Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

Conscripting Bodies, Constructing Authority: The Museum of the Bible on the National Mall
2020-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Haines 39/Zoom
The Museum of the Bible on D.C.’s national mall was founded and funded by the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby. From the start, the museum has been controversial in the national press and in the field of biblical studies. Through a close examination of the museum’s exhibits and its collection of archaeological and historical objects, biblical scholar Jill Hicks-Keeton will discuss whose Bible is represented, whose bodies are conscripted into its narrative, and why it matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Secular Rituals: How Nonreligious People Make Religion Less Religious
2019-10-17 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
As more Americans become nonreligious, life-cycle rituals and other ceremonies that religious experts once performed are increasingly the responsibility of everyday people and ritual experts for hire. Very secular people avoid rituals or work hard to minimize their resemblance to religion. Secular people who have left strict religious groups often rebel by inverting the rituals they once felt obligated to perform, which also allows them to hang onto parts of themselves they continue to value. Most nonreligious people simply want weddings or memorial services that avoid God-talk and feel familiar, but not too religious. All of these ways of engaging in ritual tell a story about secularism’s awkward relationship with religion and the strangeness of being secular. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research and discussing rituals as varied as a bat mitzvah, a Día de los Muertos celebration, and an inversion of Eid called Haramadan, this lecture describes how nonreligious people make religious rituals and practices feel more secular—and how in so doing they are changing what it means to be religious in America today.

Joseph Blankholm is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His interdisciplinary research focuses on atheism and secularism, primarily in the United States. Most recently, he has published on Karl Marx’s forgotten secularism (forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion) and the contradictory ways in which American law understands secular people (Public Culture 2018). He is currently at work on a manuscript about organized nonbelievers and their ambivalent relationship with religion.

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Fall 2019 Welcome Reception
2019-10-10 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 306
You are cordially invited to attend the Center for the Study of Religion Fall 2019 Welcome Reception. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Symposium: “On the Matter of Blackness in Europe: Transnational Perspectives”
2019-10-10 09:00 - 18:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library and Royce Hall
Organized by the UCLA Department of African American Studies
Co-Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion
A Symposium featuring Keynote Speaker Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and a renowned scholar of Black feminism, Dutch anticolonialism, and diaspora.
Key Symposium questions will include: How do marginalized experiences of Blackness within Europe, especially the interventions of Black Muslims, LGBTQI*, and/or those rendered non-citizen (e.g., refugees or asylum seekers), challenge one-dimensional conceptualizations of Blackness? How have contemporary contributions to the transnational continuations of the Black Radical and Black feminist traditions been brought to bear in various European contexts? How do various Black struggles unfold in the face of genocidal border regimes, urban policing and surveillance, neoliberal austerity policies and the current rise of right-wing extremism, gender violence, and Islamophobia?

2019-20 Calendar of Events
2019-09-23 08:00 - 2019-12-31 17:00
Click here for 2019-20 Calendar of Events

Trialogue: Beyond the Boundary Conceptual Models of the (Religious) Stranger in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
2019-06-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
This panel discussion is open to members of the UCLA and Los Angeles communities who are interested in exploring a key issue of concern in contemporary religious and cultural studies. The forum also is the culmination of the upper-division seminar course Religion 120. The course is designed to introduce students from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, as well as cultural and religious backgrounds, to an analysis of the complex interrelatedness of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Free and Open to the Public
Co-sponsored by the Academy for Judaic, Christian and Islamic Studies at UCLA | www.afjcis.org
Moderator
Reinhard Krauss, Ph.D.
Lecturer, UCLA Center for the Study of
Religion
Panelists
Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Ph.D.
Rector and Professor of Philosophy
American Jewish University
Janna Gosselin, Ph.D.
Professor of Christian Spirituality, New
Theological Seminary of the West
Muzammil Siddiqi, Ph.D.
Chair, Fiqh Council of North America
and Religious Director, Islamic Society
of Orange County

