Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

Studying Buddhism to Study Women: Sources, Topics, and Questions from Medieval China
2021-02-24 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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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Nicolas Poussin’s Visual Adaptation of Two Biblical Themes
2021-02-23 12:00 - 13:00 | 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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Can Sacrifice be Literary? Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Inauguration Day Episode
2021-02-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
One of the most enduring conclusions in pentateuchal studies is that the legal and narrative elements of the Pentateuch have distinct origins. Yet this argument is based more on outdated ideas of what counts as “literary” than on any textual or compositional evidence. In this talk, I will present an example from my recent book (The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source). I will argue that the seemingly non-standard ritual procedures in Lev 9 can only be understood when read in light of the section’s broader narrative context, and that the adaptation of the ritual procedure in Lev 9 then becomes the catalyst for a narrative scene in Lev 10. I use this example to highlight two main points: 1) the pentateuchal priestly source is characterized in large part by the mutual dependence of its ritual and narrative materials, and 2) by foregrounding the possibilities of narrative artistry, we can generate new insights about religious thought and literary composition in the ancient world.

Liane Feldman is an Assistant Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her work focuses primarily on priestly literature, with an emphasis on the literary representation of sacrifice and sacred space in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple literature. She is the author of The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source (Mohr Siebeck, 2020).

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Reading the Story of Dinah in Context and in the Age of #MeToo
2021-02-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Dinah, the only (mentioned) daughter of the patriarch Jacob, emerges in Genesis 34, only to disappear from the text. Dinah goes out to visit the women of the land. She is seen by Shechem, the prince of the local village, also named Shechem, who takes her and has sex with her (Gen 34:2). He then wants to marry her. Her brothers, Jacob’s sons, insist that Shechem and his people be circumcised. They consent, and while they are recovering from their circumcision, Simeon and Levi massacre them, while the other brothers plunder the town. Feminist scholars have debated what happens to Dinah in Genesis 34:2. Was she raped? Abducted? Something else? How can we read sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible and within the context of ancient Israel? When reading the Hebrew Bible, with attention to linguistic and historical realities, how do we also read in our contemporary context?
This talk will address the questions of what happens to Dinah, what’s at stake in the reading of this story, and how can we deal with this biblical story and others like it in the age of #MeToo?

Alison L. Joseph is Senior Editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture. She earned her PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the processes by which the Hebrew Bible was produced, bringing together historiographical, literary, and gender criticism as it illuminates the author/redactor’s role in interpreting and rewriting earlier texts. Her current project, Damning Dinah: The Priestly Battle against Intermarriage, looks at intermarriage and women’s sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and explores how late authorial voices reflect a growing concern with foreign infiltration. Her first book, Portrait of the Kings: The Davidic Prototype in Deuteronomistic Poetics (Fortress, 2015), received the 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She is co-editor of the recently published Reading Other Peoples’ Texts: Social Identity and the Reception of Authoritative Traditions (Bloomsbury, 2020).

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Music and Hebrew Infusion
2021-01-26 17:00 | Zoom
Join Sarah Bunin Benor, Co-Author of Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (2020), and sociologist Dan Lainer-Vos as they discuss the role of music in how camps infuse Hebrew in Jewish summer camps. This event will be moderated by Mark Kligman, Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.

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Organs for Sale: Markets, Motives, and the Spirit of Medicine
2020-12-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
This talk is based on my forthcoming book, Organs for Sale, which is an extended case study of the bioethical question of how to increase human organ supply, focusing on the rhetoric of competing advocates, namely, the altruism-based status quo and market alternatives. But it is also an inquiry into what a public values and how and why it disagrees, and the relationship between morals and markets under conditions of ethical pluralism and democratic regimes. Deciding together about the limits of markets, of what is and ought to be for sale and why, is about organ policy in particular but, more significantly, it is also about the very kind of society in which citizens and markets exist, deliberate, and thrive.

Ryan Gillespie is a Lecturer in the Program for the Study of Religion at UCLA, where he teaches courses on and researches about morality, religion, medicine, and public disagreement, and also serves as the faculty advisor to the UCLA Journal of Religion. He has twenty publications in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric, Harvard Theological Review, and Journal of Medical Humanities, and has just published his first book, Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation (University of Toronto Press, 2020). He earned his PhD from the University of Southern California.

