Center for the Study of Religion - UCLA

A Public Private Letter: From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the Letters of Paul and Beyond
2018-05-01 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Royce 306
What does it mean read a letter that seems to have one set of addressees, but which is redeployed in a broader or in a trans-local way? This paper tests the idea that the formation of Paul’s letter collection, found in the New Testament, may have been influenced by large-scale inscriptional “publications” of letters in the cityscapes of the second to third centuries CE. Additionally, it contextualizes the formation of Pauline letter collections within broader practices of letter collections in the first and second centuries CE, including those of Cicero and Pliny. We’ll consider together the power of texts that claim a limited “you” or addressee, but that reaches far beyond that original audience.
Laura Nasrallah is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard. Her books include Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The SecondCentury Church Amid the Spaces of Empire and An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity. She is co-editor of Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies and From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē: Studies in Religion and Archaeology. She has just completed a book manuscript titled Archaeology and the Letters of Paul.

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WISE Workshop
2018-04-26 17:00 - 19:00 | Kerckhoff 168
The Center for the Study of Religion invites the women of UCLA to participate in WISE.
WISE is workshop designed especially for women to connect and dialogue with each other about beliefs and values with an emphasis on how they intersect, challenge, and inform their experiences as women.
This interactive workshop will give participants a creative space to reflect and learn about others through sharing stories of encounter and empowerment.
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Heart & Sole
2018-04-25 17:30 - 19:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for students to participate in the workshop Wednesday April 25th from 5:30pm-7:30pm. Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!
Heart & Sole Workshop Overview
Introductions and Dialogue Skills: The workshop will start with introductions and icebreakers then move on to dialogue activities.
Through interactive and reflective exercises participants will:
• Learn about the concept of religious pluralism.
• Identify the influences that inform their beliefs and values.
• Practice reflective listening and speaking.
Walk and Talk: Participants will partner with a peer who is from a different religious tradition/belief community and go for a short walk on campus. Together they will share their perspectives and discuss a series of reflection questions.
Group Dinner: Participants will gather as group and share their experiences over dinner in the Kaplan Hall, Room 365
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Maimonaides and the Merchant
2018-04-24 16:00 - 17:30
The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Middle East and to the Jews living there. The Talmud, written in and for an agrarian society, was in many ways ill-equipped for the new economy. In the early Islamic period, the Babylonian Geonim made accommodations through their responsa, through occasional taqqanot, and especially by applying the concept that custom can be a source of law. Not previously noticed, however, in the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides made his own efforts to update the halakha through codification, in order to make it conform with Jewish merchant practice as illustrated in the business documents of the Cairo Geniza

Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Educated at Brandeis University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and the Jewish Theological Seminary (M.H.L., Rabbi, Ph.D.), he is a well-known historian of the Jews in Arab lands in the Middle Ages. His publications include Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt; Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages; Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, and, most recently, Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World. Until his recent retirement from Princeton, he was director of the Princeton Geniza Project, an on-line database of transcriptions of documents from the Cairo Geniza.
Sponsored by: UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Co-Sponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Religion

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Brides of the Buddha: Nuns' Stories from the Avadanasataka
2018-04-18 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce 243
For young women in early South Asia, marriage was a crucial event that largely determined their socioeconomic and religious future. Yet while many of the rules and requirements for Hindu marriage around the beginning of the Common Era are well documented, there has been little in the way of systematic examinations of the evidence for marriage customs among Buddhists of this period. In this respect and others, our understanding of the lives of early Buddhist women is still limited. In her recent book, Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avadānaśataka, Dr. Muldoon-Hules used ten stories from a major collection of Buddhist narratives compiled sometime in the first five centuries C.E., in conjunction with other contemporary texts from both Hinduism and Buddhism, to examine the social landscape of early India. In this talk, she discusses some of what these tales can tell us about Buddhist marital customs, Hindu-Buddhist tensions, and regional variation in South Asian Buddhism during this period.

