Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

The Seventeenth Century Judeo-Persian Adaptation of the Buddha Biographies
2019-04-09 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Royce 306
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 various languages including Sanskrit, Middle Persian, multiple Arabic versions, Georgian, Greek, Latin, several European languages and Hebrew. As with previous adaptations, the author of The Prince and The Sufi uses the language, literary style and conventions suited to the tastes of his readership. Dr. Yasharpour is preparing to publish the edited Judeo-Persian text of The Prince and the Sufi together with an English annotated translation. In her talk, she will discuss how Ben Shemuel appealed to his acculturated Persian Jewish audience by modeling his Judeo-Persian adaptation after popular classical Persian advice literature and conveying practical wisdom by way of a Sufi master.

Dr. Dalia Yasharpour (Ph.D. Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, UCLA, 2005) is a scholar of Judeo-Persian language and literature. A lecturer and researcher, Dalia most recently headed the Iranian Studies program at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In addition to authoring academic articles and editing Persian language textbooks, she is the co-author of The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China (Brill, 2011). A Los Angeles native, she lives in West Los Angeles with her family.

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CHESUCRISTO: The Fusion in Image and Word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ
2019-04-04 12:00 | Kaplan 365
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 examines Jesus as a historical figure and illuminates the convergence with Che. Kunzle weaves together the gospel texts and events with Che-Christic texts, accompanied by a continuous display of Che-Christic art
David Kunzle, educated at Cambridge and London Universities, has taught art history since 1977 at UCLA. He has published widely (thirteen books in several languages) on public, popular, public, comic and revolutionary (Latin American) art. His most recent works are on The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, The Comic Strips of Gustave Doré, Chesucristo, The Fusion in Word and Image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, and now CHAM: the best Comic Strips and Graphic Novels 1839-1863.

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The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Prophetic Visions of Blackness
2019-03-06 10:00 - 11:30 | Haines 279
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.” However, Afrofuturism has made a resurgence, due in part to the
phenomenal success of Black Panther, ongoing interest in the work of Octavia
Butler, and the rise of the “blerd” (a portmanteau of “black” and “nerd”).
Today’s talk uses an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a focal point for
investigating the intersections of Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought.

Roger Sneed is the Dorothy and B.H. Peace, Jr. Associate Professor and chair of the Religion Department at Furman University. His first book, Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism was a critique of the representations of homosexuality within Black liberation and womanist theologies as well as in some forms of Black cultural criticism. He is now writing a second manuscript titled “The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought” that will be published by the Ohio State University Press. This talk is sponsored by the UCLA Sociology Department and co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion.

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HOW MOSES BECAME A LEVITE
2019-03-05 12:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
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) questions requires rethinking not only the biblical sources but how warfare, economics, and politics led to different corners of Israelite society “claiming” Moses for themselves…including the Levites.

Mark Leuchter is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at Temple University in Philadelphia. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2003 and has held positions as Coordinator of Biblical Studies at the University of Sydney and as Visiting Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research focuses on the relationship between memory, myth, and text production in exilic and Persian period Jewish and in early rabbinic literature. His favorite band is Rush.
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Atheism in Buddhism and Nietzsche as Challenges to the Philosophy of Religion
2019-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
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 “death of God” proclamation, his critique of both Christianity and Buddhism, and the patterns of cultural nihilism associated with them. These reflections are directed toward a challenge to the contemporary philosophy of religion in its incapacity to understand religion on broader, more historical grounds than theism can provide.

Dale S. Wright is the Gamble Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies Emeritus at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is author of books in the field of Buddhist Studies including Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character (Oxford University Press, 2009), What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016) , co-editor of a series of Oxford University Press books on Zen Buddhism as well as author of numerous essays, articles, and reviews.

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Strangers, Neighbors, Friends
2019-02-19 17:00 - 18:30 | Royce 306
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 traditions. According to Eboo Patel, President of Interfaith Youth Corp, “[t]hese essays are like rays of light. They provide insight into the Abrahamic traditions, but more importantly, they illuminate the path to common life together.”
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Letters from Corinth: The Correspondence of Dionysios of Corinth and the Shape of Early Christianity
2019-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
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 apostle Paul’s, that he was active in the major debates among Christian communities in the second century, and that he was involved in complicated negotiations around memory, money, and hospitality. Recovering the story of Dionysios allows us to see early Christianity from a new perspective.

