Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

Wolakota kagapi: The Study of Peace Making on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
2022-05-17 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 314 Royce Hall
Unfortunately, the Center for the Study of Religion must postpone this event due to extenuating circumstances. We apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to welcoming you at our next event.

The Oglala Lakota Peace Making Team, was instrumental in putting together a number of training sessions for community members to become Peace Makers. The tribe developed a Peace Making Room in the new court house. The Peace Making room is used for Peace Making for the community membership.
A Peace Maker has a vision for the future, knows traditional ways, shares and develops leadership, serves and protects the tribal community, develops trust, and shows respect for all tribal people. Native communities are centered on culture, spirituality, language, and stories. They are not centered on financial profit, politics, or religion. These elements of culture are important for explaining the practice of (Wolakota) Peace making.

Richard Iron Cloud Ph.D., Oglala Lakota, Richard is a founding member of the Oglala Lakota Peace-Making Team. A group of Oglala Lakota individuals who came together to look for alternatives to the Colonial System of Justice. Richard has been involved in social justice issues, researching systems of oppression in its various forms. Richard believes in looking out for others needs rather than one’s own, such behavior is salient in the Lakota (ounye) way of life.

Antisemitism in the Pagan World
2022-05-18 16:00 - 17:00 | Royce Hall 306/Zoom
What counts as antisemitism? Did antisemitism exist among Greeks and Romans? How far and how deep did hostility to Jews extend in the pagan and pre-Christian world? What impact did it have on Jewish experience in the period of the Second Temple? In short, was there a “Jewish problem” in Greco-Roman antiquity?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Classics, History Department, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Erich Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing have been primarily in Roman history, Hellenistic history, and Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He has published or edited 14 books, the most recent of which is Ethnicity in the Ancient World – – Did it Matter? (2020). Most important, he has supervised or served on the PhD dissertation committees of over 100 students, most of whom are now teaching in various colleges and universities in this country and abroad.

Study of Religion: Commencement Toast 2022
2022-06-11 13:30 - 14:30 | Kaplan 365

Welcome Reception Fall 2022
2022-10-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2022 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Tending the Garden: Ahimsa in the Early Indian Literature
2022-10-19 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall/Zoom
Source: Shakyamuni Buddha – Jataka (Previous Lives). 1800, Zanabazar Mongolia National Museum, Mongolia, https://www.himalayanart.org/items/50191. Accessed 22 Sept. 2022.

The practice of ahiṃsā (non-violence) has a long and illustrious history both in South Asia, where it originated, and elsewhere. This talk will tour a selection of the rich body of texts composed by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus in premodern India that engage with the theme of ahiṃsā to non-humans. These works range from imperial propaganda to stories that illustrate with engaging vividness the karmic dangers of injuring other living beings, the rewards earned by those who refrain from doing so and the relationship between ahiṃsā and the doctrine of reincarnation.

Co-sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia

Dr. Anahita Hoose is a scholar of Indian languages, texts and cultures. Originally from England, she crossed the pond in 2016 to join the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies as a PhD student and moved to the Center for the Study of Religion after graduating in 2022. In her PhD dissertation, based on texts composed in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain circles over a period of more than a thousand years, she discusses the use of verbs in multiple premodern Indian languages. Her linguistic research is complemented by her interests in religion, myth and literature and she has published articles on both linguistic and cultural topics.

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The God of Possibilities: God, Human Freedom and the Obligation to Heal the World by Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller and Professor Leora F. Batnitzky as Respondent
2022-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 | Kaplan Hall 348
This discussion constitutes a personal effort at articulating a meaningful notion of God that is spiritually fulfilling, intellectually uncompromising and morally compelling. The search ranges across the Jewish tradition from the fundamentals of Biblical monotheism to Maimonides’ rationalism and onto Hasidic mysticism. The result is a contemporary notion of God that can nurture personal humility and the development of an ethical personality.

Co-sponsored by the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

Rabbi 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.
Dr. Leora Batnitzky is Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she also directs Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies. She is the author of several books, edited collections, and numerous articles and book chapters that span the fields of modern Jewish and Christian thought, continental philosophy and philosophy of religion, legal and political theory, and biblical hermeneutics. She is currently writing a book on the Jewish apostate and Catholic Saint Edith Stein.

