Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Adaptation of Two Biblical Themes
2021-02-23 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
In this talk I will discuss Nicolas Poussin adaptation of two biblical narratives in two masterpieces: “The Plague at Ashdod” (1630) inspired by an episode in 1 Samuel, namely the theft and desecration of the Arc of the Covenant by the Philistines; and “Eliezer and Rebecca” (1648) inspired by the episode in Genesis in which Abraham sends his servant Eliezer on a mission from Canaan to Babylonia to find a bride for Isaac, his son. In these paintings, Poussin is willfully unfaithful to important aspects of the biblical texts that inspired him, and he freely invents characters and details that are central to his purposes, and yet not present in the biblical texts. In the case of “The Plague at Ashdod” Poussin transforms the theme of the “wrath of God” against infidels into a meditation on human suffering and compassion; and in the case of “Eliezer and Rebecca” the French painter transforms the theme of the marriage proposal from private to a public event, in which the offer is not made to the bride’s male relatives, as in the biblical text, but directly to the young woman herself. In the talk I’ll discuss these transformations of the biblical passages into paintings, and speculate on their significance.

Efraín Kristal is Distinguished Professor and Chair of UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature. Kristal specializes in Latin American literature and intellectual history in comparative contexts from the 16th century until the present. He is also interested in aesthetics and works on the role of translation in the creative process of writers who translate, as a creative process in its own right, in the transmission of culture, and as a practice with philosophical implications. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles and several books including Temptation of the Word. The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa and Invisible Work. Borges and Translation. Kristal is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and an honorary professor at the Universidad del Pacífico in his native Lima, Peru.
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Studying Buddhism to Study Women: Sources, Topics, and Questions from Medieval China
2021-02-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Taking the example of Northern Wei Empress Dowager Ling (d. 528 CE) as a case study, this talk asks the question of â€œWhat new things can we learn about women in medieval China through Buddhist Studies?â€ Particularly, by contrasting the ways in which the Empress Dowager is depicted in normative dynastic histories and other historiographical material against the image of her that arises by surveying Buddhist materials, the presentation shows how, for womenâ€™s history, Buddhist sources constitute an extraordinary and relatively untapped archive of potentially ground-breaking source material. Looking to this archive, the paper argues, allows us to tell completely different stories about women who lived in China between the 4th and 6th centuries than the ones that we are accustomed to reading and hearing. With their stories told in in donative and mortuary epigraphy, and reflected in architectural remains and the sponsorship of Buddhist texts and monastic communities, many women in early medieval China actively supported the popularization and spread of Buddhism in East Asia. We will meet many such women in this talk and try to answer the question of why it was that Buddhism, per se, was so attractive to them.

Stephanie Balkwill is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at The University of Winnipeg, in Canada. Her research area is medieval Chinese Buddhism and she publishes on Buddhist literatures of sexuality and gender, Buddhism and the state, and the lives of Buddhist women. She is currently completing a monograph on elite Buddhist women at the court of Northern Wei Empress Dowager Ling. She is looking forward to joining the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2021.

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Religious Freedom, Buddhist Liberation
2021-03-03 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies
U.S. officials who occupied Japan after World War II claimed that the defeated country lacked religious freedom, but this tidy narrative masked a messy history. Japan’s 1889 constitution had guaranteed religious freedom, and over subsequent decades Japanese clerics had fiercely debated and vigorously defended the religious freedom clause. Yet even as Buddhists in Japan generally used religious freedom to secure privileges for themselves while excluding “foreign” religions like Christianity, Japanese Buddhists living in the U.S. Territory of Hawai`i tried and failed to get the American guarantee of religious freedom to work for them. For example, although the landmark 1927 Supreme Court case Farrington v. Tokushige upheld the right of Japanese Americans to educate their children at Buddhist-operated language schools, racist depictions of Buddhism as “un-American” made it impossible for the plaintiffs to use religious freedom law in making their case. This talk juxtaposes competing claims about religious freedom in the Japanese and U.S. empires to show that religious freedom is never simply present or absent in any given polity, nor has “it” ever been just one thing in any time or place.

Jolyon Thomas is Assistant Professor and Interim Graduate Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research on religion investigates media, law, politics, education, and capitalism in Japan and the United States. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan
(University of Hawai`i Press, 2012).