Dr. Karen Muldoon-Hules completed a Ph.D. (2011) and an M.A. (2005) in Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She also holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Indiana University. She teaches undergraduate courses for Asian Languages and Cultures Department and for the Study of Religion Program at UCLA. She has presented at a number of major conferences and published several articles and the book on which this talk is based.
Sponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
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Heart & Sole 2.0
2018-04-12 17:30 - 19:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
Students who participated in Heart & Sole during the winter quarter are invited to Heart & Sole 2.0!
Join your peers on Thursday April 12 from 5:30-7pm for a walk on campus to continue the conversation about beliefs and values AND also a enjoy delicious dinner together!
Please RSVP by Tuesday April 10th. Space is limited to 20 students.

The Stigma of Submission, Or: What Happened to Sisera in Judges 5, 25-27?
2018-03-13 12:00 - 13:30
Thomas Schneider is Professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He studied at Zurich, Basel, and Paris, earning a Master’s degree (Lizentiat), a doctorate, and a habilitation in Egyptology at the University of Basel. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna (1999) and the University of Heidelberg (2003-4). He was a Junior Research Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Basel (2001-20015) and Professor and holder of the Chair in Egyptology at the University of Wales, Swansea (2005-2007). Schneider was a visiting scholar at New York University (2006) and UC Berkley (2012). He has published six books and more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and book reviews, and edited or co-edited another six books in his main areas of research: Egyptian interconnections with the Levant and the Near East (including Egypt and the Bible), Egyptian history and chronology, Egyptian historical phonology, and the history of Egyptology in Nazi Germany. He is founding editor of the Journal of Egyptian History, as well as editor of Near Eastern Archaeology. He was the editor-in-chief of “Culture and History of the Ancient Near East” (2006-2013), and area editor history for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology.

The two versions of the story of Sisera’s defeat at the hands of Yael in Judges 4 and 5 are among the most iconic episodes of the Hebrew Bible, with a long and colorful history of interpretation and reception. This lecture will present a new understanding of Sisera’s fate in the poetic version of Judges 5,25-27. On the basis of a reassessment of the meaning of Biblical Hebrew raqqā (“cheek”, not “temple”) and the verbs describing Yael’s attack on Sisera in v. 26, it is suggested that the focus of this episode is not on the killing of Sisera but his stigmatization. Scars of holes inflicted in the face were a visible trace of the Assyrian practice of leading foreign rulers on facial hooks into captivity that is also well documented in texts of the Hebrew Bible. The proposed military submission and humiliation of Sisera sets the poetic version of the encounter of Yael and Sisera apart from the prose version in Judges 4 as an account that is factually and literarily independent.
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Translating the Life of Ibn Hanbal
2018-02-28 16:00 - 17:30
Jonathan Brown (Associate Professor of Islamic Civilization, Georgetown) and Matthew Fisher (Associate Professor of English, UCLA) will discuss The Life of Ibn Hanbal by Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200), recently translated by Michael Cooperson (Professor of Arabic, NELC, UCLA). This translation, which won the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and Cultural Understanding, recounts the life of the famous ninth-century teacher of Hadith.

Michael Cooperson received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. His previous books include Al Ma’mun and Classical Arabic Biography, and he has co-authored and edited many others on subjects ranging from Baghdad in rhetoric and narrative to Arabic time travel literature. His current projects include a book on the cultural history of the early Abbasid period, as well as a translation of the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī for the Library of Arabic Literature.

Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. The editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari.

Matthew Fisher is an Associate Professor of English at UCLA. The author of Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England, his research focuses on the material and ideological processes of textual composition, transmission, and circulation.

Asma Sayeed recieved her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam. Her current project relates to Muslim education and in particular to an examination of texts and textual practices in diverse regional and historical contexts.

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Heart & Sole 3rd Workshop
2018-02-27 16:30 - 18:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for 22 students to participate in the workshop Tuesday February 27th from 4:30pm-6:30pm. Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!