Why Religion Matters for Educational Stratification
2022-11-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
It’s well-known that Americans’ academic outcomes vary by race, class, and gender. But what about their religious upbringing? In this talk, Dr. Ilana Horwitz will discuss findings from her recent book, God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (January 2022, Oxford UniversityPress). Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, Dr. Horwitz identifies a new type of childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups: religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will explain why teens raised with religious restraint earn higher grades, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from working class and lower middle-class families benefit the most from religious restraint. Dr. Horwitz will also show how religious restraint recalibrates the academic ambitions of teens from the professional class, especially girls, leading them to question the value of selective colleges.

Dr. Ilana Horwitz is a sociologist of education and religion who examines how people’s religious upbringing, social class, gender, ethnicity, and race influence their life course, especially their educational outcomes. Currently, Dr. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology and Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University. Previously, Dr. Horwitz was the Education Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity, and she earned her PhD in Sociology of Education from Stanford University. Dr. Horwitz’s research has appeared in academic and public outlets, including the American Sociological Review, Social Science Research, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed. Her current book projects include The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A Guide for Academics (under contract with Princeton University Press), and The Price of Good Intentions: Why Universities Can’t Deliver on their Diversity Promise. You can learn more about her at www.ilanahorwitz.com.

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The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal
2022-11-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
Throughout much of history, the Jewish way of life has been characterized by strict adherence to the practices and prohibitions legislated by the Torah: dietary laws, ritual purity, circumcision, Sabbath regulations, holidays, and more. But precisely when did this unique way of life first emerge, and why specifically at that time? In his talk, Professor Yonatan Adler will present the conclusions of his new book which methodically engages ancient texts and archaeological discoveries to identify the earliest evidence of Torah observance among ordinary Judeans.

Professor Yonatan Adler is an Associate Professor in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel, where he also serves as Head of the Institute of Archaeology. Adler specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. Adler has served as a member of the Israeli Council for Archaeology since his 2018 appointment by the Israeli Minister of Culture.

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At the Origins of Monotheism: A Socio-economic Confrontation in Ancient Syro Mesoptamia
2023-01-01 00:00
Presented by: Professor Giorgio Buccellati of UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Date/Time/Loc TBD

Mothers and Rituals of Child-Naming in Ancient Israel (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-01-25 14:00
Presented by: Professor Susan Ackerman of Dartmouth University.
This event will be recorded with no live audience and shared with community after.

At the Origins of Monotheism: A Socio-economic Confrontation in Ancient Syro Mesoptamia
2023-02-14 14:00 - 15:00 | Bunche Hall 2209A, 11282 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095, United States
What is known as monotheism may be seen, in it earliest manifestation, in the light of an epistemic confrontation of the biblical tradition with the system of knowledge that had developed in the great cities of Mesopotamia. The paper presents a view that is at variance with the communis opinio, both in terms of the nature of the confrontation and of its historical setting.
As for the nature of the confrontation, I consider the notion of fate as being more central to Syro-Mesopotamian religion than normally acknowledged. Polytheism was a major intellectual feat in its attempt at breaking down the absolute into component parts, i.e., the deities that represent diverse elements of the world of nature. Fate had remained untouched by this process, and in this regard it may be seen as a form of monotheism ante litteram.
As for the historical setting, I consider the patriarchal tradition as encasing the epic memory of a Syro-Mesopotamian splinter group that detached itself from the land of the four banks at a time of de-urbanization in the middle Euphrates, and in the process lost its contacts with the organized systems of cult and divination and brought new life to the notion of fate now seen as a living absolute.
This presentation comes at a point in the course when one looks at the founding figures, and in particular Abraham. My approach puts the biblical patriarchal tradition in a different and very unconventional light, drawing not only on the biblical text and on historical records, but also on archaeology and ethnography.

Giorgio Buccellati is a Research Professor in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of History at UCLA. He founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as first director from 1973 until 1983 and where he is now Director of the Mesopotamian Lab. He is currently Director of IIMAS – The International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies and of AVASA – Associazione per la Valorizzazione dell’Archeologia e della Storia Antica.
His research interests include the ancient languages, the literature, the religion, the archaeology and the history of Mesopotamia, as well as the theory of archaeology. His publications include site reports, text editions, linguistic and literary studies as well as on archaeological theory, historical monographs and essays on philosophy and spirituality. In his field work, he has developed new approaches to the preservation and presentation of archaeological sites and to community archaeology. With his wife Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, he has worked for many years in the Near East, especially in Syria, Iraq and Turkey. They are at present co-directors of the archaeological expedition to Tell Mozan/Urkesh in North-Eastern Syria.