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Religion in a Time of Crisis: In the Shadow of the Holocaust
2020-12-01 16:00 | Zoom
During the latest installment of the Center for the Study of Religion’s “Religion in a Time of Crisis” series, panelists Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Aaron Hass will discuss Susan H. Brown’s recent memoir. A stirring collection of poetry and prose, Circles: A Legacy will serve as an occasion to talk about the ways in which the Holocaust impacted Jewish beliefs and practices. Raised by a Holocaust survivor mother and an ideologue socialist father, Brown recreates childhood and coming of age experiences riddled with secrets, fears and uncertainty. Berenbaum is a rabbi, writer, filmmaker, current director of the Sigi Ziering Institute, and professor at American Jewish University. The author and editor of eighteen books, he also co-produced the Academy Award-winning One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissmann Klein Story and has served as historical consultant on other award-winning films and History Channel specials. Hass, professor emeritus of psychology at Cal State Dominguez Hills and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is an expert on the generational trauma stemming from the Holocaust. His book about children of survivors, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation,” was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. Berenbaum and Hass will join Brown for a discussion of her book, a multi-generational tapestry across countries and continents.
This event co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
NOTE: Please register for this Zoom webinar by registering below. Registrants will be sent an email with Zoom access information.
Susan Brown, a daughter of survivors, (mother at Bergen Belsen, father in Rákosi’s prison), a hidden Jew, guarded her secrets. Born in Communist Hungary in 1947, she escaped to Austria in 1957. In 1969 she settled in Los Angeles, finally free to voice her ideology and religion. As a speech therapist with multiple language degrees, she translates her skills to teach children to communicate. Her writing explores history, Judaism and her identity as an outsider.
Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and the development of historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies. He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. For the three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He was Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust where he authored its Report to the President. Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty-two books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His work in film has earned Emmy Awards and films he was worked on have earned Academy Awards.
Aaron Hass, professor emeritus of psychology at Cal State Dominguez Hills and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is an expert on the generational trauma stemming from the Holocaust. His book about children of survivors, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation,” was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

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The Talmud Talks and We Listen: How the Talmud Became the Authoritative Voice in Jewish Life
2020-11-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
The Talmud is an obscure, elitist document that emerged from a small community of scholars who held no recognized authority, living as a minority in a land not their own. How did such a document become the authoritative voice of Jewish life and practice? In this session, Prof. Kraemer will discuss the journey of the rabbis from obscure to dominant, and of the Talmud from marginal to—arguably—the embodiment of “Torah” par excellence.
Co-Sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

David Kraemer is Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian (Director of The Library) at The Jewish Theological Seminary, where he has also served as Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics for many years. As Librarian, Prof. Kraemer is at the helm of the most extensive collection of Judaica—rare and contemporary—in the Western hemisphere. On account of the size and importance of the collection, Prof. Kraemer is instrumental in setting policy and establishing vision for projects of international importance. Prof. Kraemer is a prolific author and commentator. His books include The Mind of the Talmud (1990), Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (1995), The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (2000), and Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages (Routledge, 2007, 2009), among others. His most recent book is A History of the Talmud (Cambridge U. Press, 2019).

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Religion is Physics: A Different Kind of Theory. A Different Kind of Everything.
2020-11-12 14:00 | Zoom
(Fear not! No math is required for this talk!)
Religion is accused of being many things, but how could Religion be Physics? Physics aims to understand everything with the most economical set of basic concepts, the so-called Theory of Everything. So what is the most economical explanation of Religion? What are its most basic elements?
To some, Religion is the failure of rationality, a “maladaptive” byproduct of evolution. To others, Religion maintains and disseminates moral and cultural values. Some believe that Religion is a psychological phenomenon, while others believe it is a means of mass coercion. Still others believe that their religion is good and the worship of their deities is absolutely necessary for a meaningful life. None of these approaches to Religion present a rigorous definition of religious phenomena. Taking advantage of recent discoveries (some right here on UCLA’s main campus) we will apply the physics of Information processes to Religious systems. It will be shown how Religious phenomena emerge from fundamental physics. The actions and events of Cultural and Religious processes will be distinguished. To explain Religion, a Theory of Everything will not suffice. We need a Theory of Every Thing.

Malcolm Dean is a published author, journalist, and computer consultant. He served as Principal Editor in UCLA’s Dept. of Academic Computing, and as a Principal Investigator for a major scientific fund. He is a member of the Higher Cognitive Affinity Group, BRI, and was a Research Affiliate of UCLA’s Human Complex Systems program.