3rd Heart & Sole Workshop Overview
Introductions and Dialogue Skills: The workshop will start with introductions and icebreakers then move on to dialogue activities.
Through interactive and reflective exercises participants will:
• Learn about the concept of religious pluralism.
• Identify the influences that inform their beliefs and values.
• Practice reflective listening and speaking.
Walk and Talk: Participants will partner with a peer who is from a different religious tradition/belief community and go for a short walk on campus. Together they will share their perspectives and discuss a series of reflection questions.
Group Dinner: Participants will gather as group and share their experiences over dinner in the Kaplan Hall, Room 365
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Creating Gods Through Narratives: The Ontology of Greek Mythic Characters
2018-02-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
This paper will open with an overview of recent work by narratologists and analytical philosophers on the ontology of fictional characters. From there it proceeds to arguments about the ontological status of characters who appear in fictionalizing narratives such as the Odyssey or the Ramayana who are simultaneously the objects of religious belief. I suggest that such characters draw certain unique advantages from the ways in which their stories are narrated. Gods are described in different ways on different occasions. The ‘human’ god is easier to believe in, but the ‘theologically correct’ god can better be used to explain certain aspects of the way the world works and justify social norms. The Greek gods are portrayed in both ways. Cumulatively, the narratives created gods who were credible enough to believe in but powerful enough to matter.

Sarah Iles Johnston is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of Classics and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of several books, including Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (1999), Ancient Greek Divination (2008) and The Story of Myth (2018), and the editor of several others, including Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (2004). Her current interests focus on how religious beliefs are created and sustained; her next project is a book on the development of the ghost story in Victorian and Edwardian England

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Unveiling Judeo-Spanish Texts: A Hebrew Aljamiado Workshop & Lecture
2018-02-22 13:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
The Hebrew Aljamiado Research Group of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies are offering a workshop in learning to read 14th-16th century Judeo-Spanish texts written using the Hebrew alphabet: Hebrew “aljamiado” writing. Attendees will also learn about the cultural context of Hebrew aljamiado writing in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Sephardic diaspora.
Professor Michelle Hamilton of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, a leading scholar of these texts, will close the workshop with a lecture on “The Hebrew Aljamiado Versions of Ms. Parma 2666 and Their Cultural Significance: Danza de la muerte, Visión delectable.”
The four-hour afternoon workshop will offer hands-on practice with representative texts written in Hebrew aljamiado: Shem Tov de Carrión, Proverbios morales (14th C.), Alfonso de la Torre, Visión delectable (15th C.), Danza de la muerte (15th C.), León Hebreo, Diálogos de amor (16th C.).
The workshop is free and open to the public, but advanced registration is requested. Attendees should have a basic knowledge of modern Spanish. Familiarity with the Hebrew alef-bet is also helpful. However, materials will be distributed prior to the workshop in order to introduce attendees to the Hebrew alef-bet and the basics of its use in writing Judeo-Spanish texts.
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Please RSVP here at
http://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/hebrew-aljamiado-workshop/
For inquiries concerning the workshop, please contact John Dagenais (dagenais@humnet.ucla.edu).

Heart & Sole 2nd Workshop
2018-02-21 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 348, 348 Humanities Bldg, Los Angeles , CA, 90095, United States
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for 20 students to participate in the workshop on Wednesday February 21st from 5pm-7pm. Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!

Heart & Sole Workshop Overview
Introductions and Dialogue Skills: The workshop will start with introductions and icebreakers then move on to dialogue activities. Through interactive and reflective exercises participants will:
• Learn about the concept of religious pluralism.
• Identify the influences that inform their beliefs and values.
• Practice reflective listening and speaking.
Walk and Talk: Participants will partner with a peer who is from a different religious tradition/belief community and go for a short walk on campus. Together they will share their perspectives and discuss a series of reflection questions.
Group Dinner: Participants will gather as group and share their experiences over a delicious dinner in the Kaplan Hall, Room 348.