Presented by: Giorgio Buccellati, UCLA

Grupo Madera: 20th Century Afro-Venezuelan Religiosity, Rhythms, and Resistance
2023-02-15 16:00 | Kaplan 365
Grupo Madera (Wood Group) was founded in 1977 in San Agustín del Sur – an Afro-Venezuelan working-class barrio – by Afro-Venezuelan youth committed to Third World liberation struggles, global Pan-Africanism, and Black consciousness. As a traditional Afro-Venezuelan musical ensemble and community organization, Grupo Madera responded to the people’s calls for economic justice and political participation during an era of U.S. backed government repression in Venezuela. On August 15, 1980, while en route to an event with Indigenous communities in the Amazonas region, 11 of the founding members drowned in the Orinoco River. Survivors and social movements consider the tragedy one of the most egregious and vile acts of state violence against Afro-Venezuelan popular masses in contemporary history. In the aftermath of their death, several remaining members of Grupo Madera (1977 – 1980), along with other artists, activists, relatives, and communities, swore an oath to continue the founders’ legacy and have done so for 42 years. Join us to learn more about Grupo Madera and the role of culture, religion, and arts in people’s struggles in 20th century Venezuela.

Jeanette Charles is a proud daughter of the Haitian Diaspora raised by working-class Black and Brown Los Angeles. She is pursuing her PhD in History at the University of California, Los Angeles (MA ‘19). Her research focuses on Black Radicalism, popular religiosity, and political economy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to this, she studied at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, with the Cátedra Libre África, a research institute focused on Afro-Venezuelan, African diasporic, and African continental histories. She is also a long-time international solidarity organizer, language interpreter, and independent journalist.

Presented by: Jeanette Charles, UCLA

A Royal Osirian Funerary Rite? The Awakening of Osiris Ritual in Tutankhamun’s Tomb
2023-02-23 16:00 | Kaplan 365
Over 100 years after its discovery, the tomb of Tutankhamun continues to be the focus of numerous Egyptological studies and scholarly research. Due to Howard Carter’s meticulous documentation of the tomb, it’s possible to continue to “excavate” the tomb and make new discoveries about ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, kingship ideology, and funerary practices, including a new interpretation of the layout of the Burial Chamber as related to the Awakening of Osiris Ritual.
The earliest depiction of the Awakening of Osiris Ritual comes from the 19th Dynasty, which represents the reanimation of Osiris by his son Horus in the presence of various deities connected to the Osirian myth. In the scene, the mummiform figure of Osiris lays prone and enshrined upon a lion bed, surrounded by various crowns, weapons, clothing, and other emblems. It is here argued that Tutankhamun’s Burial Chamber is a physical manifestation of this ritual, which is not only represented in image and text, but also by objects and even the body of Tutankhamun himself. The author proposes a number of hypotheses for why this ritual physically manifested itself within Tutankhamun’s burial, and how this analysis provides us with more information on royal funerary practice during the New Kingdom.

Nick Brown is an American Egyptologist who has worked as an archaeologist in Egypt since 2011. He received his MA degree in Egyptology from the American University in Cairo in 2016, and currently is an Egyptology PhD candidate at the UCLA. Currently he lives between Los Angeles, CA and Cairo, Egypt. His excavation experience includes working with archaeological sites in Aswan (at Elephantine Island and Wadi el-Hudi), as well as funerary sites in Luxor, Amarna and the Sudan. In 2016, Nicholas spent the summer working at the MFA, Boston as the Terrace Curatorial Research Associate in Egyptology. He returned to the MFA over the summer of 2019 to conduct archival research for the Egyptian Art Department’s exhibit “Ancient Nubia Now.” Nicholas’s research interests include funerary material culture from the New Kingdom, as well as the use and perception of ancient Egypt within modern contexts.
Presented by: Nick Brown (NELC UCLA)

