Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

Hearing the Listeners: Jain Perspectives from India’s Islamic Past. A Conversation with Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke, moderated by Alka Patel
2022-02-22 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
Perhaps uniquely in South Asia, Jains wrote voluminously about their interactions with Muslim rulers from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire. Their writings present us with unparalleled views of these rulers and the social, cultural, and religious transformations taking place throughout the 13th to 17th centuries. This period of history is hotly contested today, as the Hindu Right seeks to de-legitimize India’s commitment to secularism and deny India’s Muslim population a place in the nation. In this conversation, historians Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke will discuss how their readings of Jain sources composed in these centuries have shaped their understanding of India’s past—and present—by paying attention to what Jains living in those times said about Muslim rulers, interreligious relations, and their own changing identities. Art Historian Alka Patel will moderate and show how studying Jain and Muslim built spaces can give us a richer understanding of the interactions between these two religious communities.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Steven M. Vose is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion Colorado College (Colorado Springs). His research focuses on the formation of Jain communities in (and from) western India from the late medieval period to the present. His first book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge, forthcoming) won the 2020 Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). He is currently working on a study of how globalization and neoliberalism affect identity formation in transnational Jain communities. (Twitter: @StevenMVose)

Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books, most recently, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press, January 2021). Audrey believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower, so you can find her on Twitter (@audreytruschke). She is currently working on a single volume history of India, spanning 4,600 years, with the support of a NEH Public Scholars grant.

Alka Patel is Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California at Irvine. Her research has focused on South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia, including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004), Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean (2004), India and Iran in the Longue Durée (Brill, 2017), and a guest-edited special issue on reuse in South Asian visual culture in Archives of Asian Art (2007). Patel co-edited Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (with K. Leonard, Brill 2012). Her recent book, Iran to India: The Shansabanis of Afghanistan (Edinburgh 2021), is the first of a two-volume study that analyzes the firm incorporation of South Asia within the Persianate world.

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Caste Marketing: How Hindu Rituals Sell Brahminical Supremacy
2022-02-09 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
“Caste marketing” can be understood in several ways: a description of how companies market products based on a caste profile of their users or “caste” groups as targeted market. This lecture will focus on the latter and delve into the ways Hindu ritual websites embed savarna (dominant-caste) focused terms, symbols, deities, rituals, and ideas into their websites such that they become digital repositories of “caste ideology” (Jaiswal 1998). In this sense, collectively, these ritual websites become another form of what Thenmozhi Soundarajan has called “digital brahminism”. The terms “caste” and “brahmin” do not appear on these sites, rather we see “Vedic” and “pandit” appealing to the sense of “caste innocence” held by many liberal, dominant caste members of South Asian/Hindu diaspora communities. This research shows how Hindu ritual websites use these subtle caste markers to reinforce savarna Hindu traditions as an unmarked “normal” (casteless).

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She is a scholar of ritual, nationalism, and digital culture in South Asia. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Specifically, she is interested in how online mechanisms of meaning-making like hashtags operate through the aggregation of capital, relying on power, privilege, and access to be successful. Much of her work thinks about the savarna logics of virtual platforms and how caste-oppressed, Adivasi, and minority religious communities are characterized, minimized, and effaced within these spaces. Her current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma: The Making of a Global Hindu Brand examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively “branding” religious identities through a neoliberal “Vedicizing” of virtual spaces.

Black and White Color Symbolism in Early Christian Apocalyptic Literature
2022-01-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom
Reconciling the modern categories of race, ethnicity, and religion with ancient examples of identity formation continues to befuddle historians of antiquity. This problem of fusing disparate ancient and modern conceptual categories has been particularly acute for historians of early Christianity. This paper investigates the color symbolism employed in early Christian apocalyptic literature and demonstrate the role that such rhetorical strategies have on the formulations of Christian imperialism and anti-black prejudice. Yonatan Binyam proposes that racial formation theory as currently employed in premodern race studies can be a productive heuristic for analyzing Christian social formations in late antiquity.

Yonatan Binyam is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Society and Genetics and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Prior to coming to UCLA, he was an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a doctorate in Religion from Florida State University. His research focuses on medieval Ethiopic receptions of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as the study of race, ethnicity, and religion in late antiquity.