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Did Adam Fall, Stumble, or Stub his Toe in the Garden of Eden? A New Look at an Ancient Story
2018-02-20 12:00 - 13:30
Ziony Zevit is Distinguished Professor of Biblical Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages at the American Jewish University since 1974. Prior to joining AJU, Dr. Zevit taught at the University of Haifa, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and UC Berkeley. He has held visiting professorships at Univ. of Pennsylvania, UCLA, USC, UCSD, and the Hebrew University. He also participated in archaeological excavations at Tel Lachish and at Tel Dan. In 2013 was appointed Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.

This seminar will examine a few salient features of the Garden of Eden story after reconsidering its vocabulary and grammar. The examination yields new insights into the story’s plot that have broad implications for correcting contemporary notions about what it meant and its significance in the context of ancient Israel’s civilization.
Moderator: William Schniedewind
Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
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Jewish Reactions to the Prophet Muhammad
2018-02-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
When Muhammad began his mission in Arabia in the early 7th century, he preached his new revelation not only to the pagan Arabs among whom he was raised but also to the Jewish (and Christian) community among whom he came to live. How did the Jews of Muhammad’s day react? What did they think of his claims to have a new/old revelation of God, and his claims to be a prophet like their prophet Moses? In attempting to answer these questions, we will look at early Jewish polemics against Muhammad in the early Islamic era, polemics preserved only in the Islamic sources themselves. We will then compare these early Jewish responses to later medieval Jewish writings on Muḥammad, as found in the writings of such luminaries as Maimonides, Daniel al-Qumisi, and Ibn Adret. Do these early and later reactions have anything in common? How much do the Jewish reactions to Muhammad change with time and place? And, what can the medieval Jewish reactions tell us about the historicity of the Muslim sources’ presentation of the contemporaneous Jewish reaction?

Shari Lowin is Professor of Religious Studies and Program Director of Middle Eastern Studies at Stonehill College, Massachusetts. Her research centers on the interplay between Judaism and Islam in the early and early medieval Islamic periods, c. 800-1200 CE, focusing mainly on the development of Jewish and Muslim exegetical narratives. Of her most recent publications is Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems of al-Andalus (Routledge, 2013), which examines these narratives in Arabic and Hebrew eros poetry of Muslim and Jewish religious scholars in 10th-13th century Muslim Spain. Other works include comparative studies of Judaism and Islam focused on the narratives of Abraham and on accounts of enemies of God in the midrash aggadah and in the ḥadīth, including a monograph entitled The Making of a Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives (Brill, 2006). Lowin is also the editor of the Review of Qur’anic Research.

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Lunch & Learn
2018-02-13 12:30 - 14:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
Open to students of RELIGN M50:
Join Professor Bakhos for a reading and discussion of Biblical passages of your choosing over lunch.
PLEASE RSVP BELOW:

Satan in the Bible, God's Minister of Justice
2018-02-01 16:00 - 18:00 | 118 Haines Hall
Throughout the ages, Satan has been seen as God’s implacable enemy, fiercely determined to keep as many human beings as he can from entering the heavenly kingdom. But according to Henry Ansgar Kelly, this understanding dates only from post-biblical times, when Satan was reconceived as Lucifer, a rebel angel, and as the serpent in the garden of Eden. In the Bible itself, beginning in the book of Job and continuing through the New Testament, Satan is considered to be a member of the heavenly government, charged with monitoring the human race. In effect, he is God’s Minister of Justice, bent on exposing sin and vice, especially in virtuous-seeming persons like Job and Jesus. He fills the roles of investigator, tempter (that is, tester), accuser, prosecutor, and punisher, but also obstructer, preventer of vice, and rehabilitator. He is much feared and despised, accused of underhanded and immoral tactics. His removal from office is promised and his eventual punishment hoped for. The later misreading of Satan as radically depraved transformed Christianity into a highly dualistic religion, with an ongoing contest between good and evil. Seeing Satan in his true nature, as a cynical and sinister celestial bureaucrat, will help to remedy this distorted view.

Henry Ansgar Kelly is Distinguished Research Professor in the Division of the Humanities at UCLA, and has served as director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of The Devil, Demonology, and Witchcraft (2004), The Devil at Baptism (2004), and Satan: A Biography (2006).