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Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack
2019-05-14 19:00 | Powell Library
In this talk “Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack”, Professor Judah Cohen of Indiana University explores the very creation of what we know today as “Jewish music.” There were no professional cantors in synagogues in early America. Choirs were non-existent. Synagogue practice mirrored that in European synagogues. But all that changed in 19th Century America. Why? Sharing insights from a book of the same name, Cohen tells the story of the innovations and evolutions in Jewish musical developments of that period, laying the foundation of the Jewish music we know today. UCLA student vocalists sing music of the period, highlighting Cohen’s talk.
Professor Shari Rabin of the College of Charleston, scholar of American religious history and the author of “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America” will be the respondent.
This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. It is co-sponsored by The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the Department of Ethnomusicology, the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Musicology.

Please RSVP at https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/event/restoring-the-synagogue-soundtrack/.

Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in the Evangelical America
2019-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
How do people make worship music? What does it take to turn songs into worship and to turn worship into songs? This deep study of more than 75 leaders in Evangelical worship across America sheds light on the way that songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals make music that can serve the needs of congregations around the world.
Ari Y Kelman is the inaugural holder of the Jim Joseph Professorship in Education and Jewish Studies in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he also directs the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies. He holds a courtesy appointment in Religious Studies, and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the American Studies Program, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. His scholarship investigates the ways that people learn to hold religious commitments, and they have covered a range of topics from Evangelical worship music (Shout to the Lord Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU Press), Yiddish Radio (Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (UC Press) and congregational life (Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary). He is now working on projects that cover the educational dimensions of the church-school divide, and an article on the Voyager Golden Record.
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Between Bible and Qur'an
2019-04-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
The Qur’an draws on three major earlier traditions, those of Judaism, Christianity tradition, and pre-Islamic paganism, and while the Qur’an presents itself as a continuation and confirmation of the Torah and the Gospel, its style deviates significantly from that found in Biblical texts. Western scholarship has focused on Biblical influence in terms of the characters of Biblical narrative, and specific terms and concepts, and the versions of individual stories. This study focuses instead on genres, which have not been entirely ignored but have certainly been understudied. A notable exception is Wansbrough’s Qur’anic Studies, which assumes an essential continuity of the types of prophetic speech in the monotheistic tradition. This study takes a close look at several genres, including prayers, parables, and punishment stories, in an attempt to show the close relationship between Biblical and Qur’anic texts while also pointing out distinct features of Qur’anic as opposed to Biblical style.
The term Isra’iliyyat is quoted in Islamic literature to mention narratives and traditions originally e supposedly coming from Jewish and Christian literature, including the Bible. The term has circulated since the 10th century and has been used in different ways gaining a specific polemical sense only with the work of Ibn Taymiyya and his pupil. The many occurrences through the ages display a variety in the meaning given to it and the extent of what Islamic authors conceived about the relation of Islamic tradition in relation to Jewish and other literatures including the Bible. Such a variety of attitudes also emerge in Western scholarly literature where the term is given meanings mostly related to the research approaches rather than its medieval circulation and attestations.
Devin J. Stewart earned a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He now teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. His areas of scholarly interest include the Qur’an, Shiite Islam, Islamic legal scholarship, biography, autobiography, speech genres, and other topics in Arabic and Islamic studies. He is the author of Islamic Legal Orthodoxy (Utah University Press, 1998) and Disagreements of the Jurists (NYU Press, 2015) and a co-author of Interpreting the Self (University of California Press, 2002). He has written a number of studies on Qur’anic rhyme and rhythm and on form criticism of the Qur’an.
Roberto Tottoli is Professor of Islamic studies at the University of Naples L’Orientale. He has published studies on the Biblical tradition in the Qur’an and Islam (Biblical prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim literature, Richmond, 2002; The stories of the prophets of Ibn Mutarrif al-Tarafi, Berlin, 2003) and the medieval Islamic literature. His most recent publications include Ludovico Marracci at work: The Evolution of his Latin translation of the Qur’ān in the light of his newly discovered manuscripts (co-authored with Reinhold F. Glei), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2016; andBooks and Written Culture of Islamic World. Studies Presented to Claude Gilliot on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday(edited with Andrew Rippin), Leiden – Boston, 2015.
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On the Soul
2019-04-10 11:30 - 13:00 | Royce 306
This discussion of the soul departs from the concept of the soul that for thousands of years has occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians and pervaded religious discourse. Morris is concerned with what William James referred to as ‘the popular soul,’ the soul as it is invoked by expressions such as ‘an expansive soul,’ ‘a soulless person,’ ‘soul-mate,’ and ‘that melody touched my soul.’ Skepticism with regard to the existence of this soul is without warrant. How this soul comes into being and develops; what its essential features are; how the world, when the soul is engaged, is transformed; what its relationship is to one’s conscience; its importance in a human life; its connections to purity and perfection, to silence; its survival upon death; and the perils posed today to its development and existence are the principal topics considered.