Dr. Cavan W. Concannon is associate professor of religion at USC. He is the author of Assembling Early Christianity: Trade, Networks, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale University Press, 2014). He is the co-director of the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative and holds a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard University.

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Bible Women: The Concert
2019-02-10 15:00 - 17:30 | Schoenberg Hall
In this inaugural musical collaboration with the Academy for Jewish Religion, CA, esteemed alumni of both UCLA and AJRCA will share songs which give voice to the women of the Bible, telling classic stories through new lenses. Perspective is everything. While Bible stories have offered valuable life lessons through the millennia, the viewpoint is singularly focused: that of men. What will Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Esther and Lilith say about their own lives? You’ll never hear these stories the same way again. The lyrics and music of this show were created by Tony-nominated composer Elizabeth Swados.
Join us for a pre-performance talk at 3:00 pm with scholar and Rabbi Ruth Sohn and Cantor Kerith Spencer-Shapiro, who will explore the different ways in which women are depicted in the Bible. The musical performance will begin at 4:00 pm.
This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Bible Women is co-sponsored by the Herb Alpert Endowment for the School of Music and the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion.
This event is FREE! Let us know you’ll be coming by RSVP. Seating is first-come, first-seated. Early arrival recommended. RSVPs do not guarantee entry.
PLEASE RSVP AT: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bible-women-the-concert-tickets-53165394125

DWELLING ON THE PAST AND LONGING FOR HOME: ISRAEL IN EXILE
2019-01-23 12:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
This talk examines the effect of the sixth century BCE deportations to Babylonia on Israelite identity. Paying close attention to the prophetic book of Ezekiel, whose community was deported from Jerusalem to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar, it explores how the experience of forced migration changed the way the people talked about themselves, their past, and their homeland. To help make sense of these changes, it places Ezekiel’s reactions in conversation with the responses of more recent forced migrants to similar experiences.

Dr. Carly L. Crouch is David Allen Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller
Theological Seminary and author of several volumes, including War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East (2009), The Making of Israel (2014), Israel and the Assyrians (2014) and An Introduction to the Study of Jeremiah (2017). Her research focuses on the intersection of theology, ethics, and community identities, with a historical focus on the social and intellectual world of ancient Israel and a contemporary interest in the relevance of this work for twenty-first century ethics. She is especially interested in integrating insights from other disciplines, such as anthropology, refugee studies, and postcolonial theory, into biblical studies. Her current work addresses the effects of Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem on Israelite and Judahite identities and is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
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Finding Faithfulness in all the Wrong Places
2019-01-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
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 difficulty receiving as scripture. In the interpretive tradition, many of these stories are whitewashed and/or spiritualized in dramatic ways. For example: David’s illicit marriage to Bathsheba and murder of Uriah the Hittite disappear from the rewritten narratives of 1+2 Chronicles; Abraham is told to lie about Sarah being his sister (and God protects her while inside Pharoah’s harem), Noah’s drunken stupor becomes an occasion for prophetic revelation; and Jephthah who sacrifices his daughter is celebrated as a hero of faith. Through an examination of the reception and interpretation of narratives of Drunkenness, Deceit, and Debauchery in the Hebrew Bible, Dr. Lanfer will consider the impact of the textualization/scripturalization of oral narratives on the reception of them in early Jewish and Christian literatures.

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Johannes Vermeer and the Doctrine of the Logos
2018-11-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
During the previous half-century, Johannes Vermeer has emerged as one of the greatest painters of the Baroque era. Nevertheless, the uncommon depth and subtlety of his religious allegories have not been adequately noted in scholarship. In this lecture, we will look at a pair of paintings that figures forth the doctrine of Jesus Christ as it is represented in the Gospel of John and compare Vermeer’s allegory with similar ones by his contemporaries.

