This paper will open with an overview of recent work by narratologists and analytical philosophers on the ontology of fictional characters. From there it proceeds to arguments about the ontological status of characters who appear in fictionalizing narratives such as the Odyssey or the Ramayana who are simultaneously the objects of religious belief. I suggest...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...