Herbert Morris is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Emeritus Professor of Law and former Dean of Humanities (1983 – 1993) at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest publication is Disclosures: Essays on Art, Literature and Philosophy (2017).

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The Seventeenth Century Judeo-Persian Adaptation of the Buddha Biographies
2019-04-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 306
Elisha ben Shemuel’s Shahzadeh va-Sufi or The Prince and The Sufi is a seventeenth century Judeo-Persian adaptation of the life of Buddha, known in the west as the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. The plot, that of the prince who abandons a life of privilege and opulence for spiritual enlightenment, has traveled through centuries in various languages including Sanskrit, Middle Persian, multiple Arabic versions, Georgian, Greek, Latin, several European languages and Hebrew. As with previous adaptations, the author of The Prince and The Sufi uses the language, literary style and conventions suited to the tastes of his readership. Dr. Yasharpour is preparing to publish the edited Judeo-Persian text of The Prince and the Sufi together with an English annotated translation. In her talk, she will discuss how Ben Shemuel appealed to his acculturated Persian Jewish audience by modeling his Judeo-Persian adaptation after popular classical Persian advice literature and conveying practical wisdom by way of a Sufi master.

Dr. Dalia Yasharpour (Ph.D. Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, UCLA, 2005) is a scholar of Judeo-Persian language and literature. A lecturer and researcher, Dalia most recently headed the Iranian Studies program at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In addition to authoring academic articles and editing Persian language textbooks, she is the co-author of The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China (Brill, 2011). A Los Angeles native, she lives in West Los Angeles with her family.

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CHESUCRISTO: The Fusion in Image and Word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ
2019-04-04 12:00 | Kaplan 365
After his death, Che Guevara became an icon and was even compared to Jesus Christ. Many images, poems, plays, and films bear witness to this remarkable process, which made studious use of Christian iconography. In this way, Che Guevara became a Christ figure for our times. In order to explain their real affinity, the author examines Jesus as a historical figure and illuminates the convergence with Che. Kunzle weaves together the gospel texts and events with Che-Christic texts, accompanied by a continuous display of Che-Christic art
David Kunzle, educated at Cambridge and London Universities, has taught art history since 1977 at UCLA. He has published widely (thirteen books in several languages) on public, popular, public, comic and revolutionary (Latin American) art. His most recent works are on The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, The Comic Strips of Gustave Doré, Chesucristo, The Fusion in Word and Image of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, and now CHAM: the best Comic Strips and Graphic Novels 1839-1863.

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The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Prophetic Visions of Blackness
2019-03-06 10:00 - 11:30 | Haines 279
A talk by Dr. Roger Sneed: Afrofuturism as a way of Black people expressing
their identity through speculative fictions is fairly new, and yet it is not new. We
can trace the Black use of speculative fiction to articulate visions of Blackness
and critique white supremacy back to W.E.B. DuBois’s 1920 short story “The
Comet.” However, Afrofuturism has made a resurgence, due in part to the
phenomenal success of Black Panther, ongoing interest in the work of Octavia
Butler, and the rise of the “blerd” (a portmanteau of “black” and “nerd”).
Today’s talk uses an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a focal point for
investigating the intersections of Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought.