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

“Surely There is No Fear of God in This Place” – The Biblical Plagues and OUR Plague: An Anthropocentric “Theology” and a Lesson for Our Times
2021-12-01 12:00 - 13:00
**Please note this talk has been postponed to Wednesday, December 1 at 12pm via Zoom**

The onset of the coronavirus brought with it a slew of perverse efforts to identify the ‘sinful’ behaviors for which the plague was God’s punishment. Through an analysis of “Vehaya im Shamoa”(Deut.11:13-21) I offer an alternative understanding of punishment as a disciplinary act attributed to God but, actually, the direct consequence of human conduct. Proceeding to outline the Pharoanic behavioral antecedents of the Egyptian plagues I move on to focus on the causal chain of human missteps that have led to the current crisis. In doing so I hope to diminish the degree of randomness with which we frame the pandemic and argue that this human induced ‘plague’ imposes on us a moral obligation to take corrective actions that could bring healing to our beleaguered planet.

Chaim Seidler-Feller recently celebrated his fortieth year of working with students and faculty as the Executive Director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. He is currently Director Emeritus. He was ordained in 1971 at Yeshiva University where he completed a Masters in Rabbinic Literature. Chaim has been a lecturer in the Departments of Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is currently a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute,North America and of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was the founding director of the Hartman Fellowship for Campus Professionals and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now. In 2014 he initiated a fact finding mission for non-Jewish student leaders to Israel and the Palestine Authority which is now offered on ninety campuses. In 2020 a Festschrift entitled Swimming Against the Current: Reimagining Jewish Tradition in the 21st Century was published in Chaim’s honor. He is married to Dr. Doreen Seidler-Feller, a clinical psychologist, and is the father of Shulie, a photojournalist and Shaul, an ordained rabbi who is currently serving as a Judaica consultant at Sotheby’s while pursuing a doctorate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University.

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

The Constantinian Compromise: Senators, Bishops and the Emperor in Late Antique Rome
2021-10-28 16:00 - 17:00
Given the historic role played by the victorious Constantine in spreading Christianity, it is ironic that senatorial aristocrats were more cooperative with Constantine than were the early fourth-century bishops of the city. Although the bishops of Rome and the clergy, along with other Christians, benefitted greatly from the restoration of their property and the recognition of their legal standing under Constantine, their resistance to imperial intervention in the Donatist controversy marginalized the bishop of Rome for centuries to come, as I demonstrate based on a range of texts and documents from the fourth-fifth centuries.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Classics and the UCLA Department of History

Michele Renee Salzman is Professor and Chair of History at the University of California at Riverside. Her research focuses on the religious and social history of late antiquity. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Letters of Symmachus: Book 1 Translation with Michael Roberts, Introduction and Commentary by Michele Renee Salzman, (Society of Biblical Literatures, 2011; Brill Press, 2012). Her new book, The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience and Resurgence in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), offers a new perspective on the fate of this vast city and the remarkable families who returned again and again to renew it in the last three centuries of its empire. She is the recipient of numerous awards, with Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the NEH, the American Academy in Rome, and the Bogliasco Foundation.

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:
The event will be offered via Zoom only.

To Appeal to the Judge of the Netherworld: the Role of Literary Figures in Mesopotamian Incantations
2021-10-20 12:00 - 13:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Mesopotamian incantations were, at their core, practical texts with specific purposes, whether that was the protection of a dwelling from future threats or driving out a malevolent demonic force afflicting an individual. Throughout the extensive corpus of such texts, found in languages such as Sumerian and Akkadian from the third to first millennium BCE, we see several persistent tropes. Incantations may cluster in categories, according to form and function; draw upon the legitimation of a number of deities; and even directly reference texts outside the ritual and religious sphere, including, notably, literary texts. This talk focuses on the ways in which incantations incorporate literary figures and imagery, examining in particular references to the Epic of Gilgamesh. By far Mesopotamia’s most well-known text, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a narrative concerned with journeys, particularly those of its eponymous protagonist. Here he journeys outside the bounds of the text itself, invoked in several incantations consigning antagonistic figures such as witches or ghosts to the Netherworld. Although the literary texts focus on Gilgamesh’s standing as king and his skill in battle, in incantations he is presented in another role entirely, as a judge of the dead. This different focus underscores the adaptability of such characters across textual categories, as well as the larger scope of connections between the texts themselves.

Gina Konstantopoulos is an Assistant Professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research centers on religion, magic, and literature in Mesopotamia, with a particular focus on the role of demons and monsters in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. Her current research examines the creation of distant and imagined lands and notions of space and place in the ancient Near East, particularly the intersection of distant space and empire in the first millennium BCE. She has previously held research positions at the University of Tsukuba, University of Helsinki, and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University.

