This lecture seeks to clarify the status of Buddhism as a non-atheistic religion, that is, a set of religious concerns that aren’t supported by the various structures of theism: the creator God, divine beings, and corresponding practices such as worship, obedience, and supplication. Comparing Buddhist non-theism to atheism in the West we summarize Friedrich Nietzsche’s...

The Bible presents Moses as Israel’s prophet par excellence and among the most prominent members of the Israelite tribe of Levi. But how does this picture of Moses square with actual history? How did the memory of an early Transjordanian holy man become part of a priestly tradition in ancient Israel? Answering these (and other)...

A talk by Dr. Roger Sneed: Afrofuturism as a way of Black people expressing their identity through speculative fictions is fairly new, and yet it is not new. We can trace the Black use of speculative fiction to articulate visions of Blackness and critique white supremacy back to W.E.B. DuBois’s 1920 short story “The Comet.”...

After his death, Che Guevara became an icon and was even compared to Jesus Christ. Many images, poems, plays, and films bear witness to this remarkable process, which made studious use of Christian iconography. In this way, Che Guevara became a Christ figure for our times. In order to explain their real affinity, the author...

Elisha ben Shemuel’s Shahzadeh va-Sufi or The Prince and The Sufi is a seventeenth century Judeo-Persian adaptation of the life of Buddha, known in the west as the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. The plot, that of the prince who abandons a life of privilege and opulence for spiritual enlightenment, has traveled through centuries in...

This discussion of the soul departs from the concept of the soul that for thousands of years has occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians and pervaded religious discourse. Morris is concerned with what William James referred to as ‘the popular soul,’ the soul as it is invoked by expressions such as ‘an expansive soul,’...

The Qur’an draws on three major earlier traditions, those of Judaism, Christianity tradition, and pre-Islamic paganism, and while the Qur’an presents itself as a continuation and confirmation of the Torah and the Gospel, its style deviates significantly from that found in Biblical texts. Western scholarship has focused on Biblical influence in terms of the characters...

This panel discussion is open to members of the UCLA and Los Angeles communities who are interested in exploring a key issue of concern in contemporary religious and cultural studies. The forum also is the culmination of the upper-division seminar course Religion 120. The course is designed to introduce students from a broad spectrum of...

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Organized by the UCLA Department of African American Studies Co-Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion A Symposium featuring Keynote Speaker Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and a renowned scholar of Black feminism, Dutch anticolonialism, and diaspora. Key Symposium questions will include: How do marginalized experiences of Blackness within...