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Globalized Guru, Nationalized Icon: The Shrimad Rajchandra Mission and the Birth of "Globalized Jainism"
2021-04-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In November 2017, the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission of Dharampur, Gujarat (SRMD) unveiled a 34-foot bronze statue of Srimad Rajacandra (1866-1901), a Jain layman and spiritual leader who is best known for his correspondence with a young Mahatma Gandhi. Over the previous decade, the SRMD’s founder, Rakeshbhai Jhavery (b. 1966), has developed a sizable following, in part by creating and publicly worshipping images of the Mission’s eponymous “inspiration.” In this talk, Dr. Steven Vose analyzes the visual aesthetics of the images of Rajacandra to show that a semantic shift has allowed the emaciated body of Rajacandra to be read as a new model of ascetic perfection and modern Jain spirituality. Vose argues that these images enabled the creation and growth of a “Globalized Jainism” specifically marketed to middle- and upper-class Indian and diaspora Jains that allows them to connect to their religious and national heritage in new ways. An examination of the cultural and religious implications of India’s turn toward neoliberalism, this talk argues that the appeal of the SRMD’s Globalized Jainism lies partly in its ability to connect modern, “philosophical” aspects of Jainism with nationalist spectacle through these images in ways that replicate traditional, ritual-based displays of piety while circumventing the structures of power that have historically linked Jain monastic orders to specific caste communities in western India.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

Dr. Steven M. Vose is the Bhagwan Mahavir Assistant Professor of Jain Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He holds a doctorate in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. His research interests focus on the formation of Jain communities and articulations of Jain identity from the late medieval period to today. His forthcoming book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge), which examines the role of Jain monks’ intellectual and literary production in normalizing relations between the Jain community and the first Islamicate empire in South Asia, is the winner of the 2020 American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities. His current research examines the roles of colonialism, post-coloniality, globalization and neoliberalism on articulations of Jain identity. His teaching and research interests also include the social history of “tantra” and devotion (bhakti) in South Asia; gender, caste, and identity; religious visual culture and temple building practices.

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Identity through Diversity: Classical Jain Philosophical Responses to Religious Difference
2021-04-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In South Asia’s distinctive history of religious diversity, the Jains stand out as a perpetual but prominent minority especially attentive to the range of doctrinal options surrounding them. This talk will delineate some classical Jain philosophical efforts to conceptualize differences, navigate disagreements, and seek agreement with others as exemplified in the emblematic and transformative figure of Haribhadrasūri. Thought to have been born a Brahmin in the eighth century CE, this scholar-monk is credited with ushering Jain commentarial literature into the lingua franca of Sanskrit, initiating a doxographical tradition of cataloguing the doctrinal landscape, and setting the terms for the famously enigmatic Jain theory of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda). A survey of each of these phases displays some critical ways in which a marginalized but important group of intellectuals has carved out its own identity–not through retreat into insularity, but through active engagement with the diversity in their midst.
Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

Anil Mundra is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy of Religions program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work has appeared in the journal Religions and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and is forthcoming in the Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies and Routledge’s Contemplative Studies & Jainism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship.

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Acquiescing to Necropolitics? The Church and Same Sex Relations in Africa
2021-04-21 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In this lecture I offer provisional perspectives on the question, acquiescing in necropolitics? In the first part of the lecture I highlight some of the debates on same sex relations in Cameroon. In the second part of the lecture I discuss the recent genealogy of necropolitics in Michele Foucault and Achille Mbembe. This will lead me to the major part of the essay where I argue that by advocating for death sentences for members of the LGBTQI persons as some Africans have done, they are reverting to necropolitics to solve what they think is a problem as it was during the reign Kabaka Mwanga of Uganda when he resorted to necropolitics to punish the male pages who rejected his sexual advances. My goal in this short thought experiment is to demonstrate that some of the positions taken by members of different churches, and articulated largely by leading church men and women, amounts to acquiescing to necropolitics in African societies.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA African Studies Center and LGBTQ Studies

Elias Kifon Bongmba is Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University. He earned his PhD from the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology and was awarded the DTheo. h.c. from Lund University. Bongmba studied African Religions and the Social Sciences in Africa at the University of Iowa with Professor Allen Roberts. Bongmba’s scholarship covers religion, philosophy, and theology. His book The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa won the Franz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Bongmba is the 2020 recipient of the Ray Hart Service Award from the American Academy of Religion.

