Finding Faithfulness in all the Wrong Places: Making Sacred Sense of Drunkenness, Deceit, and Debauchery in the Hebrew Bible This talk will be “birthed” out of Dr. Peter Lanfer's current book project (Reading Sacredness in the Badly Behaving Bible) exploring the morally questionable stories of the Hebrew Bible that early Jewish and Christian interpreters had...

In this lecture, Prof. Concannon tells the story of Dionysios of Corinth, a largely forgotten Christian bishop from the late second century CE.  While Dionysios was forgotten by ancient Christians and modern scholars, the traces that remain of his writings suggest that he was connected to a series of early Christian networks bigger than the...

Muslim-Christian-Jewish Reflections on Compassion and Peace Kelly James Clark, Aziz Abu Sarah, Nancy Kreimer Strangers, Neighbors, Friends is an informed and robust Abrahamic defense of compassion toward neighbors, strangers and even enemies. It aims to show that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the resources to motivate respect and love for those of very different faith...

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...