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Take Shelter: Teaching and Learning about the End Times, from Late Antiquity to Our Times
2020-05-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
In Jeff Nichols’s 2011 film Take Shelter, Michael Shannon portrays Curtis, a blue-collar family man who is haunted by terrifying prophetic visions of the end of the world. As he becomes obsessed with building a shelter in his backyard, convinced a storm is coming, Curtis’s relationships suffer and his life falls apart.
How are we to understand the film’s portrayal of Curtis’s prophetic experience? In his commentary on the film, Dr. Pregill will discuss different possible interpretations of it, especially pertaining to the shifts in perspective on its apocalyptic message generated by our recent collective confrontation of various proximate doomsday scenarios. How do changes in our perception of immediate crisis alter our reading of narratives? More importantly, how does crisis fatigue impair our ability to see danger clearly, to take warnings about the end seriously?
NOTE: please register for this Zoom webinar by registering below. Registrees will be sent an email with a link for the Zoom session as well as a link to stream the film online.

Dr. Michael 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. He lives and teaches in Los Angeles, California.

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Religion(s) in State(s) of Crisis
2020-05-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom
Scholars of religion are not in the fortune telling business, but the comparative study of religion does provide multiple examples of how social, economic, and political crises have contributed to the transformation of cultural and religious systems in the past and can help us understand and anticipate how contemporary crises might be navigated in the future. Whether a crisis is envisioned as testing-by-trial, a punishment for disobedient violations of a covenant, the cause-and-effect results of karmic suffering, a convenient opportunity to transfer blame onto a scapegoat, a call invoking the need for “sacrifice,” or the apocalyptic solution of a battle between the forces of good and evil, it is to the language of religious discourse that we can turn to make sense and meaning of religion(s) in a state of crisis. This talk will briefly survey the study of religious crisis and provide an exploratory, illustrative example of how different social groups respond differently by focusing on the catastrophic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and how different responses to this particular crisis ultimately facilitated the construction of rabbinical Judaism and Christianity.

Dr. Simon J. Joseph is Lecturer in Early Christianity at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a Master’s degree in Religious Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in Religion (New Testament) from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of four books and over two dozen scholarly articles. His work has been published in the Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, New Testament Studies, Dead Sea Discoveries, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and History of Religions. In addition to his scholarly work in religion and biblical studies, Dr. Joseph is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

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Thinking About Religion: Langston Hughes and a Literary Approach to the Study of African American Religious History
2020-03-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
African American religious history has largely been written from the perspective of believers and belief. But what about the religious perspectives of skeptics, the doubtful, and unbelievers? What value can be gained from explorations of their views? Wallace Best answers these questions with a historical-literary analysis of the work of Harlem Renaissance writer, Langston Hughes. Hughes’s work has served, often unrecognized, as an alternative source of spiritual authority and a viable historical account of black religion. He wrote as much about religion as he did any other topic. Hughes was an astute thinker about religion, and his artistic production cannot be fully known apart from an examination of his thoughts on God, the church, and matters of ultimate meaning.

Wallace Best is Professor of Religion and African American Studies and Faculty Affiliate of History at Princeton University. He earned a PhD in United States History from Northwestern University and an MA in Church History and Theological Studies from Wheaton College (Illinois). The focus of his research and teaching merge at the crucial intersections of American religion, African American religious history, urban religion, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. With attention given to the lived experiences of religion in urban contexts, he employs various historical and literary methodologies to elucidate the ways religious discourses, practices, movements, and institutions shape American society in general and African American life in particular. He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 and Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem. He has also published in Religion and American Culture, Religion and Politics, Fides Et Historia, U.S. Catholic Historian, Callaloo, The Huffington Post, Reuters, and The Washington Post. He has held fellowships at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University. At Princeton he serves on the Executive Councils of the Center for the Study of Religion and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

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Canceled! Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law Canceled!
2020-03-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
Canceled!
Though typically translated as “Jewish law,” the term halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. This is because the rabbinic legal system has rarely wielded the political power to enforce its many detailed rules, nor has it ever been the law of any state. Even more idiosyncratically, the talmudic rabbis claim that the study of halakhah is a holy endeavor that brings a person closer to God—a claim no country makes of its law.
In this talk Professor Chaim Saiman will introduce the thesis of his book which traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. He will show how in the world of halakhah where everything is law, law is also everything, such that even laws that serve no practical purpose form part of a learned and regulatory canon.