Event Flyer
RSVP Required:
The event will be offered as a hybrid event allowing attendees to participate in person or via Zoom. RSVP is required for all attendees.

Fall 2021 Welcome Reception
2021-10-14 16:00 - 18:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2021 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

Event Flyer
RSVP Below:

Bodily Sacrifice for a Single True Verse: Implications of a Cluster of the Buddha’s Past-Life Stories
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Online on Zoom
Across various Buddhist texts we find, again and again, a story of how the Buddha in a past life (as Bodhisattva) made a great sacrifice in exchange for a single verse of true teaching. Although we can interpret such stories as simply glorifications of Buddha or dharma, more interesting questions also arise, such as: How can the Bodhisattva access properly true teachings before he has realised the dharma for himself and made it available to others as the Buddha? If there is dharma available, is it a properly Buddhist dharma, or just a pithy generic well-spoken verse, and is it there independently of buddhas? How does the Bodhisattva’s sacrifice – of wealth, body, life and family – in exchange for a verse of teaching relate to other stories in which he makes similar sacrifices for other reasons? Why is no such story found in the huge Pali Jataka collection? In this paper I will offer some preliminary answers to these questions, and explore the implications of this cluster of stories for our understandings of the relationship between the dharma and buddhahood.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies

Naomi Appleton is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of Edinburgh. Her primary research interest is the role of stories in the construction, communication and challenge of religious ideas in early India. She has a particular passion for jātaka stories (stories of the Buddha’s past lives) but also enjoys exploring the ways in which the narrative traditions of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions interact. She is the author of three monographs and many other articles and books on related themes, including translations of Pali and Sanskrit narrative texts.

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Dangerous Children: The Role of Children in Ancient Near Eastern Household Religion
2021-05-18 14:00 - 15:00
Dr. Kristine Henriksen Garroway will present on the place of children in the household religions of the Ancient Near East. She will explore the delicate balance between a child’s life and the forces out to destroy it. Topics addressed include dangers posed to a child in the womb, infancy, early years, and beyond and how caregivers tried to successfully navigate everything from diseases to demons. The talk will conclude with a discussion of enculturation and ways in which children would come to emulate the rituals modeled for them.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Kristine Henriksen Garroway was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway’s scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to thetorah.com. Garroway’s books include: Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (Eisenbrauns 2014) and Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2018), and co-edited with John Martens Children and Methods: Listening To and Learning From Children in the Biblical World (Bril, 2020). She is the recipient of the Biblical Archaeological Society’s 2019 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to Hebrew Bible.

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Acquiescing to Necropolitics? The Church and Same Sex Relations in Africa
2021-04-21 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In this lecture I offer provisional perspectives on the question, acquiescing in necropolitics? In the first part of the lecture I highlight some of the debates on same sex relations in Cameroon. In the second part of the lecture I discuss the recent genealogy of necropolitics in Michele Foucault and Achille Mbembe. This will lead me to the major part of the essay where I argue that by advocating for death sentences for members of the LGBTQI persons as some Africans have done, they are reverting to necropolitics to solve what they think is a problem as it was during the reign Kabaka Mwanga of Uganda when he resorted to necropolitics to punish the male pages who rejected his sexual advances. My goal in this short thought experiment is to demonstrate that some of the positions taken by members of different churches, and articulated largely by leading church men and women, amounts to acquiescing to necropolitics in African societies.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA African Studies Center and LGBTQ Studies

Elias Kifon Bongmba is Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University. He earned his PhD from the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology and was awarded the DTheo. h.c. from Lund University. Bongmba studied African Religions and the Social Sciences in Africa at the University of Iowa with Professor Allen Roberts. Bongmba’s scholarship covers religion, philosophy, and theology. His book The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa won the Franz Fanon Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Bongmba is the 2020 recipient of the Ray Hart Service Award from the American Academy of Religion.

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Identity through Diversity: Classical Jain Philosophical Responses to Religious Difference
2021-04-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In South Asia’s distinctive history of religious diversity, the Jains stand out as a perpetual but prominent minority especially attentive to the range of doctrinal options surrounding them. This talk will delineate some classical Jain philosophical efforts to conceptualize differences, navigate disagreements, and seek agreement with others as exemplified in the emblematic and transformative figure of Haribhadrasūri. Thought to have been born a Brahmin in the eighth century CE, this scholar-monk is credited with ushering Jain commentarial literature into the lingua franca of Sanskrit, initiating a doxographical tradition of cataloguing the doctrinal landscape, and setting the terms for the famously enigmatic Jain theory of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda). A survey of each of these phases displays some critical ways in which a marginalized but important group of intellectuals has carved out its own identity–not through retreat into insularity, but through active engagement with the diversity in their midst.
Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

Anil Mundra is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy of Religions program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work has appeared in the journal Religions and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and is forthcoming in the Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies and Routledge’s Contemplative Studies & Jainism: Meditation, Devotion, Prayer, and Worship.