“Abba has begun to make money from the beer business”: Beer, Business, and Halakhah in Rabbinic Literature (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-02-28 14:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Presented by: Professor Jordan D. Rosenblum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Where Was Adam Buried? Textual Communities and the Changing Location of a Sacred Site
2023-03-09 16:00 | Online on Zoom
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https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95410494359

Because neither the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, nor Qur’ān specify the place of Adam’s burial, its location became an object of contention over the ages among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The oldest Jewish traditions locate Adam’s tomb in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, thereby associating Adam with the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs buried there (Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Early Christians debated whether Adam was buried in Hebron or in Jerusalem, where his burial was associated with the passion and redemption of Jesus Christ. Later, Muslims entered into the debate, sometimes arguing for Hebron or Jerusalem, and other times for specifically Muslim traditions that locate Adam’s burial in Mecca, Najaf (in Iraq), or Sri Lanka. What was at stake in these contests was the religious symbolism and meaning of the final resting place of the ancestor of all of humanity, but more often than not the debate was shaped by pragmatic concerns having to do with political power, ecclesiastical rivalries, and economic gain, whose forms often reveal the early history of pilgrimage and religious tourism.

Fred Astren is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. His current work encompasses Jewish history—in both the East and West—in the years 500–950. Forthcoming is a journal article on the failure of Visigothic anti-Jewish legislation in Spain, and a book chapter on the impact of ninth century Muslim Arabic book culture on Jewish sectarianism. He is currently working on a book chapter on Iranian contexts of the eighth-century Jewish messianic figure, Abū ʿĪsā al- Isfahānī. Recent publications include a journal article that examines ways that minority and majority groups “co- produce” historical narratives in medieval Islam and a chapter in the Cambridge History of Judaism on medieval non-rabbinic Judaisms other than Karaism. Astren is the author of Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (University of South Carolina Press, 2004), and co-editor of Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Interaction, and Communication (Brill, 2000). Astren serves on the Advisory Board of the Mediterranean Seminar.

Presented by: Professor Fred Astren of San Francisco State University

Mark of Contradictions: The Creation of Judah's History and the Case of Samson (Bible and the Ancient World series)
2023-03-14 14:00 | 314 Royce Hall
Presented by: Professor Mahri Leonard-Fleckman of College of the Holy Cross

History and Ideology: Is There A Second Temple Judaism?
2023-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 39/Zoom
Periodization is a critical tool for historians, but it is also practice fraught with difficulty. As scholars have come to recognize, the division of historical narratives into broad analytic rubrics is anchored in the ideological commitments—often implicit and unrecognized—of their authors. A great deal of work has been devoted to examining these questions as they pertain to the assumptions informing modern history, particularly in the fields such as colonial history and women’s history. And while the issue has received less attention among scholars of the ancient world, it is no less pressing. This talk will address the broader theoretical question of periodization itself, and provide a detailed discussion of one example—the assumption that there is a Second Temple period.

Azzan Yadin-Israel is professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash and The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.
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This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple
2023-04-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
With the exception of the cross, the apple—as the forbidden fruit—may be the most widely-recognized biblical image. Yet the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew original does not name the species of fruit that caused the Fall of Man, nor do any of its many translations. While early Christian and rabbinic commentators identify various species as the forbidden fruit—the fig, the grape, the citron—they never include the apple. How, then, did the forbidden fruit come to be identified as the apple? Examining the history of biblical translation and of the artistic representation of the Fall of Man, the presentation offers a new explanation for the emergence of the apple as a symbol of temptation and forbidden knowledge.
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Azzan Yadin-Israel is professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including Scripture and Tradition: Rabbi Akiva and the Triumph of Midrash and The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and CMRS Center for Early Global Studies.