Chaim Saiman is a scholar of Jewish law, insurance law and private law, and has just published Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law with Princeton University Press. Professor Saiman has served as the Gruss Visiting Professor of Talmudic Law at both Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a visiting fellow at Princeton University and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Bar-Ilan, Hebrew University and IDC faculties of law. Saiman has also served as an arbitrator on rabbinical courts and as an expert witness in insurance law and Jewish law in federal court. Professor Saiman received his B.S. from Georgia State University, and his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. He also studied for a number of years at Yeshivat Har-Etzion (Gush) and Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Israel. Prior to joining the faculty at Villanova, he was an Olin Fellow at Harvard Law School a Golieb Fellow at NYU Law School, a law clerk to Judge Michael McConnell on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked as a corporate associate with the firm Cleary Gottlieb in New York. At Villanova, Professor Saiman teaches Contracts, Insurance Law, Insurance Coverage Disputes, Jewish Law, and Legislation.
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Le Monde Invisible: Art, Death and Vodou in Urban Haiti
2020-03-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
In Haitian Vodou, one lwa (deity) is widely celebrated as the spirit of pèp la (the people). The lwa Gede is a trickster who resides over death and sexual regeneration. He embodies transgressive masculinity and carnivalesque freedom. This presentation explores how such a rogue became a national sign. It traces Gede’s rise in popularity to early waves of urbanization in the first half of the 20th century, and new forms of masculinity that the city made possible. Through a close reading of ethnographic texts, the chapter maps Gede’s ascendance against the centralization of political and economic power in the capital. The paper argues that Gede offers a powerful example of gender formation and apotheosis as popular historicity.

Katherine Smith, PhD is a visiting scholar in the UCLA International Institute and the Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance. She has participated in a curatorial projects and has published widely about the art and religion in Haiti and the Caribbean. She has had fellowships at NYU and Brown University.

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Christianity, Race, Slavery: New Considerations for the Life Sciences
2020-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
The idea that so-called races reflect inherent biological differences between social groups has been a prominent aspect of Western thought since at least the Enlightenment. While there have been moments of refuting this way of thinking, fixed biological conceptions of race haunt new genetic technologies, where race is thought to be measurable at the molecular level. Keel argues that the resilience of this naturalized understanding of race may stem less from overtly political motives on the part of scientists and more from our inherited theological traditions that predate the Enlightenment, were in play during transatlantic slavery, and continue to shape the intellectual horizon of scientific reasoning.

Terence Keel is an associate professor with a split appointment in the Department of African American Studies, and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. He is a critical race theorist, historian of science, and scholar of religion who has written widely about American biomedical science, religion, law, and modern thought. Keel is an affiliate of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute as well as the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

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Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion
2020-02-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 279
Melissa J. Wilde: Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania.
Sponsored by the Sociology Department. Co-Sponsored by the Study of Religion.
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Conscripting Bodies, Constructing Authority: The Museum of the Bible on the National Mall
2020-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
The Museum of the Bible on D.C.’s national mall was founded and funded by the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby. From the start, the museum has been controversial in the national press and in the field of biblical studies. Through a close examination of the museum’s exhibits and its collection of archaeological and historical objects, biblical scholar Jill Hicks-Keeton will discuss whose Bible is represented, whose bodies are conscripted into its narrative, and why it matters.

Jill Hicks-Keeton (Phd, Duke University) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Arguing with Aseneth (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Lexington Books/ Fortress Academic, 2019).

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Study of Religion Student and Faculty Social
2020-02-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan 365
Please join the Study of Religion IDP on Thursday, February 6th, for a Student and Faculty Social! Refreshments will be served.

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On the Ethics of Studying Hate Speech: The Case of Medieval Arabic Polemics
2020-02-04 16:00 - 17:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
“Hate speech” is as contested as it is distressingly common in contemporary public discourse. It poses dilemmas that extend beyond political and legal debates about how it should be regulated. For professional historians – particularly scholars of religion in its historical dimensions – it also raises questions of classification and academic ethics. Is “hate speech” an accurate and useful term to use in describing and analyzing discourses of the past, especially the distant past? What ethical or social responsibilities do scholars have when dealing with such discourses? Answering these and related questions requires that we test both the limits of academic objectivity and the factors that lie behind scholars’ decisions to study particular subjects in the first place. This presentation will explore these fraught issues through the lens of the speaker’s work on medieval and early-modern Arabic religious polemics. These texts, most of which were composed between the twelfth and the fourteenth century in Egypt and Syria, but which had long afterlives, drew on the Islamic scholarly heritage in order to marginalize and exclude non-Muslims from public life. The presentation will pose and wrestle with with the questions of whether and how they should be published, studied, and situated in present-day discussions.

