Full-Time Faculty

Christopher Key Chapple, Ph.D.
cchapple@lmu.edu
310-338-2846

Dr. Christopher Key Chapple is the Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His research interests have focused on the renouncer religious traditions of India: Yoga, Jainism, and Buddhism. He has published several books with SUNY Press, including Karma and Creativity (1986), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Reconciling Yogas (2003), and Yoga and the Luminous: Patanjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom (2008).

He has also edited and co-authored several books on religion and ecology, including Ecological Prospects: Religious, Scientific, and Aesthetic Perspectives (1994, SUNY), Hinduism and Ecology (2000, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Harvard), Jainism and Ecology (2002, Harvard), Yoga and Ecology (2009, Deepak Heritage), and In Praise of Mother Earth: The Prthivi Sukta of the Atharva Veda (2011, with O.P. Dwivedi, winner, translation prize, Dharma Academy of North America). He also is editor of the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology (Brill).

Chris serves as an academic advisor for the International Summer School of Jain Studies and on the advisory boards for the Green Yoga Association (Oakland), the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), and the Ahimsa Center (Pomona). In 2002 he established the first of several certificate programs in the study of Yoga at LMU’s Center for Religion and Spirituality and will direct LMU’s Master of Arts in Yoga Studies, which begins in the fall of 2013.

1980   Ph.D. Theology, Fordham University, U.S.A.
           History of Religions Program Dissertation: “The Concept of Will in the Yogavasistha”

1978   MA Fordham University, U.S.A.
           Thesis: “Tson Kha Pa and the Synthesis of Buddhism in Tibet”

1976   B.A. State University of New York at Stony Brook, U.S.A.
           Comparative Literature and Religious Studies (summa cum laude)