Ancient Judaism between Christian Memory and Jewish Forgetting
2023-05-02 14:00 - 15:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
Drawing on her in-progress book project on Forgetting, this seminar will explore the place of memory and forgetting in the reception of Second Temple Judaism, revisiting the supposed Rabbinic retreat from “history” after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and exploring Christian and Jewish contestation over pre-70 Jewish pasts, from antiquity to the present.
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Annette Yoshiko Reed is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She studies ancient Jews and Christians, with a focus on questions of knowledge, identity, and difference. Her recent books include Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism and Christianity​ (2018 and Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (2020). She is currently working on a book on the cultural power of forgetting, focusing on the Jewish reception of the Second Temple past.
Tuesday, May 2, 2023 • 314 Royce • 2 PM
Annette Yoshiko Reed (Harvard University)
Moderator: Catherine Bonesho (UCLA)
Ancient Judaism between Christian Memory and Jewish Forgetting
Etta and Milton Leve Scholar-in-Residence

This event is co-sponsored with lead sponsor UCLA Alan D Leve Center for Jewish Studies’ Etta and Milton Leve Scholar in Residence.

Lost Books: The Forgetfulness of Writing and the Forgetting of Jewish Pasts
2023-05-04 16:00 - 17:00 | 314 Royce Hall
It is often noted how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of ancient Judaism, radically expanding our evidence for Jews and Judaism prior to the rise of Christianity. Yet this material also stands as a striking reminder of how much of the literary heritage of Jewish antiquity has been lost to us. How and why was this material lost to the Jewish tradition, and what might its forgetting tell us about Jewish memory-making, past and present? This lecture explores these questions with a focus on lost books, real and imagined, and the shifting meanings of writing within Jewish cultural history.
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Annette Yoshiko Reed is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She studies ancient Jews and Christians, with a focus on questions of knowledge, identity, and difference. Her recent books include Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism and Christianity​ (2018 and Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (2020). She is currently working on a book on the cultural power of forgetting, focusing on the Jewish reception of the Second Temple past.
Thursday, May 4, 2023 • 314 Royce Hall • 4 PM
Annette Yoshiko Reed (Harvard University)
Moderator: Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)
Lost Books: The Forgetfulness of Writing and the Forgetting of Jewish Pasts
Etta and Milton Leve Scholar-in-Residence

This event is co-sponsored with lead sponsor UCLA Alan D Leve Center for Jewish Studies’ Etta and Milton Leve Scholar in Residence.

The Mothers, the Mamzers, and the Rabbis: Reconstructing Family and Community in Post-Holocaust Jewish Law
2023-05-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Haines 39/Zoom
This talk centers on the little-known story of the children of illicit unions that resulted from a highly unusual situation in post-Holocaust Munkacz, a SubCarpathian town that had been a major Jewish center before World War II. A number of women who returned to Munkacz in 1945 believed their husbands had perished in the camps, remarried, had children, and then saw their first husbands return. In 1965, two major Eastern European Orthodox rabbis tried to find solutions to keep the children of these children from also being considered Mamzerim, children of misbegotten unions who are considered outcasts in the Jewish community. In texts that at first glance appear highly formalistic and technical, these Jewish legal decisors tackled many of the central dilemmas of postwar European Jewry, and are thus illuminated by contemporary writings of policymakers, international relief agencies, novelists, and historians.
This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

Ethan B. Katz is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, where he has taught since the fall of 2018. He is an affiliate faculty of the Center for Middle East Studies, the Institute of European Studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion. Dr. Katz also serves as the Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate. Since the spring of 2019, he has been the co-founder and co-director of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, an effort that has received national attention and funding.
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Mark of Contradictions: The Creation of Judah's History and the Case of Samson
2023-05-09 12:30 - 13:00 | 290 Royce Hall
In biblical texts, we find preserved the “mark of contradictions, fragmentations, and adjunctions,” as intellectual historian Michel de Certeau once wrote (The Writing of History 1988: 313). This talk will explore the mark of contradictions in what may seem a peripheral set of texts within the broader biblical narrative, the Samson stories of Judges 13-16. Buried in the book of Judges, these quirky stories have consistently baffled scholars: where do they come from, why were they preserved, and what role do they serve? In the talk, Mahri Leonard-Fleckman will trace shifting portrayals of Samson through different biblical witnesses and rewritings through the first century C.E. to demonstrate how Samson preserves an important mark of contradictions as he is drawn into the fabric of Judah’s history. In doing so, her broader aim is to probe the relationship between fluidity and fixity in scribal production, history writing, and tradition itself. Moderated by William Schniedewind (UCLA).
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Mahri Leonard-Fleckman is an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible in the Religious Studies Department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. She specializes in Iron Age history and the composition history of the Hebrew Bible, and is the author of The House of David: Between Political Formation and Literary Revision (Fortress Press, 2016) and co-author of The Book of Ruth in the Wisdom Commentary Series (Liturgical Press, 2017). Her current book project, provisionally titled Scribal Representations and Social Landscapes of the Iron Age Shephelah, focuses on scribal representations of the “Other” in ancient Israel in relation to broader questions of identity in the Iron Age Levant, and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Leonard-Fleckman has published numerous scholarly and public-facing books and articles, is currently the Catholic Biblical Quarterly Book Review Editor for the Old Testament and Qumran, and is active on numerous other editorial boards and professional committees.