Luke Yarbrough is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He earned a PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2012. Since then he has been a post-doctoral research fellow at both the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, and an Assistant Professor at Saint Louis University. He is the editor and translator of The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt (New York: NYU Press, 2016) and the author of Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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International Conference on Mahatma Gandhi
2020-01-30 - 2020-02-02 | Young Research Library & Royce Hall
This conference (January 30 to February 2, 2020) aims to offer a scholarly, critical, and nuanced perspective on Gandhi. The conference follows the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, who is increasingly being studied as a philosopher, religious thinker, and critic of industrial modernity. It is, for example, little known that he pioneered a new form of what is these days called “interfaith” workship and diologe, and througout his life he maintained extensive dialogues with Christian thinkers and missionaries, Muslim theologians, and activists of all stripes and hues. All events will be open to the public and the UCLA communityl.

AFFILIATED FACULTY: Vinay Lal, Professor, History; Carol Bakhos, Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, Director, Center for the Study of Religion

Does Jewish Biblical Scholarship Exist: A Historical Perspective
2020-01-27 14:00 - 16:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Bible and Its Interpreters Seminar Series
Moderator: William Schniedewind (UCLA)
Sponsored by: The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by: The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Center for the Study of Religion
How and when did Jewish scholars enter into the mainstream of biblical scholarship? What religious and other constraints prevented them from entering the mainstream until the second half of the twentieth century? And once they entered, did they produce a body of distinctive Jewish biblical scholarship?
Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Yale University, Brown University, Wellesley College and Middlebury College. He has written God is King, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, The Book of Judges, and Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Israeli Hebrew. He is co-author of The Bible and the Believer, and co-editor of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, The Jewish Study Bible, and The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and has contributed to all ten volumes of My People’s Prayer Book. In 2017, he was one of 100 scholars and leaders asked to participate in the “American Values Religious Voices” project. He has written for The Forward and The Jerusalem Report, has appeared on the Television series “Mysteries of the Bible,” was heard on the National Public Radio show “All Things Considered,” and was interviewed on “Fresh Air” by Terry Gross.
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The ‘Religionization' of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
2020-01-15 17:00 - 18:30 | UCLA Faculty Center
There has long been a popular misconception that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is driven by religion. This is historically inaccurate, but religion is having an increasing impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. In this talk, Professor Dov Waxman will explore the growing role of religion in the conflict, and the implications of this trend for the prospect of peace between Israel and the Palestinians
As of Jan. 1, 2020, Dov Waxman is Professor of Israel Studies, Director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, and The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies. His research has focused on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, Israeli foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, and Diaspora Jewry’s relationship with Israel. He is the author of several books on these subjects including, most recently, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). Previously, Waxman was the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University, and a professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies. He also directed Northeastern’s Middle East Studies program and co-directed its Middle East Center.
Co-Sponsored by the UCLA international Institute, Center for Middle East Development, Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of Religion, and the SAdy and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History
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The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(Out) and Original Sin in the Bible
2020-01-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
Genesis 3 is classically understood in Christian tradition as the biblical account of the Fall of humanity from divine grace, resulting in humanity’s general sinful condition. As John Milton began his epic poem, Paradise Lost: “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/ of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe/ With loss of Eden…“ But does Genesis 3 really support this cornerstone of Christian doctrine? This presentation will examine what this chapter does (and doesn’t) say about the morality of the first human pair’s actions in the Garden of Eden. It will also discuss how Genesis 4 and 6 signal a fall-out of sin and evil from the human actions in the Garden. This talk will also show what led to the traditional Christian reading, as suggested specifically by the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts in the Second Temple period.