Roger Sneed is the Dorothy and B.H. Peace, Jr. Associate Professor and chair of the Religion Department at Furman University. His first book, Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism was a critique of the representations of homosexuality within Black liberation and womanist theologies as well as in some forms of Black cultural criticism. He is now writing a second manuscript titled “The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought” that will be published by the Ohio State University Press. This talk is sponsored by the UCLA Sociology Department and co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion.

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HOW MOSES BECAME A LEVITE
2019-03-05 12:00 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
The Bible presents Moses as Israel’s prophet par excellence and among the most prominent members of the Israelite tribe of Levi. But how does this picture of Moses square with actual history? How did the memory of an early Transjordanian holy man become part of a priestly tradition in ancient Israel? Answering these (and other) questions requires rethinking not only the biblical sources but how warfare, economics, and politics led to different corners of Israelite society “claiming” Moses for themselves…including the Levites.

Mark Leuchter is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at Temple University in Philadelphia. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2003 and has held positions as Coordinator of Biblical Studies at the University of Sydney and as Visiting Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research focuses on the relationship between memory, myth, and text production in exilic and Persian period Jewish and in early rabbinic literature. His favorite band is Rush.
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E-mail cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

Atheism in Buddhism and Nietzsche as Challenges to the Philosophy of Religion
2019-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
This lecture seeks to clarify the status of Buddhism as a non-atheistic religion, that is, a set of religious concerns that aren’t supported by the various structures of theism: the creator
God, divine beings, and corresponding practices such as worship, obedience, and supplication. Comparing Buddhist non-theism to atheism in the West we summarize Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” proclamation, his critique of both Christianity and Buddhism, and the patterns of cultural nihilism associated with them. These reflections are directed toward a challenge to the contemporary philosophy of religion in its incapacity to understand religion on broader, more historical grounds than theism can provide.

Dale S. Wright is the Gamble Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies Emeritus at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is author of books in the field of Buddhist Studies including Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character (Oxford University Press, 2009), What Is Buddhist Enlightenment? (Oxford University Press, 2016) , co-editor of a series of Oxford University Press books on Zen Buddhism as well as author of numerous essays, articles, and reviews.

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Strangers, Neighbors, Friends
2019-02-19 17:00 - 18:30 | Royce 306
Muslim-Christian-Jewish Reflections on Compassion and Peace
Kelly James Clark, Aziz Abu Sarah, Nancy Kreimer

Strangers, Neighbors, Friends is an informed and robust Abrahamic defense of compassion toward neighbors, strangers and even enemies. It aims to show that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the resources to motivate respect and love for those of very different faith traditions. According to Eboo Patel, President of Interfaith Youth Corp, “[t]hese essays are like rays of light. They provide insight into the Abrahamic traditions, but more importantly, they illuminate the path to common life together.”
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Letters from Corinth: The Correspondence of Dionysios of Corinth and the Shape of Early Christianity
2019-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 314
In this lecture, Prof. Concannon tells the story of Dionysios of Corinth, a largely forgotten Christian bishop from the late second century CE. While Dionysios was forgotten by ancient Christians and modern scholars, the traces that remain of his writings suggest that he was connected to a series of early Christian networks bigger than the apostle Paul’s, that he was active in the major debates among Christian communities in the second century, and that he was involved in complicated negotiations around memory, money, and hospitality. Recovering the story of Dionysios allows us to see early Christianity from a new perspective.

Dr. Cavan W. Concannon is associate professor of religion at USC. He is the author of Assembling Early Christianity: Trade, Networks, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale University Press, 2014). He is the co-director of the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative and holds a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard University.

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