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Dangerous Children: The Role of Children in Ancient Near Eastern Household Religion
2021-05-18 14:00 - 15:00
Dr. Kristine Henriksen Garroway will present on the place of children in the household religions of the Ancient Near East. She will explore the delicate balance between a child’s life and the forces out to destroy it. Topics addressed include dangers posed to a child in the womb, infancy, early years, and beyond and how caregivers tried to successfully navigate everything from diseases to demons. The talk will conclude with a discussion of enculturation and ways in which children would come to emulate the rituals modeled for them.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Kristine Henriksen Garroway was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway’s scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to thetorah.com. Garroway’s books include: Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (Eisenbrauns 2014) and Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2018), and co-edited with John Martens Children and Methods: Listening To and Learning From Children in the Biblical World (Bril, 2020). She is the recipient of the Biblical Archaeological Society’s 2019 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to Hebrew Bible.

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Bodily Sacrifice for a Single True Verse: Implications of a Cluster of the Buddha’s Past-Life Stories
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Online on Zoom
Across various Buddhist texts we find, again and again, a story of how the Buddha in a past life (as Bodhisattva) made a great sacrifice in exchange for a single verse of true teaching. Although we can interpret such stories as simply glorifications of Buddha or dharma, more interesting questions also arise, such as: How can the Bodhisattva access properly true teachings before he has realised the dharma for himself and made it available to others as the Buddha? If there is dharma available, is it a properly Buddhist dharma, or just a pithy generic well-spoken verse, and is it there independently of buddhas? How does the Bodhisattva’s sacrifice – of wealth, body, life and family – in exchange for a verse of teaching relate to other stories in which he makes similar sacrifices for other reasons? Why is no such story found in the huge Pali Jataka collection? In this paper I will offer some preliminary answers to these questions, and explore the implications of this cluster of stories for our understandings of the relationship between the dharma and buddhahood.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies

Naomi Appleton is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Edinburgh. Her primary research interest is the role of stories in the construction, communication and challenge of religious ideas in early India. She has a particular passion for jātaka stories (stories of the Buddha’s past lives) but also enjoys exploring the ways in which the narrative traditions of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions interact. She is the author of three monographs and many other articles and books on related themes, including translations of Pali and Sanskrit narrative texts.

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Fall 2021 Welcome Reception
2021-10-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2021 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

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To Appeal to the Judge of the Netherworld: the Role of Literary Figures in Mesopotamian Incantations
2021-10-20 12:00 - 13:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Mesopotamian incantations were, at their core, practical texts with specific purposes, whether that was the protection of a dwelling from future threats or driving out a malevolent demonic force afflicting an individual. Throughout the extensive corpus of such texts, found in languages such as Sumerian and Akkadian from the third to first millennium BCE, we see several persistent tropes. Incantations may cluster in categories, according to form and function; draw upon the legitimation of a number of deities; and even directly reference texts outside the ritual and religious sphere, including, notably, literary texts. This talk focuses on the ways in which incantations incorporate literary figures and imagery, examining in particular references to the Epic of Gilgamesh. By far Mesopotamia’s most well-known text, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a narrative concerned with journeys, particularly those of its eponymous protagonist. Here he journeys outside the bounds of the text itself, invoked in several incantations consigning antagonistic figures such as witches or ghosts to the Netherworld. Although the literary texts focus on Gilgamesh’s standing as king and his skill in battle, in incantations he is presented in another role entirely, as a judge of the dead. This different focus underscores the adaptability of such characters across textual categories, as well as the larger scope of connections between the texts themselves.

Gina Konstantopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research centers on religion, magic, and literature in Mesopotamia, with a particular focus on the role of demons and monsters in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. Her current research examines the creation of distant and imagined lands and notions of space and place in the ancient Near East, particularly the intersection of distant space and empire in the first millennium BCE. She has previously held research positions at the University of Tsukuba, University of Helsinki, and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University.