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Multi-Faith Forum: Practicing Pluralism in a Religiously Complex World
2018-01-31 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Multi-Faith Forum is back! Please join us for reflection and discussion on Wednesday January 31st 4:00PM-5:30PM. Come for the cookies and stay for the conversation!
The Multi-Faith Forum was established in 2014 in order to address the needs of students who want to engage topics related to faith, religion, religious identity and spirituality, and who are interested in learning about religious traditions outside the classroom setting.
Students of all backgrounds are welcome to attend!

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Heart & Sole
2018-01-24 17:00 - 19:00 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 348, 348 Humanities Bldg, Los Angeles , CA, 90095, United States
The Center for the Study of Religion invites students to participate in Heart & Sole, an innovative workshop designed to educate students about religious diversity, help them explore their own beliefs and values, and teach the skills needed to engage in inter-religious dialogue with their peers on campus.
Join us in our effort to make Heart & Sole a campus wide initiative that fosters increased understanding around religious diversity and contributes to positive campus climate at UCLA!
We are looking for 20 students to help us pilot the first workshop Wednesday January 24th from 5pm-7pm. Students from all backgrounds are invited and encouraged to participate!

Heart & Sole Workshop Overview
Introductions and Dialogue Skills: The workshop will start with introductions and icebreakers then move on to dialogue activities. Through interactive and reflective exercises participants will:
• Learn about the concept of religious pluralism.
• Identify the influences that inform their beliefs and values.
• Practice reflective listening and speaking.
Walk and Talk: Participants will partner with a peer who is from a different religious tradition/belief community and go for a short walk on campus. Together they will share their perspectives and discuss a series of reflection questions.
Group Dinner: Participants will gather as group and share their experiences over a delicious dinner in the Kaplan Hall, Room 348.
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Preservation and Innovation: The Tracks of the Master Scribe
2018-01-23 12:00 - 13:30
Sara Milstein is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies in the Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia. She published Tracking the Master Scribe: Revision through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature (Oxford UP, 2016), and in 2010, she co-authored with Daniel Fleming The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (Brill). Her current project, “Making a Case: The Emergent Near Eastern Legal Mind,” is funded by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant.

When we encounter a text, whether ancient or modern, we typically start at the beginning and work our way toward the end. For biblical and Mesopotamian literature, however, this habit can lead to misinterpretation. In the ancient Near East, “master scribes”—those who held the authority to produce and revise texts—regularly introduced changes in the course of transmission. One of the most effective techniques in the scribal toolbox was what Milstein calls “revision through introduction,” a method that allowed scribes to preserve received material while simultaneously recasting it. Milstein demonstrates what is to be gained by disentangling the competing voices in a given work, a process that allows for the text to be perceived afresh at all stages in its development.
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Moderator: William Schniedewind
Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
UCLA Center for the Study of Religion

Winter 2018 Calendar
2018-01-02 - 2018-03-31
CSR Calendar of Events – Winter 2018

Panel Discussion: Faith in Service of the City
2017-11-29 16:00 - 17:30 | Rolfe Hall, Rm 1200
What does it mean to serve a city? “Faith in Service of the City” is an event designed to create dialogue on–and offer potential models of–how residents of Los Angeles use their faith commitments, tools, resources, beliefs, practices, and so forth to mobilize service acts to our city. Panelists representing significant faith-motivated organizations in the city will share about the work they do, the challenges they face, and the successes they’ve had in a hybrid presentational and moderated dialogue format. Audience Q+A and discussion will also feature. An excellent opportunity to think through relations between theory, theology, and practice, as well as to meet–and potentially join!– those on the front line of service work in the City of Angels.
Speakers

Fosterall
Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) Los Angeles
Cafe 580 Wesley Foundation UCLA
Newground