Gregory Harwell studied Economics, Literature, Philosophy, History and Art History, in that order, at the University of Texas at Austin, Heidelberg University and Princeton University, where he received his doctorate. He has taught art history at the University of Southern California, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara and at UCLA since 2011. He has written extensively on the numismatic arts in the Renaissance and has recently completed two books: one on the French painter, Jean Chardin, and a history book on the Flemish Uprising of 1488. Dr. Harwell is currently working on a book about art and religion in early Modern Europe.

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Korea Before Nationalism: Judging and Misjudging, the 1801 Silk Letter of Hwang Sayŏng
2018-11-13 15:30 - 17:00 | Royce 243
Sponsored by: Center for Korean Studies
Co-Sponsored by: Center for Study of Religion, Center for Buddhist Studies

In 1801, in the midst of a bloody anti-Catholic persecution, one of the persecuted Catholics, Hwang Sayŏng, tried to send a letter to the bishop in Beijing requesting European military intervention to force Chosŏn to stop killing Catholics. Over two centuries later, historians debate how to characterize Hwang’s action. Many declare that he was traitor for asking foreign military forces to threaten Korea. A few others insist that he was a human rights activist, since all he wanted was religious freedom, not the fall of the government. Both characterizations are anachronistic. Professor Baker will provide a way to evaluate Hwang’s intentions in their historical context, before the concepts of nationalism or religious freedom were present on the peninsula. He will argue that Hwang simply wanted Chosŏn to change its allegiance from Beijing to Rome.

Donald Baker is professor of Korean History and Civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His most recent book is Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea. He also wrote Korean Spirituality, a survey of Korea’s religious culture and has published numerous articles on Christianity and Confucianism in Korean history.

The Public's Views of the Relationship Between Religion and Science – and the Resulting Disconnect With Social Sciences and the Humanities
2018-11-13 12:00 - 13:30
In this talk I examine recent sociological research on the relationship between religion and science for the public. This research suggests that while religion may have at one time been concerned with fact claims in the natural world that could be contradicted by science, it largely is no longer. This post-1960s development has coincided with the rise of moral conflict between religious traditions and science. However, social science and humanities research on this relationship largely assumes that religion and science are epistemic – not moral – systems, and thus misunderstands the situation in the public.
John H. Evans is the Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences, Associate Dean of the Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University and has held visiting professorial fellowships or honorary professorships at the Universities of Edinburgh, Muenster, Ben Gurion, and Queensland. He specializes in examining debates that involve religion and science in the public sphere, trying to use social science to contribute to humanistic and ethical debates. He has particularly focused on ethical debates about human genetics.

The talk will be held in Haines 279.

Jesus in Retrospect: From Sin to Perfection
2018-11-01 16:00 - 17:30
How is it that Jesus came to be viewed by the earliest Christians as “sinless,” and what did this mean for them? In this presentation I will explore the process by which early Christianity claimed that Jesus was a perfectly sinless human being, setting the stage for his apotheosis as God. As we will see, everything hinges on the tragic death of Jesus on the cross, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). How were the early followers of Jesus to make sense of the death of Jesus when what they had expected was that Jesus would usher in the kingdom of God and commence a messianic age (Luke 24:21; Acts 1:6)? Once they came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, the early Christian communities began a process of “retrospective theologizing,” namely, retelling the story of Jesus from the perspective of his death and resurrection, and then retrojecting these beliefs back onto his public ministry, his baptism, and his birth. Against charges that Jesus was “born in sin” (out of wedlock), the early Christians retorted that his was a perfect virgin birth. Against charges that Jesus repented from sin at his baptism by John, the early believers responded that this was a baptism of perfect righteousness. And against charges that Jesus violated laws and customs surrounding Jewish family, friends, and faith, — in short that “we know this man is a sinner” (John 9:24), the early Christians accused the Jewish leaders of being children of the devil (John 8:44), leading to centuries of Christian anti-semitism. Christians also co-opted Jewish festivals such as Yom Kippur and Passover to claim that Jesus was the “true bread from heaven” (John 6) and the ultimate
“lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). While we can understand the historical and theological processes by which Jesus came to be viewed as sinless, is such a view still necessary for contemporary Christianity?