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The Constantinian Compromise: Senators, Bishops and the Emperor in Late Antique Rome
2021-10-28 16:00 - 17:00
Given the historic role played by the victorious Constantine in spreading Christianity, it is ironic that senatorial aristocrats were more cooperative with Constantine than were the early fourth-century bishops of the city. Although the bishops of Rome and the clergy, along with other Christians, benefitted greatly from the restoration of their property and the recognition of their legal standing under Constantine, their resistance to imperial intervention in the Donatist controversy marginalized the bishop of Rome for centuries to come, as I demonstrate based on a range of texts and documents from the fourth-fifth centuries.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Classics and the UCLA Department of History

Michele Renee Salzman is Professor and Chair of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research focuses on the religious and social history of late antiquity. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Letters of Symmachus: Book 1 Translation with Michael Roberts, Introduction and Commentary by Michele Renee Salzman, (Society of Biblical Literatures, 2011; Brill Press, 2012). Her new book, The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience and Resurgence in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), offers a new perspective on the fate of this vast city and the remarkable families who returned again and again to renew it in the last three centuries of its empire. She is the recipient of numerous awards, with Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the NEH, the American Academy in Rome, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

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“Surely There is No Fear of God in This Place” – The Biblical Plagues and OUR Plague: An Anthropocentric “Theology” and a Lesson for Our Times
2021-12-01 12:00 - 13:00
**Please note this talk has been postponed to Wednesday, December 1 at 12pm via Zoom**

The onset of the coronavirus brought with it a slew of perverse efforts to identify the ‘sinful’ behaviors for which the plague was God’s punishment. Through an analysis of “Vehaya im Shamoa”(Deut.11:13-21) I offer an alternative understanding of punishment as a disciplinary act attributed to God but, actually, the direct consequence of human conduct. Proceeding to outline the Pharoanic behavioral antecedents of the Egyptian plagues I move on to focus on the causal chain of human missteps that have led to the current crisis. In doing so I hope to diminish the degree of randomness with which we frame the pandemic and argue that this human induced ‘plague’ imposes on us a moral obligation to take corrective actions that could bring healing to our beleaguered planet.

Chaim Seidler-Feller recently celebrated his fortieth year of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He was ordained in 1971 at Yeshiva University where he completed a Masters in Rabbinic Literature. Chaim has been a lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute,North America and of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. In 2014 he initiated a fact finding mission for non-Jewish student leaders to Israel and the Palestine Authority which is now offered on ninety campuses. In 2020 a Festschrift entitled Swimming Against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the 21st Century was published in Chaim’s honor. He is married to Dr. Doreen Seidler-Feller, a clinical psychologist, and is the father of Shulie, a photojournalist and Shaul, an ordained rabbi who is currently serving as a Judaica consultant at Sotheby’s while pursuing a doctorate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University.

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Black and White Color Symbolism in Early Christian Apocalyptic Literature
2022-01-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom
Reconciling the modern categories of race, ethnicity, and religion with ancient examples of identity formation continues to befuddle historians of antiquity. This problem of fusing disparate ancient and modern conceptual categories has been particularly acute for historians of early Christianity. This paper investigates the color symbolism employed in early Christian apocalyptic literature and demonstrate the role that such rhetorical strategies have on the formulations of Christian imperialism and anti-black prejudice. Yonatan Binyam proposes that racial formation theory as currently employed in premodern race studies can be a productive heuristic for analyzing Christian social formations in late antiquity.

Yonatan Binyam is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Prior to coming to UCLA, he was an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a doctorate in Religion from Florida State University. His research focuses on medieval Ethiopic receptions of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as the study of race, ethnicity, and religion in late antiquity.

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Caste Marketing: How Hindu Rituals Sell Brahminical Supremacy
2022-02-09 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
“Caste marketing” can be understood in several ways: a description of how companies market products based on a caste profile of their users or “caste” groups as targeted market. This lecture will focus on the latter and delve into the ways Hindu ritual websites embed savarna (dominant-caste) focused terms, symbols, deities, rituals, and ideas into their websites such that they become digital repositories of “caste ideology” (Jaiswal 1998). In this sense, collectively, these ritual websites become another form of what Thenmozhi Soundarajan has called “digital brahminism”. The terms “caste” and “brahmin” do not appear on these sites, rather we see “Vedic” and “pandit” appealing to the sense of “caste innocence” held by many liberal, dominant caste members of South Asian/Hindu diaspora communities. This research shows how Hindu ritual websites use these subtle caste markers to reinforce savarna Hindu traditions as an unmarked “normal” (casteless).