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Conference: Sound and the Sacred
2017-11-17 09:30 - 2017-11-18 20:00
Sound—whether thunder or psalmody—plays a role in the formation and perception of the sacred. Religions acknowledge the importance of sound, manifested in the voice of God, the call to prayer, collective chant, and other profound ways. Sound unifies communities in sacred worship and arms sacred hierarchies. It is captured in images and contained in built environments. Sound—human, angelic, primordial, heavenly— is critical to spiritual transformation. The connection of sound and the sacred is born in the first cry of a child emerging from the womb, and at death, sound is the last sense to leave the body. Sound is never extinguished; reverberations are theorized to be omnipresent and eternal. Sound fades beyond human cognition but lingers in the atmosphere.
This symposium addresses questions that are at the forefront of current academic research in the humanities and sciences. It showcases projects on the acoustical measurement of ancient, Early Christian, Byzantine,Western Medieval, Islamic and Renaissance temples, churches, and mosques. These projects engage scholars in innovative explorations of sound and its reception, particularly within sacred landscapes. This symposium also considers orality/aurality and performance/reception, through diachronic, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches.
Limited seating.
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How Ancient Israel Began: A New Archaeological Perspective
2017-11-14 16:00
Over the last hundred years or so, a number of theories have been proposed to explain the origins of ancient Israel. All these have been informed to some degree by the biblical text and all have considered the role of New Kingdom Egypt and the collapse of empires throughout the Near East circa 1200-1100 BCE. The lecture will present a radical new proposal: that Egypt itself instigated “Israelite” settlement.

About the Speaker: David llan is the director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He has excavated at Tel Arad, Tel Megiddo, and Tel Dan. He teaches at Hebrew Union College and has taught at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, and at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in mortuary archaeology, religion, and ritual in the Chalcolithic period, the Middle Bronze Age and the early Iron Age of the southern Levant. Since 2005, he has directed the excavations at Tel Dan in northern Israel. He is also the editor of the journal NGSBA Archaeology.

Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Funding provided by the
Viterbi Program in Mediterranean Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
UCLA Center for the Study of Religion
UCLA Costen Institute of Archaeology

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Pre-registration is required
Email: cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu or call (310)-267-5327

Women in the Hands of Men: Rabbinic Interpretations of the Four Matriarchs
2017-11-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 306
It’s not surprising that many of the familiar Hebrew Bible tales concerning the four Matriarchs portray them very favorably. However, the Book of Genesis also relates some episodes about these women that seem to imply mixed or even negative judgments about particular aspects of their moral characters. We’ll examine how the contributions of classical rabbinic commentary create balance and nuance for our understanding of the Matriarchs’ characters—in particular, through some imaginative and often surprising stories in the midrashic literature that read against the grain of Torah in order to counter the positive or negative implications of the biblical text.

Jerry Rabow, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, retired from the practice of law in 1996 to focus on studying, teaching, and writing. He has taught many adult education programs for synagogues, universities, book groups, and other Jewish, legal, and general community organizations, including lecturing extensively about topics related to his books. He continues to be active as a member and lay leader of Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue in Encino, and he currently serves as a public member of the Institutional Review Board for Human Subject Research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His writings include: Many professional articles on probate, estate planning, and taxation; various inspirational poetry, prayers, and essays privately published by religious, literary, and charitable organizations; A Guide to Jewish Mourning and Condolence, a nationally distributed booklet now available to the public at www.vbs.org; 50 Jewish Messiahs (Gefen Publishing House), telling the life stories of the major Jewish messiah figures since Jesus, and their impact upon the Christian, Muslim, and secular worlds of their time; and The Lost Matriarch: Finding Leah in the Bible and Midrash (Jewish Publication Society), which uses classical Midrash and personal commentary to uncover the hidden story of Leah, perhaps our most important but most neglected biblical Matriarch.