Co-sponsored with the lead sponsor UCLA Alan D Leve Center for Jewish Studies as part of their Bible and the Ancient Near East series, in addition to and the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures

Ethics in Paul and Paul in Ethics
2023-05-11 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
This talk looks at a few examples of Paul’s ethical reasoning and then discusses how his ethical discourse compares with those of several types current today.
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Adela Yarbro Collins is the current president of the Society for Biblical Literature and an American author and academic who has served as the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. Her research focuses on the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Revelation, and she has also written on early Christian apocalypticism and eschatology. Collins has also served as the President of the Society of New Testament Studies (2010–2011) and as the President of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical Literature (2004–2005).

Different Roads, One Goal: Gandhi and Jainism
2023-06-03 14:00 - 17:30 | 314 Royce Hall
The nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the last century’s most revered figures, has exerted enormous influence across the world. Gandhi was himself greatly influenced by Jainism, an ancient religion whose practitioners, many of whom live in Gandhi’s native state of Gujarat in north-western India, are committed to minimizing harm to living beings.
In this symposium, speakers will discuss connections between Gandhi and Jainism and parallels between Gandhian and Jain thought.
SCHEDULE:
2:00 – 2:45: Tara Sethia: “Gandhi, Ahiṃsā and Jainism”
2:45 – 3:30: Chris Chapple: “Jain and Gandhian Vows: Nonviolence, Truth, and Simplicity”
3:30 – 3:45: Break
3:45 – 4:30: Veena Howard: “Gandhi and his Practical Anekāntavāda for Sarvodaya”
4:30 – 4:50: Response from Vinay Lal
4:50 – 5:30: Concluding Discussion
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Speakers:
Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and founding director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He has published more than twenty books including Karma and Creativity (1986), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Reconciling Yogas (2003), Yoga and the Luminous (2008), Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (2020), and several edited volumes on religion and ecology. He has received numerous grants for his research, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Nehru Fellowship program. He serves on the advisory boards for the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Jaina Studies Centre (London), the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley), the Uberoi Foundation (Denver), the South Asia Studies Association (Los Angeles), the Center for Religions and Spirituality (LMU), and the International School for Jain Studies (Delhi).

Veena R. Howard, Ph.D., is Professor of Asian Religious Traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno She also holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma. She was recently appointed as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books, Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed.), (Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed.) (IB Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles including, “The Nonviolence Conundrum: Political Peace and Personal Karma in Jain and Hindu Traditions” (Religions, 2023); “Oxford Bibliography Article: Mohandas K. Gandhi” (Oxford University Press, 2019); “Divine Light and Melodies Lead the Way: The Santmat Tradition of Bihar”(Religions, 2019); “The modern monastic Santmat movement of Bihar: building bridges between Sanātana Dharma and Sant-Mat (International Journal of Dharma Studies, 2017); “Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahabharata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments” (Sophia International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, 2016), “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women” (The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2013), She has also translated three books from the modern Sant tradition from Hindi into English. She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Tara Sethia is the founder of Ahimsa Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Thought and Action at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona where she held the inaugural the Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Ahimsa Studies. As Center-Director for nearly two decades she created an interdisciplinary Minor in Nonviolence Studies; directed summer institutes for K-12 educators; and hosted conferences, lectures, dialogues, and workshops on nonviolence. Her publications include the following books: Gandhi: Pioneer of Nonviolent Social Change, Living Gandhi, and Ahimsa, Anekanta and Jainism. She teaches courses on India, South Asia, and Nonviolence and Social Change. Dr. Sethia is a recipient of many honors, awards, and grants, and has been featured in the media, including the Los Angeles Times. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA. Currently, she is emerita professor of History.