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She is a scholar of ritual, nationalism, and digital culture in South Asia. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Specifically, she is interested in how online mechanisms of meaning-making like hashtags operate through the aggregation of capital, relying on power, privilege, and access to be successful. Much of her work thinks about the savarna logics of virtual platforms and how caste-oppressed, Adivasi, and minority religious communities are characterized, minimized, and effaced within these spaces. Her current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma: The Making of a Global Hindu Brand examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively “branding” religious identities through a neoliberal “Vedicizing” of virtual spaces.

Hearing the Listeners: Jain Perspectives from India’s Islamic Past. A Conversation with Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke, moderated by Alka Patel
2022-02-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Perhaps uniquely in South Asia, Jains wrote voluminously about their interactions with Muslim rulers from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire. Their writings present us with unparalleled views of these rulers and the social, cultural, and religious transformations taking place throughout the 13th to 17th centuries. This period of history is hotly contested today, as the Hindu Right seeks to de-legitimize India’s commitment to secularism and deny India’s Muslim population a place in the nation. In this conversation, historians Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke will discuss how their readings of Jain sources composed in these centuries have shaped their understanding of India’s past—and present—by paying attention to what Jains living in those times said about Muslim rulers, interreligious relations, and their own changing identities. Art Historian Alka Patel will moderate and show how studying Jain and Muslim built spaces can give us a richer understanding of the interactions between these two religious communities.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Steven M. Vose is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Colorado College (Colorado Springs). His research focuses on the formation of Jain communities in (and from) western India from the late medieval period to the present. His first book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge, forthcoming) won the 2020 Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). He is currently working on a study of how globalization and neoliberalism affect identity formation in transnational Jain communities. (Twitter: @StevenMVose)

Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books, most recently, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press, January 2021). Audrey believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower, so you can find her on Twitter (@audreytruschke). She is currently working on a single volume history of India, spanning 4,600 years, with the support of a NEH Public Scholars grant.

Alka Patel is Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her research has focused on South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia, including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004), Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean (2004), India and Iran in the Longue Durée (Brill, 2017), and a guest-edited special issue on reuse in South Asian visual culture in Archives of Asian Art (2007). Patel co-edited Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (with K. Leonard, Brill 2012). Her recent book, Iran to India: The Shansabanis of Afghanistan (Edinburgh 2021), is the first of a two-volume study that analyzes the firm incorporation of South Asia within the Persianate world.

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The Jewish Discovery of Islam Revisited
2022-02-23 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
From the oldest European Christian engagements with the Qur’an in the Middle Ages through the advent of modern academic approaches to the Muslim scripture, scholars have frequently seen qur’anic narratives on the biblical prophets and related subjects as the result of formative Jewish influences on the Prophet Muhammad. This approach to the origins of Islam has become enshrined in modern Qur’anic Studies due to the groundbreaking research of Abraham Geiger in his 1833 work What Has Muhammad Borrowed from Judaism? Although contemporary scholarship has shifted away from the problematic, reductionist emphasis on “influence” that once characterized research on biblical narratives in the Qur’an, Geiger’s role as a bridge figure between medieval ecclesiastical polemical discourse and the modern discipline of Qur’anic Studies has yet to be fully explored and appreciated. In this talk, Michael Pregill will discuss Geiger’s context and methodology, and posit that many of Geiger’s insights about the Jewish sources of qur’anic themes and episodes are still valuable for contemporary scholarship—including, paradoxically, in those cases when Geiger is actually wrong.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Michael E. Pregill is a scholar of comparative religion, focusing on the scriptural cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Much of his research focuses on the reception of biblical, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the Qur’an and Islam. His monograph The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford University Press, 2020) is the recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Textual Studies). He is currently a lecturer at Chapman University in Orange, California; a visiting scholar at the Dornsife School of Religion at the University of Southern California; and a postdoctoral fellow of the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an,’ pursuing a new project entitled “Re-Orienting Geiger: Revisiting the Jewish Foundations of Western Qur’anic Studies.”

Study of Religion: Spring Snack Social
2022-04-13 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaplan 365

A Conversation with Michael Schur
2022-04-21 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Michael Schur is a television producer, writer, actor and author of How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Questions. With Pamela Hieronymi, Professor at UCLA Department of Philosophy, this conversation with explore the role of religion in contemplating moral and ethical decision-making.
HOW TO BE PERFECT: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question sets out to do for moral philosophy what A Brief History of Time did for astrophysics. (But with jokes!) And by the time the book is done, the reader will know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. He will be perfect, and all his friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, the reader will gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day. The hope is that – in a world of ever-increasing moral stakes and intense disagreement – HOW TO BE PERFECT will provide a foundation for all of us to consider our behavior and ponder how we can do better and be better to one another.