Jeffrey S. Siker is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), where he has taught since 1987. His areas of expertise include early Jewish/Christian relations, the history of biblical interpretation, scripture & ethics, and the Bible and technology. In addition to dozens of articles, his most recent books include: Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World (Fortress, 2017); Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity
(Cambridge, 2015); Scripture & Ethics: 20th Century Portraits (Oxford, 2006); and Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate (Westminster/John Knox, 1994). He is currently completing a volume on Sin: New Testament Perspectives (forthcoming, Oxford, 2019).

This talk will be held in Kaplan Hall 365. Please RSVP below:

Guiding Presences and the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths
2018-10-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Kaplan Hall 348
Novelists sometimes experience their characters as coming to life and guiding their writing process, but the characters remain imaginary. Founders of new religious and spiritual movements paths often go beyond this to become convinced that real divine Presences are actively guiding the emergence of their new spiritual paths. Historical sources indicate that Joseph Smith, Carl Jung, and Helen Schucman each felt they received guidance from a divine Presence (the Lord, the Spirit of the Age, and the Voice of God’s Son, respectively) who guided the emergence of the new psycho-spiritual path (Mormonism, Analytic Psychology, and A Course in Miracles) for which they are known. This talk will consider how they and others came to believe that they were interacting with a real (not just imaginary) presence through analysis and comparison of the early stages of the three movements.

Ann Taves is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Fits, Trances, and Visions (Princeton, 1999); Religious Experience Reconsidered (Princeton, 2009); and, most recently, Revelatory Events (Princeton, 2016). She is currently working with collaborators on several projects including situating Religious Studies under the wider rubric of Worldview Studies, developing and testing a cross-cultural Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences, and co-authoring a primer on “explanation” for scholars of religion and other humanists. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), a past president of the American Academy of Religion (2010); and Deputy General Secretary of the IAHR (2015-2020).

2018-19 Calendar of Events
2018-09-26 16:28
For downloadable calendar please see: 2018.19 Calendar of CSR Events

Trialogue: Help or Hindrance? The Role of Religion in Hearing the Voices of Women
2018-06-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
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 academic disciplines, as well as cultural and religious backgrounds, to an analysis of the complex interrelatedness of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Moderator Reinhard Krauss, Ph.D. Lecturer, UCLA Center for the Study of Religion Panelists
Gail Labovitz, Ph.D Associate Professor of Rabbinics, American Jewish University
Jane Dempsey Douglass, Ph.D. Professor Emerita of Historical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary
Edina Lekovic Producer and Host, Meeting the Moment Podcast; Educational Trainer and Consultant
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Heart & Sole
2018-05-23 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 348, 348 Humanities Bldg, Los Angeles , CA, 90095, United States
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for 20 students to participate in the workshop Wednesday May 23rd from 5:00pm-7:00pm.
Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!

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African Sources of Knowledge in Ajami Script: The Case of the Muridiyya
2018-05-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
Although written records are rarely regarded as part of sub-Saharan Africa’s intellectual heritage, important bodies of Ajami literature (records of African languages written in Arabic script) have existed in Africa for centuries. In South Africa, Muslim Malay slaves produced the first written record of Afrikaans in Ajami. The neglect of African Ajami traditions is due to a number of factors, including the lack of an Ajami public depository, the limited number of scholars with the linguistic and cultural background necessary to study Ajami manuscripts, and the prevailing assumption that sources of useful knowledge on Africa are either oral or written in European languages. Yet, Ajami traditions of Africa are old and are varied. They include satirical, polemical and protest poetry, as well as biographies, eulogies, genealogies, talismanic resources, medicinal manuals, family journals, business transactions, historical records, speeches, texts on administrative and diplomatic matters, Islamic jurisprudence, behavioral codes, grammar, and even visual arts. In this talk I show how the study of Ajami manuscripts forces revisions of various aspects of our understanding of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa.

Fallou Ngom is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. His research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the adaptations of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, and Ajami literatures—records of African languages written in Arabic script. He seeks to understand the knowledge buried in African Ajami literatures and the historical, social, cultural, and religious heritage that has found expression in this manner. He has held Fulbright, ACLS/SSRC/NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships. His work has appeared in several scholarly journals, including African Studies Review, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Language Variation and Change, and International Journal of the Sociology of Language. His recent book, Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridyya (Oxford University Press, 2016), won the 2017 Melville J. Herskovits Prize in African Studies.

