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!

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...

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...

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...

For downloadable calendar please see: 2018.19 Calendar of CSR Events

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...