Mark S. Smith is Helena Professor of Old Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary and Skirball Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He took Masters degrees from the Catholic University of America, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale University, where he also completed his Ph.D.. Professor Smith works on God in the Bible, the history of Israelite religion, various biblical books (especially Genesis and Judges), and the literary texts of Late Bronze Age Ugarit. He is the author of over one hundred and twenty essays, as well as sixteen books of his own and four co-authored books, including The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel; The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts; God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World; Poetic Heroes: The Literary Commemoration of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World; Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World. His most recent book is The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(out) and Original Sin in the Bible.

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2020 Winter Calendar
2020-01-06 08:00 - 2020-03-20 17:00
Click here for 2020 Winter Calendar of Events

Religion and Revolution: The Puritan Movement (c. 1560-1660) in Britain Reconsidered
2019-12-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
Who were the “Puritans”? The short answer is, a party within the two state churches (Scotland and England) dissatisfied with anything short of a “thorough” or “perfect” Protestantism that eliminated every trace of “idolatry,” curtailed the authority of the monarchy in matters of religion, and set a high standard for being a “sincere” Christian. A hard-fought politics unfolded, but it was the political collapse of Charles I in 1640-41 that enabled Puritans in both countries to come into power—only to discover that they disagreed on matters as fundamental as the nature of the true church. The New England colonists inherited these issues but resolved them in ways that continually surprise us.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of History

David D. Hall has taught at Yale, Boston University, and Harvard Divinity School, from which he retired in 2008; he has also been a visiting director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and most recently was a senior research fellow at the Huntington Library (2014-15). In the early 1980s he initiated the Center for the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society and became general editor of a five volume History of the Book in America (2000-2010). His prize-winning Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989) was shaped by studies of popular culture and popular religion in early modern Europe, and a collection of essays he edited, Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (1997). More recently, the Rosenbach lectures he gave at the University of Pennsylvania appeared as Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (2008). He has also edited an important collection of documents stemming from the “antinomian controversy” in 1630s Massachusetts and another of documents relating to witch-hunting in New England. Always, he has sought to bring an Atlantic perspective to bear on the history of early America.

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CANCELED: Religious Responses to Death and Migration: Borderlands in Haiti and the United States/Mexico
2019-11-21 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
This event has been canceled. Please continue to check this website for a rescheduling.

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Muhammad's Treaty Guaranteeing Equal Rights for Jews Under Islamic Rule
2019-11-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
According to classic Islamic law and historical memory, Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule are governed according to a set of rules authorized by the great `Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, the second caliph and the noble conqueror who carved out the imposing empire of Islam. These rules established legal status for monotheistic religious minorities, but only as second-class citizens subject to debilitating and often humiliating restrictions. According to ancient Jewish sources, however, Muhammad had already ensured full and extraordinary rights for Jews based on the vital aid that they gave to Muhammad, aid that saved him and his community from destruction at a time of terrible stress. This presentation will examine the ancient Jewish document, including the endorsement of Prophet Muhammad and his closest companions, and will retell the story of Jewish heroism that served as the reason for its creation. But did it ever happen?

Rabbi Dr. Reuven Firestone is the Regenstein Professor in medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, Senior Fellow of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, and founder of the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement in Los Angeles. Author of eight books and over one hundred scholarly articles translated into a dozen languages on Judaism, Islam, their relationship with one another and with Christianity, and phenomenology of religion, Rabbi Firestone has lived in Israel, Egypt and Germany and lectures at universities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East as well as throughout North America. He is a regular speaker in synagogues, mosques and churches. His books include Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Judaism for Muslims; An Introduction to Islam for Jews; Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam; and Who are the Real Chosen People: The Meaning of “Chosenness” in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and Holy War in Judaism: the Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea. He received rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College and his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from New York University. He has served as Vice President of the Association for Jewish Studies and President of the International Qur’anic Studies Association.

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Prayer Books from Medieval Byzantium: New Evidence for Religion and Society
2019-11-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Young Research Library Room 11348
Byzantine prayer books (euchologia) contain—in addition to the eucharistic and other sacramental liturgies— a vast number of short prayers pronounced by the clergy on particular occasions in the life of a person or in the annual cycle of a community. Although these prayers address the concerns of all levels of society, regardless of social and economic status, they have gone largely unexplored as a source for daily life and social history, in large part because of the challenges posed by their transmission in the medieval manuscripts.This lecture will give an introduction to this rich source material, based on the work of the Vienna Euchologia Project, and illustrate its potential to shed new light on social relations within Byzantine society.
Event made possible by UCLA library.