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Multi-Faith Forum
2018-05-10 12:30 - 13:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Multi-Faith Forum was established in 2014 in order to address the needs of students who want to engage topics related to faith, religion, religious identity and spirituality, and who are interested in learning about religious traditions outside the classroom setting. Lunch will be provided!

Graduate Conference on Religion: Imagining Life After Death: Past, Present, and Future
2018-05-09 - 2018-05-10
See http://religion.ucla.edu/conference/religion-conference-2018/ for more information!
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CANCELLED: "The Face That Most Resembles Christ": the Matter of Motherhood in Dante's Paradiso
2018-05-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 348, 348 Humanities Bldg, Los Angeles , CA, 90095, United States
We regret to inform you that this event has been cancelled.

A Public Private Letter: From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the Letters of Paul and Beyond
2018-05-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Royce 306
What does it mean read a letter that seems to have one set of addressees, but which is redeployed in a broader or in a trans-local way? This paper tests the idea that the formation of Paul’s letter collection, found in the New Testament, may have been influenced by large-scale inscriptional “publications” of letters in the cityscapes of the second to third centuries CE. Additionally, it contextualizes the formation of Pauline letter collections within broader practices of letter collections in the first and second centuries CE, including those of Cicero and Pliny. We’ll consider together the power of texts that claim a limited “you” or addressee, but that reaches far beyond that original audience.
Laura Nasrallah is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard. Her books include Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The SecondCentury Church Amid the Spaces of Empire and An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity. She is co-editor of Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies and From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē: Studies in Religion and Archaeology. She has just completed a book manuscript titled Archaeology and the Letters of Paul.

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WISE Workshop
2018-04-26 17:00 - 19:00 | Kerckhoff 168
The Center for the Study of Religion invites the women of UCLA to participate in WISE.
WISE is workshop designed especially for women to connect and dialogue with each other about beliefs and values with an emphasis on how they intersect, challenge, and inform their experiences as women.
This interactive workshop will give participants a creative space to reflect and learn about others through sharing stories of encounter and empowerment.
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Heart & Sole
2018-04-25 17:30 - 19:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for students to participate in the workshop Wednesday April 25th from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!
Heart & Sole Workshop Overview
Introductions and Dialogue Skills: The workshop will start with introductions and icebreakers then move on to dialogue activities.
Through interactive and reflective exercises participants will:
• Learn about the concept of religious pluralism.
• Identify the influences that inform their beliefs and values.
• Practice reflective listening and speaking.
Walk and Talk: Participants will partner with a peer who is from a different religious tradition/belief community and go for a short walk on campus. Together they will share their perspectives and discuss a series of reflection questions.
Group Dinner: Participants will gather as group and share their experiences over dinner in the Kaplan Hall, Room 365
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Maimonaides and the Merchant
2018-04-24 16:00 - 17:30
The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The Talmud, written in and for an agrarian society, was in many ways ill-equipped for the new economy. In the early Islamic period, the Babylonian Geonim made accommodations through their responsa, through occasional taqqanot, and especially by applying the concept that custom can be a source of law. Not previously noticed, however, in the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides made his own efforts to update the halakha through codification, in order to make it conform with Jewish merchant practice as illustrated in the business documents of the Cairo Geniza

Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Educated at Brandeis University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and the Jewish Theological Seminary (M.H.L., Rabbi, Ph.D.), he is a well-known historian of the Jews in Arab lands in the Middle Ages. His publications include Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt; Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages; Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, and, most recently, Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World. Until his recent retirement from Princeton, he was director of the Princeton Geniza Project, an on-line database of transcriptions of documents from the Cairo Geniza.
Sponsored by: UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Co-Sponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Religion

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Brides of the Buddha: Nuns' Stories from the Avadanasataka
2018-04-18 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
For young women in early South Asia, marriage was a crucial event that largely determined their socioeconomic and religious future. Yet while many of the rules and requirements for Hindu marriage around the beginning of the Common Era are well documented, there has been little in the way of systematic examinations of the evidence for marriage customs among Buddhists of this period. In this respect and others, our understanding of the lives of early Buddhist women is still limited. In her recent book, Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avadānaśataka, Dr. Muldoon-Hules used ten stories from a major collection of Buddhist narratives compiled sometime in the first five centuries C.E., in conjunction with other contemporary texts from both Hinduism and Buddhism, to examine the social landscape of early India. In this talk, she discusses some of what these tales can tell us about Buddhist marital customs, Hindu-Buddhist tensions, and regional variation in South Asian Buddhism during this period.