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Michael Schur is a television writer and producer who has worked on shows like The Office, Master of None, The Comeback and Hacks, and created or co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, The Good Place and Rutherford Falls. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jennifer, and their two kids, William and Ivy.

Do Robots Have Souls? Intelligent Machines, Digital Humans, and the Future of Technology
2022-04-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
In this lecture, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets the work of Ibn Rushd (“Averroës”), the twelfth-century Islamic scholar of Andalusia who achieved renown as the ‘father’ of secularism, in order to elucidate Ibn Rushd’s theory of the intellect as a power of the soul. Johnson leverages Rushd’s distinction between sensing and knowing in order to examine contemporary, sensory-driven AI technology (particularly brain-computer-interface architectures) as a uniquely generative problem of interest for humanists and technical experts alike. Of central importance is the sensation of pain, as it constitutes a phenomenon of embodiment, a category of human experience, and a political problem.

Sylvester A. Johnson is Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities and Executive Director of the “Tech for Humanity” initiative advancing human-centered approaches to technology at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, which is supporting human-centered research and humanistic approaches to the guidance of technology. Sylvester’s research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and race. He is a Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture and a design-team affiliate faculty member in Virginia Tech’s socio-technical, transdisciplinary Calhoun Discovery Program. In addition to co-facilitating a national working group on religion and US empire, he co-leads a project at Virginia Tech, supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop ethically designed, public-interest Artificial Intelligence that can benefit an innovation-driven society.
Sylvester is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000 (Cambridge 2015), an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California 2017) and Religion and US Empire (appearing from NYU Press in 2022). He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. Sylvester is writing a book on human identity in an age of intelligent machines and human-machine symbiosis.
He currently leads “Future Humans, Human Futures” at Virginia Tech, a series of research institutes and symposia funded by the Henry Luce foundation that focus on technology, ethics, and religion. He is also directing the creation of a university-wide “Tech for Humanity” undergraduate minor, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to prepare future talent at the intersection of humanities, social justice, and technology.

Song of Songs, Time after Time
2022-04-28 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
The Song of Songs has been subject to numerous and varying interpretive approaches since its emergence. Drawing from her recently published book, Perils of Wisdom: The Scriptural Solomon in Jewish Tradition, Dr. Keiter will focus on varying Jewish interpretive strategies toward the Song, highlighting the development of Jewish biblical exegesis and its impact on the King Solomon legend in Jewish thought.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and its Bible and the Ancient World Seminar Series

Dr. Sheila Keiter is a Near Eastern Languages and Cultures alumna and former Teaching Fellow in the UCLA English Department. She is currently an instructor at Shalhevet High School and a Regular Contributor for the “Table for Five” Torah panel column in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Keiter recently published, Perils of Wisdom: The Scriptural Solomon in Jewish Tradition (2021).

The Ten Commandments: Who What When Where Why
2022-05-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Kaplan 365
For over two thousand years the Ten Commandments have been understood as the fundamental set of divine laws in the Hebrew Bible. Even for those who do not believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the Ten Commandments have retained their place as especially ancient, and especially important in the religious and communal life of Israel. In this lecture, Joel Baden will explain why this is, essentially, all wrong – and how we should understand, and grapple with, the true origins of these most famous words.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and its Bible and the Ancient World Seminar Series

Prof. Joel Baden works widely in the field of Hebrew Bible, with special attention to the literary history of the Pentateuch. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other books include J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch (Mohr Siebeck, 2009); The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 2012); The Promise to the Patriarchs (Oxford University Press, 2013); The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperOne, 2013); Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2015); and Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2017). He is the co-editor of the volumes The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions (TVZ, 2009), Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls (Brill, 2017), and The Oxford Handbook of the Pentateuch (with Jeffrey Stackert; Oxford University Press, 2021).
Current projects include editing The Routledge Handbook of Marginalization in the Bible and a special issue of the journal Religions devoted to the Hebrew Bible, race, and racism, along with writing forthcoming commentaries on Deuteronomy (IECOT), Exodus (Anchor), and Lamentations (Oxford).
Prof. Baden has published numerous scholarly articles and essays. He has also written widely for a popular audience, in venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN, and The Daily Beast.

