacred geography of remote parts of India and needed to inform my loved ones back home just where on earth I was. I would send a telegram almost every week. Last week, the Guardian reported on the demise of the Indian Telegraph Service, today completely outmoded by instantaneous communications of email satellite telephone systems that span even rural India. Today's powerful telecommunications networks deploy worldwide advertising strategies, create worldwide markets, and become worldwide news brokers. Syria and Egypt are in our living room and the headlines from South Africa, the cricket scores from India and the birth notices from London are on our iPhones. But over these years, some things haven't changed much at all. Not just the number seven bus route outside of SOAS, but the deep differences, the deep differences, economic and political and religious differences that continue to fracture and divide the world, globally and now locally as well. We understand one another far too little. Our ignorance and our prejudice circle the globe along with our credit card numbers and our greenhouse gases. And it is this that makes your work as graduates of SOAS more urgent than ever before, creating the human and the moral infrastructure that will enable us to live creatively with difference is the challenge of today and tomorrow. It's your challenge. And along with the communications revolution, the migration of peoples as economic migrants and refugees has transformed the face of our societies. The new immigrants to the US over the past five decades have brought to my country only their dreams of a new life and a new land, but their Korans and their Bhagavad Gita's, their Kirtans and their Ithars, their Buddhist meditation practices, their yoga, their Bollywood films. Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims are now neighbours across the street in America. Their temples and Gurdwaras and mosques and Islamic centers are part of the landscape of American cities and towns. In America, today, like Great Britain has been for some time, is a multi-religious, a multi-cultural country. President Obama in his first inaugural address described the nation rightly as a patchwork people. A nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers, he said we are shaped by every language and culture and drawn from every end of this earth. That's true of other countries as well. It's long been true here in Britain. But diversity, pure and simple, is not pluralism. Diversity is just a fact of our world and pluralism is a creation. It's an achievement. It is the product of places like so-as. It's forged by the engagement of people, one another across lines of difference, across lines of cultures and continents, the kinds of relationship that you have found here. It's forged by the energies that are so blatantly on display in the undergraduate common room. It's forged by the relationships that you've made and by the intellectual strengths that you've found here. In the world we all live in today, you are lucky to be graduates of this place. Negotiating difference, creating the infrastructure of pluralism, is both a global and a local challenge. And it's your challenge as citizens of whatever country you come from and as citizens of a fast-changing and interdependent and complex world. So graduating from so-as today, you are surely prepared to be leaders in this work, and what your field of study. We're counting on you. Congratulations and good luck. Thank you.