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Globalized Guru, Nationalized Icon: The Shrimad Rajchandra Mission and the Birth of "Globalized Jainism"
2021-04-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
In November 2017, the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission of Dharampur, Gujarat (SRMD) unveiled a 34-foot bronze statue of Srimad Rajacandra (1866-1901), a Jain layman and spiritual leader who is best known for his correspondence with a young Mahatma Gandhi. Over the previous decade, the SRMD’s founder, Rakeshbhai Jhavery (b. 1966), has developed a sizable following, in part by creating and publicly worshipping images of the Mission’s eponymous “inspiration.” In this talk, Dr. Steven Vose analyzes the visual aesthetics of the images of Rajacandra to show that a semantic shift has allowed the emaciated body of Rajacandra to be read as a new model of ascetic perfection and modern Jain spirituality. Vose argues that these images enabled the creation and growth of a “Globalized Jainism” specifically marketed to middle- and upper-class Indian and diaspora Jains that allows them to connect to their religious and national heritage in new ways. An examination of the cultural and religious implications of India’s turn toward neoliberalism, this talk argues that the appeal of the SRMD’s Globalized Jainism lies partly in its ability to connect modern, “philosophical” aspects of Jainism with nationalist spectacle through these images in ways that replicate traditional, ritual-based displays of piety while circumventing the structures of power that have historically linked Jain monastic orders to specific caste communities in western India.

Event Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

Dr. Steven M. Vose is the Bhagwan Mahavir Assistant Professor of Jain Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He holds a doctorate in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. His research interests focus on the formation of Jain communities and articulations of Jain identity from the late medieval period to today. His forthcoming book, Reimagining Jainism in Islamic India: Jain Intellectual Culture in the Delhi Sultanate (Routledge), which examines the role of Jain monks’ intellectual and literary production in normalizing relations between the Jain community and the first Islamicate empire in South Asia, is the winner of the 2020 American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Book Prize in the Indian Humanities. His current research examines the roles of colonialism, post-coloniality, globalization and neoliberalism on articulations of Jain identity. His teaching and research interests also include the social history of “tantra” and devotion (bhakti) in South Asia; gender, caste, and identity; religious visual culture and temple building practices.

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Religious Freedom, Buddhist Liberation
2021-03-03 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies
U.S. officials who occupied Japan after World War II claimed that the defeated country lacked religious freedom, but this tidy narrative masked a messy history. Japan’s 1889 constitution had guaranteed religious freedom, and over subsequent decades Japanese clerics had fiercely debated and vigorously defended the religious freedom clause. Yet even as Buddhists in Japan generally used religious freedom to secure privileges for themselves while excluding “foreign” religions like Christianity, Japanese Buddhists living in the U.S. Territory of Hawai`i tried and failed to get the American guarantee of religious freedom to work for them. For example, although the landmark 1927 Supreme Court case Farrington v. Tokushige upheld the right of Japanese Americans to educate their children at Buddhist-operated language schools, racist depictions of Buddhism as “un-American” made it impossible for the plaintiffs to use religious freedom law in making their case. This talk juxtaposes competing claims about religious freedom in the Japanese and U.S. empires to show that religious freedom is never simply present or absent in any given polity, nor has “it” ever been just one thing in any time or place.

Jolyon Thomas is Assistant Professor and Interim Graduate Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research on religion investigates media, law, politics, education, and capitalism in Japan and the United States. He is the author of Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan
(University of Hawai`i Press, 2012).

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

Studying Buddhism to Study Women: Sources, Topics, and Questions from Medieval China
2021-02-24 12:00 - 13:00 | 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.

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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.
Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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).

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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).

Event Flyer

RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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.

Click to Access More Information and RSVP

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.

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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.

RSVP Below (RSVP REQUIRED FOR ACCESS):

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).

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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.

Event Flyer
RSVP Required for Zoom Access:

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.

RSVP Below – RSVP REQUIRED FOR ACCESS:

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.

RSVP Below:

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.

Event Flyer
RSVP Below:

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.
RSVP Below:

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.

Event Flyer
RSVP Below:

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.

Event Flyer
RSVP Below:

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.
More Information

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).

Event Flyer
RSVP Below:
