Robert C. Neville

Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology

Robert Cummings Neville writes and teaches in the fields of philosophy, religious studies, and systematic theology. He is especially interested in metaphysics (God the Creator), philosophical cosmology (Recovery of the Measure), ethics (The Puritan Smile, Eternity and Time’s Flow), religious semiotics (The Truth of Broken Symbols, Symbols of Jesus), and cross-cultural comparative philosophy and theology, with a comparative specialty in Chinese philosophy and religion (Ritual and Deference, Boston Confucianism). He is currently working on a systematic philosophical theology that pulls together these interests in a new theory of religion with a comparative, pragmatic, and homiletical orientation.

Neville was dean of the BU School of Theology from 1988 to 2003. Then he was dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 2003 to 2006. He was executive director of the Danielsen Institute from 2005 to 2009. He first came to Boston University in 1987 as chair of the Department of Religion and director of the Division of Religious & Theological Studies. He was dean of Fine Arts and Humanities at State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook from 1982 to 1985. He has been chair of every other academic unit in which he has served since 1966, and resolves to undertake no more administrative responsibilities. He attributes his remaining sanity to having taught full time during all these administrative endeavors. He has taught at Yale University, Fordham University, Wesleyan University (part time), SUNY Purchase, and SUNY Stony Brook as well as Boston University.

Dean Neville was ordained deacon in the Methodist Church in 1963 and elder in the United Methodist Church in 1966, with membership now in the Missouri Conference of the United Methodist Church, having served summer pastorates in Missouri in 1956 and 1962. From 1965 to 1978 he was unofficial associate pastor of St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church in the Bronx, New York, and from 1978 to 1987 was unofficial associate at the Huntington United Methodist Church in Huntington, Long Island.

The past president of the American Academy of Religion, Dean Neville is also past president of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the Association of United Methodist Theological Schools. He is currently president of the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought. He has served as a member of the Accrediting Commission of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada and the Commission on Theological Education of the United Methodist Church. He is a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Soundings. He was associated editor for behavioral and neurological articles for the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. He has published numerous books and articles.