Caste Marketing: How Hindu Rituals Sell Brahminical Supremacy
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...
Hearing the Listeners: Jain Perspectives from India’s Islamic Past. A Conversation with Steven M. Vose and Audrey Truschke, moderated by Alka Patel
ZoomPerhaps 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,...
The Jewish Discovery of Islam Revisited
Haines 39/ZoomFrom the oldest European Christian engagements with the Qur’an in the Middle Ages through the advent of modern academic approaches to the Muslim scripture, scholars have frequently seen qur’anic narratives on the biblical prophets and related subjects as the result of formative Jewish influences on the Prophet Muhammad. This approach to the origins of Islam...
Study of Religion: Spring Snack Social
Kaplan 365
A Conversation with Michael Schur
314 Royce HallMichael Schur is a television producer, writer, actor and author of How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Questions. With Pamela Hieronymi, Professor at UCLA Department of Philosophy, this conversation with explore the role of religion in contemplating moral and ethical decision-making. HOW TO BE PERFECT: The Correct Answer to Every Moral...
Do Robots Have Souls? Intelligent Machines, Digital Humans, and the Future of Technology
ZoomIn this lecture, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets the work of Ibn Rushd (“Averroës"), the twelfth-century Islamic scholar of Andalusia who achieved renown as the ‘father’ of secularism, in order to elucidate Ibn Rushd’s theory of the intellect as a power of the soul. Johnson leverages Rushd’s distinction between sensing and knowing in order to examine...
Song of Songs, Time after Time
Haines 39/ZoomThe Song of Songs has been subject to numerous and varying interpretive approaches since its emergence. Drawing from her recently published book, Perils of Wisdom: The Scriptural Solomon in Jewish Tradition, Dr. Keiter will focus on varying Jewish interpretive strategies toward the Song, highlighting the development of Jewish biblical exegesis and its impact on the...
The Ten Commandments: Who What When Where Why
Kaplan 365For over two thousand years the Ten Commandments have been understood as the fundamental set of divine laws in the Hebrew Bible. Even for those who do not believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the Ten Commandments have retained their place as especially ancient, and especially important in the religious and communal life of Israel....
Losing Control of the gods: How Religion Slipped Out of the Hands of Men in the Early Roman Empire
Dodd Hall 248The dignified and extravagant public rituals of Romans - ancestral institutions as the last generations of the Republic imagined them - definitively failed in the last century BCE. Future senatorial priests presided only over the cults of a city that was less and less a capital. In place of a narrative of early imperial religion...
Wolakota kagapi: The Study of Peace Making on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
314 Royce HallUnfortunately, 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....