Losing Control of the gods: How Religion Slipped Out of the Hands of Men in the Early Roman Empire
2022-05-12 17:00 - 18:00 | Dodd Hall 248
The dignified and extravagant public rituals of Romans – ancestral institutions as the last generations of the Republic imagined them – definitively failed in the last century BCE. Future senatorial priests presided only over the cults of a city that was less and less a capital. In place of a narrative of early imperial religion that sets the worship of the emperors at its center, I shall argue for a systemic shift in the religious order, a disintegration of authority that reflected much wider changes in the nature of Roman culture.

References
Beard, Mary, John North and Simon Price (1998). Religions of Rome. 2 volumes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Feeney, Denis (1998). Literature and religion at Rome. Culture, contexts and beliefs. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Feeney, Denis (2016). Beyond Greek. The beginnings of Latin literature. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Gasparini, Valentino, et al. Eds. (2020). Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Berlin & Boston, de Gruyter.
MacRae, Duncan (2016). Legible religion. Books, gods, and rituals in Roman culture Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Nongbri, Brent (2013). Before Religion. A history of a modern concept. New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
Rüpke, Jörg (2018). Pantheon. A New History of Roman Religion. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.
Rüpke, Jörg and Greg Woolf, Eds. (2021). Religion in the Roman Empire. Stuttgart, Verlag W.Kohlhammer.
Scheid, John (2016). The gods, the state, and the individual. Reflections on civic religion in Rome. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Várhelyi, Zsusanna (2010). The Religion of Senators in the Roman Empire. Power and the beyond. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Classics and the History Department

Greg Woolf arrived in UCLA in September 2021 to become the first Ronald J Mellor Professor of Ancient History. Before then he directed the Institute of Classical Studies in the School of Advanced Study in London for six years, and before that was Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has held visiting appointments in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. His work straddles the fields of ancient history and archaeology, and he has published on a range of cultural historical subjects from the history of libraries and the impact of Roman imperialism on ancient societies to (more recently) numerous studies of Roman religion and Roman urbanism. His most recent books are the second edition of Rome. An Empire’s Story (Oxford 2022) and (with his long term collaborator Jörg Rüpke the edited collection Religion in the Roman Empire.) He is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for the Study of Religion.

Wolakota kagapi: The Study of Peace Making on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
2022-05-17 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Unfortunately, the Center for the Study of Religion must postpone this event due to extenuating circumstances. We apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to welcoming you at our next event.

The Oglala Lakota Peace Making Team, was instrumental in putting together a number of training sessions for community members to become Peace Makers. The tribe developed a Peace Making Room in the new court house. The Peace Making room is used for Peace Making for the community membership.
A Peace Maker has a vision for the future, knows traditional ways, shares and develops leadership, serves and protects the tribal community, develops trust, and shows respect for all tribal people. Native communities are centered on culture, spirituality, language, and stories. They are not centered on financial profit, politics, or religion. These elements of culture are important for explaining the practice of (Wolakota) Peace making.

Richard Iron Cloud Ph.D., Oglala Lakota, Richard is a founding member of the Oglala Lakota Peace-Making Team. A group of Oglala Lakota individuals who came together to look for alternatives to the Colonial System of Justice. Richard has been involved in social justice issues, researching systems of oppression in its various forms. Richard believes in looking out for others needs rather than one’s own, such behavior is salient in the Lakota (ounye) way of life.

Antisemitism in the Pagan World
2022-05-18 16:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 306/Zoom
What counts as antisemitism? Did antisemitism exist among Greeks and Romans? How far and how deep did hostility to Jews extend in the pagan and pre-Christian world? What impact did it have on Jewish experience in the period of the Second Temple? In short, was there a “Jewish problem” in Greco-Roman antiquity?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Classics, History Department, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Erich Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing have been primarily in Roman history, Hellenistic history, and Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He has published or edited 14 books, the most recent of which is Ethnicity in the Ancient World – – Did it Matter? (2020). Most important, he has supervised or served on the PhD dissertation committees of over 100 students, most of whom are now teaching in various colleges and universities in this country and abroad.