Claudia Rapp took up her current position as Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna in 2011, after 17 years in the History Department at UCLA. She is the Director of the Division of Byzantine Research within the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and was the Scholarly Director of the Sinai Palimpsests Project. Her research focuses on social and cultural history, often from the angle of religious history and manuscript studies. Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition, published in 2005, was re-issued in paperback in 2013. Her most recent book, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen and Christian Ritual (2016) has led to the formation of the Euchologia Project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Funding through the Wittgenstein-Award has enabled her to assemble a team of scholars for the joint investigation of Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency.

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Book Talk: Blackbird Blues
2019-10-29 16:00 - 17:30 | Kaplan 365
CHICAGO, Illinois – The height of the Civil Rights era merges with the hauntingly beautiful swinging sounds of Chicago jazz in award-winning reporter and psychologist Jean K. Carney’s debut novel, “Blackbird Blues” (Oct. 1, 2019, Bedazzled Ink Publishing).
Following the death of her teacher and mentor Sister Michaeline, aspiring jazz singer Mary Kaye meets Lucius, Sister’s former love and father of their estranged son, Benny. The two unite to bond over their mutual loss, with Mary Kaye helping Lucius and Benny mend their fractured relationship. Decades of secrets lie behind the heartache as Mary Kaye struggles with an unwanted pregnancy that could derail her dreams.
Carney’s work as a reporter covering Roe v. Wade, her extensive research, and decades of experience as a psychologist helped her write this stunning piece of fiction with historically accurate characters so realistic it’s as if they were pulled right off the streets of Chicago during the Civil Rights era. Behind its themes of racism, abortion, and child abandonment, this heartbreaking and timely novel ponders two pressing issues of human existence: What do we owe our children? What do we owe ourselves?

JEAN K. CARNEY is the author of “Blackbird Blues” (Oct. 1, 2019, Bedazzled Ink Publishing). She spent eight years as an award-winning reporter and editorial writer at the Milwaukee Journal, covering Children’s Court, City Hall, and Roe v. Wade. She earned a Ph.D. in Human Development at the University of Chicago and trained at a large Chicago inner-city psychiatric hospital. She taught psychology at St. Xavier University, was director of a clinic that provided low-cost psychoanalytic treatment, and supervised psychologists in training for 13 years. In full-time private practice as a psychologist for 30 years in the Chicago Loop, she saw patients from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. After her husband died of ALS, she edited his last book, “Jewish Writing and the Deep Places of the Imagination,” stopped publishing in professional psychoanalytic venues, and turned to fiction. She has since remarried and is the mother of a son and a son and daughter by marriage.

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The Báb, Sayyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi (1819 - 1850): His Life, Writings, and Religion
2019-10-19 08:00 - 17:30 | UCLA Faculty Center
Schedule:
8am-9am: Light breakfast
9am-12:30pm: Morning Session: The Movement of the Báb
Welcome by Dr. Simon Joseph (UCLA)
Moderated by Dr. Nahid Pirnazar (UCLA)
Performance by Dr. Manouchehr Sadeghi
Introduced by Dr. Latifeh Hagigi (UCLA)
Presentations by Dr. Sholeh Quinn (UC Merced), Dr. Abbas Amanat (Yale University), and Dr. Janet Afary (UC Santa Barbara)
12:30pm-2pm: Break for Lunch
2pm-5:30pm: Afternoon Session: The Writings of the Báb
Moderated by Dr. Nayereh Tohidi (Cal State Northridge)
Performance by Gordafarid
Introduced by Dr. Latifeh Hagigi (UCLA)
Presentations by Dr. Todd Lawson (University of Toronto), Dr. Stephen Lambden (UC Merced), and Dr. Nader Saiedi (UCLA)

This conference commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of the founder of the Bábí religion and one of the twin prophets of the Bahá’í Faith. The Báb, whose short but dramatic ministry challenged both the clerical and political structures of 19th century Iran, reinterpreted and reconstructed the major traditional theological concepts and categories through a synthesis of mysticism and historical/dialectical consciousness. His writings began with a reinterpretation of Shi’ih millenarian expectation of the coming of the 12th Imam, and culminated in his own announcement that his revelation would be followed by a higher revelation. Despite the massacre of the Bábís by state and clerical authorities, his movement was partly secularized in the reform movements of 20th century Iran, and partly institutionalized through the Bahá’í Faith.

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