Dr. Karen Muldoon-Hules completed a Ph.D. (2011) and an M.A. (2005) in Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She also holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Indiana University. She teaches undergraduate courses for Asian Languages and Cultures Department and for the Study of Religion Program at UCLA. She has presented at a number of major conferences and published several articles and the book on which this talk is based.
Sponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
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Heart & Sole 2.0
2018-04-12 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
Students who participated in Heart & Sole during the winter quarter are invited to Heart & Sole 2.0!
Join your peers on Thursday April 12 from 5:30-7pm for a walk on campus to continue the conversation about beliefs and values AND also a enjoy delicious dinner together!
Please RSVP by Tuesday April 10th. Space is limited to 20 students.

The Stigma of Submission, Or: What Happened to Sisera in Judges 5, 25-27?
2018-03-13 12:00 - 13:30
Thomas Schneider is Professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He studied at Zurich, Basel, and Paris, earning a Master’s degree (Lizentiat), a doctorate, and a habilitation in Egyptology at the University of Basel. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna (1999) and the University of Heidelberg (2003-4). He was a Junior Research Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Basel (2001-20015) and Professor and holder of the Chair in Egyptology at the University of Wales, Swansea (2005-2007). Schneider was a visiting scholar at New York University (2006) and UC Berkley (2012). He has published six books and more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and book reviews, and edited or co-edited another six books in his main areas of research: Egyptian interconnections with the Levant and the Near East (including Egypt and the Bible), Egyptian history and chronology, Egyptian historical phonology, and the history of Egyptology in Nazi Germany. He is founding editor of the Journal of Egyptian History, as well as editor of Near Eastern Archaeology. He was the editor-in-chief of “Culture and History of the Ancient Near East” (2006-2013), and area editor history for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology.

The two versions of the story of Sisera’s defeat at the hands of Yael in Judges 4 and 5 are among the most iconic episodes of the Hebrew Bible, with a long and colorful history of interpretation and reception. This lecture will present a new understanding of Sisera’s fate in the poetic version of Judges 5,25-27. On the basis of a reassessment of the meaning of Biblical Hebrew raqqā (“cheek”, not “temple”) and the verbs describing Yael’s attack on Sisera in v. 26, it is suggested that the focus of this episode is not on the killing of Sisera but his stigmatization. Scars of holes inflicted in the face were a visible trace of the Assyrian practice of leading foreign rulers on facial hooks into captivity that is also well documented in texts of the Hebrew Bible. The proposed military submission and humiliation of Sisera sets the poetic version of the encounter of Yael and Sisera apart from the prose version in Judges 4 as an account that is factually and literarily independent.
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Translating the Life of Ibn Hanbal
2018-02-28 16:00 - 17:30
Jonathan Brown (Associate Professor of Islamic Civilization, Georgetown) and Matthew Fisher (Associate Professor of English, UCLA) will discuss The Life of Ibn Hanbal by Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200), recently translated by Michael Cooperson (Professor of Arabic, NELC, UCLA). This translation, which won the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and Cultural Understanding, recounts the life of the famous ninth-century teacher of Hadith.

Michael Cooperson received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. His previous books include Al Ma’mun and Classical Arabic Biography, and he has co-authored and edited many others on subjects ranging from Baghdad in rhetoric and narrative to Arabic time travel literature. His current projects include a book on the cultural history of the early Abbasid period, as well as a translation of the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī for the Library of Arabic Literature.

Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. The editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari.

Matthew Fisher is an Associate Professor of English at UCLA. The author of Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England, his research focuses on the material and ideological processes of textual composition, transmission, and circulation.

Asma Sayeed recieved her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam. Her current project relates to Muslim education and in particular to an examination of texts and textual practices in diverse regional and historical contexts.

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