Study of Religion: Commencement Toast 2022
2022-06-11 13:30 - 14:30 | Kaplan 365

Welcome Reception Fall 2022
2022-10-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2022 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Tending the Garden: Ahimsa in the Early Indian Literature
2022-10-19 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall/Zoom
Source: Shakyamuni Buddha – Jataka (Previous Lives). 1800, Zanabazar Mongolia National Museum, Mongolia, https://www.himalayanart.org/items/50191. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022.

The practice of ahiṃsā (non-violence) has a long and illustrious history both in South Asia, where it originated, and elsewhere. This talk will tour a selection of the rich body of texts composed by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus in premodern India that engage with the theme of ahiṃsā to non-humans. These works range from imperial propaganda to stories that illustrate with engaging vividness the karmic dangers of injuring other living beings, the rewards earned by those who refrain from doing so and the relationship between ahiṃsā and the doctrine of reincarnation.

Co-sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Anahita Hoose is a scholar of Indian languages, texts and cultures. Originally from England, she crossed the pond in 2016 to join the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies as a PhD student and moved to the Center for the Study of Religion after graduating in 2022. In her PhD dissertation, based on texts composed in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain circles over a period of more than a thousand years, she discusses the use of verbs in multiple premodern Indian languages. Her linguistic research is complemented by her interests in religion, myth and literature and she has published articles on both linguistic and cultural topics.

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The God of Possibilities: God, Human Freedom and the Obligation to Heal the World by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller and Professor Leora F. Batnitzky as Respondent
2022-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaplan Hall 348
This discussion constitutes a personal effort at articulating a meaningful notion of God that is spiritually fulfilling, intellectually uncompromising and morally compelling. The search ranges across the Jewish tradition from the fundamentals of Biblical monotheism to Maimonides’ rationalism and onto Hasidic mysticism. The result is a contemporary notion of God that can nurture personal humility and the development of an ethical personality.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller recently celebrated his fortieth year of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He was ordained in 1971 at Yeshiva University where he completed a Masters in Rabbinic Literature. Chaim has been a lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute,North America and of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. In 2014 he initiated a fact finding mission for non-Jewish student leaders to Israel and the Palestine Authority which is now offered on ninety campuses. In 2020 a Festschrift entitled Swimming Against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the 21st Century was published in Chaim’s honor.
Dr. Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she also directs Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies. She is the author of several books, edited collections, and numerous articles and book chapters that span the fields of modern Jewish and Christian thought, continental philosophy and philosophy of religion, legal and political theory, and biblical hermeneutics. She is currently writing a book on the Jewish apostate and Catholic Saint Edith Stein.

Why Religion Matters for Educational Stratification
2022-11-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
It’s well-known that Americans’ academic outcomes vary by race, class, and gender. But what about their religious upbringing? In this talk, Dr. Ilana Horwitz will discuss findings from her recent book, God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (January 2022, Oxford UniversityPress). Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, Dr. Horwitz identifies a new type of childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups: religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will explain why teens raised with religious restraint earn higher grades, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from working class and lower middle-class families benefit the most from religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will also show how religious restraint recalibrates the academic ambitions of teens from the professional class, especially girls, leading them to question the value of selective colleges.

Dr. Ilana Horwitz is a sociologist of education and religion who examines how people’s religious upbringing, social class, gender, ethnicity, and race influence their life course, especially their educational outcomes. Currently, Dr. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology and Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Previously, Dr. Horwitz was the Education Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity, and she earned her PhD in Sociology of Education from Stanford University. Dr. Horwitz’s research has appeared in academic and public outlets, including the American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed. Her current book projects include The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A Guide for Academics (under contract with Princeton University Press), and The Price of Good Intentions: Why Universities Can’t Deliver on their Diversity Promise. You can learn more about her at www.ilanahorwitz.com.

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The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal
2022-11-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
Throughout much of history, the Jewish way of life has been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions legislated by the Torah: dietary laws, ritual purity, circumcision, Sabbath regulations, holidays, and more. But precisely when did this unique way of life first emerge, and why specifically at that time? In his talk, Professor Yonatan Adler will present the conclusions of his new book which methodically engages ancient texts and archaeological discoveries to identify the earliest evidence of Torah observance among ordinary Judeans.

Professor Yonatan Adler is an Associate Professor in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel, where he also serves as Head of the Institute of Archaeology. Adler specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. Adler has served as a member of the Israeli Council for Archaeology since his 2018 appointment by the Israeli Minister of Culture.

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