Discussant:
Vinay Lal is a writer, blogger, cultural critic, and Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned his BA and MA, both in 1982, from The Johns Hopkins University with concentration in literature, history, and philosophy, and a PhD with Distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 1992. He writes widely on Indian history, historiography, the Indian diaspora, colonialism, the architecture of nonviolence, Gandhi, American politics, contemporary culture, and the global politics of knowledge systems. His 20 books include the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013); The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Ashis Nandy (Viking Penguin, 2005); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003); Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002); India and Civilizational Futures: Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics II (Oxford, 2019); The Fury of Covid-19: The Passions, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (Pan Macmillan, 2020); and, most recently, Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (Roli Books, 2022). Two volumes of his collected papers on Gandhi are scheduled for publication in early 2024. He blogs at abplive.in and maintains an extensive academic YouTube channel with over 300 lectures at youtube.com/user/dillichalo with nearly 33,000 subscribers and 2.5 million views.

From Enchanted to Re-enchanted: Trajectories of Vietnamese Buddhism in a Post-modern World
2023-10-05 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies. It is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Buddhist modernity has often taken on the form of a secularized, rationalist and democratic Buddhism that accentuates meditative techniques and a focus on psychology and salvation attained through individual endeavor. Non-rational, devotional, forms of Buddhism have, at least rhetorically, been painted as pre-modern, backwards or superstition. Echoing the now debunked secularization theory of religion – that religion will diminish and be replaced by science – it has been assumed that the modernization of Buddhism would displace devotional forms of Buddhism with this rational and humanistic form of Buddhist modernism. This theory is now demonstrably proven false in many places, but especially in Vietnam where there has been a resurgence of interest in devotional forms of Buddhism, which focus on supernatural assistance in daily life and the potency of some monks to tell the future and alter fates (in essence, the denying the secular division between the mundane and supernatural.) Professor Alexander Soucy (Saint Mary’s University), will posit that this is not a persistence nor resurgence of the pre-modern, but instead needs to be understood as something new – as much owing to the structures and assumptions of modernity as to the power of the enchanted past.
Registration required. Click here.
Alexander Soucy is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Canada). His first monograph, The Buddha Side: Gender, Power and Buddhist Practice in Vietnam (2012) is the only English-language ethnography of Vietnamese Buddhism. He has co-edited two volumes on Buddhism in Canada, Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada (2010) and Flowers on the Rock: Global and Local Buddhisms in Canada (2014), and a volume on Buddhism and globalization, called Buddhism in the Global Eye: Beyond East and West. He has published a number of essays on Vietnamese Buddhism in Vietnam and in the West.

Welcome Reception - Fall 2023
2023-10-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
Please join us to welcome in the new academic year, see old friends and meet new people.
Click here to let us know that you will be coming by October 5th. Thank you!

Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: David Reubeni's How-To Manual of Messianic Redemption
2023-10-18 16:00 | Zoom
In the 16th century, a Hebrew-speaking, battle-scarred, Black-skinned Jew named David Reubeni appeared suddenly in Venice with a desperate plan to restore Jewish pride and political independence. Why did kings, bishops, rabbis, bankers, and even a pope, open their homes and wallets for him? Some answers come from one of the weirdest documents in Jewish history, Reubeni’s personal diary. Professor Alan Verskin will share insights from his book in this online event which is co-sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies.

Register here for your Zoom link.

Bio: Alan Verskin is Samuel J. Zacks Chair of Jewish History at the University of Toronto. Prior to that, he taught for a decade at the University of Rhode Island. His areas of research include religious, legal, and social history in both Jewish and Islamic contexts, from the middle ages through the nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in travel, translation, and the migration of ideas between religious communities. His most recent book is Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Righting the American Dream
2023-10-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Kaplan 365
Zoom or In-Person event
Click here to register
In this book talk, author Diane Winston explores how after two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but something changed in 1983. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast his vision for limited government and market economics as the natural outworking of religious conviction.
In a provocative new history of how the news media facilitated the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the religious Right, Winston reveals how support for Reagan emerged from a new religious vision of American identity circulating in the popular press. The news media broadcast this message with enthusiasm, and white evangelicals rallied to the president’s cause. With their support, Reagan won reelection and continued to dismantle the welfare state, unraveling a political consensus that stood for half a century.
Diane Winston spent over a decade as a journalist and is now associate professor of journalism and Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is the author or editor of several books, including Religion in Los Angeles: Religious Activism, Innovation, and Diversity in the Global City. Her newest book, Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision, is available through University of Chicago Press.
Small bites and beverages will be provided. RSVP is required. Click here to register
Obtain a 30% discount on the book with promocode UCPNEW at the University of Chicago Press website.

Shirdi Sai Baba's Presence: Mediums, Mediations, and Mobilities
2023-11-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce Hall 306/Zoom
In-person and Zoom
Register here for both in-person or Zoom
The South Asian saint Shirdi Sai Baba has an ever-growing global diaspora. His inspiration and healing energies are boons reinforced for many by his defiance of religious communitarianism. In welcoming all castes, creeds, and nationalities, Baba offers an alternative to the divisiveness of his time and ours. Although Baba left his body in 1918, he is eternally present through two- and three-dimensional iconic images and figural sculptures that, as his embodiments, are found in innumerable temples, home altars, roadside and wayside shrines, films, websites, and social media. Through a recently published volume, Professors Srinivas and Roberts have explored the emergence of specific spaces, practices, selves, presences, and mobilities associated with Baba. Such presentations are often exegetical and are interesting unto themselves, but they also offer opportunities to consider the dynamics of religious expression anywhere in the world. Haptic visualities, spatial refabulations, corporeal mobilities, transmigrations, universes of translation, and positionalities in trans-Asian and Indian Ocean worlds are among theoretical perspectives addressed. An anthropology of credibility is espoused as Drs. Srinivas and Roberts seek to understand and, to a degree, participate in the truths lived by Baba and his devotees.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia
AL Roberts in Tunis, March 2023; photo by Amira Hassnaoui
Allen F. Roberts is Distinguished Research Professor / Distinguished Professor Emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and was trained in socio-cultural Anthropology (PhD 1980, University of Chicago). He and his late spouse Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts (d.2018), who was Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and Consulting Curator for African Arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have undertaken research, writing, teaching, and museum work together concerning arts and humanities of Africa and the Indian Ocean World. AL and Polly’s award-winning books and traveling exhibitions include Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) and A Saint in the City: Sufi Art of Urban Senegal (2003). Most recently and with Professor Smriti Srinivas of UC Davis, AL has co-edited and contributed to Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (2023) as a volume dedicated to Polly Roberts’ memory.
Smriti Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA. She explores regimes of spatial, somatic, and symbolic production, particularly in cities and Indian Ocean worlds. Her most recent books include Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (2022), coedited with Allen F. Roberts and Neelima Jeychandran; Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020, coedited); and A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia (2015).

Teach-in for Peace
2023-11-27 16:30 - 20:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
ROOM FULL for in- person attendance. Accepting Zoom registration only.
RSVP required. Register here
Explore sources of peace and non-violence with leading teachers, including:

Salam Al-Marayati – Muslim Public Affairs Council
Professor Carol Bakhos – UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
Rabbi Sharon Brous – Ikar
Prof./Rabbi Aryeh Cohen – American Jewish University
Aziza Hasan – Executive Director, NewGround
Andrea Hodos – Associate Director, NewGround
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller – Director Emeritus, UCLA Hillel
Rev. Dr. Najuma Smith – Word of Encouragement Community Church
Imam Dr. Jihad Turk – Bayan Islamic Graduate School

Moderated by Professor David Myers, UCLA Distinguished Professor & Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History
Sessions taught by text experts, spiritual leaders, historians, peace activists & students.
Schedule:

4:30-4:45: Introduction (Prof. David Myers and poetry reading by Rachel Burnett)
4:45-5:05: Rabbi Sharon Brous
5:05-5:25: Imam Dr. Jihad Turk
5:25-5:45: Prof. Carol Bakhos
5:45-5:55: Break
5:55-6:15: Salam Al-Marayati
6:15-6:20: breathing exercise (Sharon Zelnick)
6:20-6:40: Prof. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen
6:40-6:50: Break
6:50-7:10: Rev. Dr. Najuma Smith
7:10-7:30: Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos
7:30-7:50: Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller

(Light refreshments provided)
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion and the New Coalition for Peace in the Middle East.