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Light lunch will be provided

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

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Multi-Faith Forum
2017-11-09 16:00 - 17:30 | Humanities Bldg, Rm 365
The Multi-Faith Forum is back! Please join us on Thursday November 9th from 4-5:30 pm to meet our new Religious Diversity Education coordinator Mary Katherine Sheena who will be facilitating the group this year. If you are interested in being part of the forum please come and share your ideas and interests with Mary Katherine.
Come for the cookies and stay for the conversation!
About the forum: The Multi-Faith Forum was established in 2014 in order to address the needs of students who want to engage topics related to faith, religion, religious identity and spirituality, and who are interested in learning about religious traditions outside the classroom setting.
Students of all backgrounds are welcome to attend!

Healing with Joy: Recovering Medicine as a Moral Art in Uganda
2017-11-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 306
What might it mean to recover medicine as a moral art – medicine and health as something beyond a physical, empirical practice? Drawing heavily on my fieldwork of CURE Children’s Hospital of Uganda, a pediatric neurosurgical site that pioneered a revolutionary treatment of hydrocephalus, we’ll explore an integrative healing approach based on their specific practical theology of health and human flourishing and its implementation in their infrastructure, practices, and habits, with particular emphasis on the dialectic of physical and spiritual healing – most notably, intimate prayer and cutting-edge brain surgery. We will also consider the centrality of joy and suffering as a dyad forming theological underpinnings to human flourishing, and human flourishing so conceived as a candidate for the ultimate goal of medicine, as well as discuss challenges of articulating any substantive moral end in empirically driven practices like medicine in secular democratic societies.

Ryan Gillespie, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Study of Religion Program at UCLA. Broadly, he is interested in how we talk about what we value, more specifically intersections of morality & religion, bioethics, and the public sphere, with subinterests in political economy and rhetorics of science. His work has appeared in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Journal of Medical Humanities, Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Journal of Cultural Economy, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture & Critique, as well as numerous edited book volumes. His current research project, funded in part by the Templeton Foundation and the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, asks what a recovery of medicine as a moral art might mean in contemporary practice, and this talk includes a case study from that project.
Light lunch will be provided
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Pastries with Professors
2017-11-07 16:00 - 17:30
Students come and learn more about the majors/minor for The Study of Religion! Come mingle with other current students and faculty members within the department.
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How Much Did Paul of Tarsus Know About the Historical Jesus, and How and When Did He Know It?
2017-11-01 12:00 - 13:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 306
Why did early Christians conclude that four distinct narratives about Jesus and Nazareth and the letters of Paul of Tarsus belonged together in their authoritative Scripture?What do these diverse writings have in common apart from the name “Jesus”? Many prominent 20th century New Testament scholars ignored this question while they focused on contending that Paul had no personal knowledge about the historical Jesus’ teaching and actions, was totally reliant on hearsay, then distorted what he heard, betrayed Jesus’ intentions, and became the “first founder of Christianity.” In this lecture I draw on what I have learned from cross-cultural anthropologists and neuroscientists to challenge this view. In sharp contrast, I seek to show convincingly the many, strong lines of continuity between Jesus and the transformed Paul, especially in the radically transformed changes in attitude and behavior each of them sought to generate in their followers.
S. Scott Bartchy PhD is Emeritus Professor of Christian Origins and History of Religion in UCLA’s Dept. of History. He earned his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University. He co-founded UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion in 1995 and served as its director for fourteen years. He came to UCLA after teaching New Testament Studies at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, for nine years. He is internationally known for his scholarship on ancient slavery and gender issues in early Christianity.
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Feeling the Love of a Divinity in Bhakti Vaishnavism, Christianity, Sufism, Shia Islam, and Buddhism
2017-10-26 16:00 - 17:30 | Royce Hall, Rm 306
The sudden intensification of ‘love,’ ‘union,’ or ‘belonging’ generates a distinct emotion to which we give the scientific name, kama muta. In vernacular language, depending on the context, moments of kama muta may be called being moved, touched, stirred, enraptured, mystical ecstasy, slain in the Spirit; être ému; bewegt sein or gerührt sein; 感动 (gǎn dòng / gam dong / kando), etcetera. This emotion is evoked by suddenly feeling ‘close’ to a person or animal (especially an infant), a team, a nation, nature, a deceased or former loved one, or a deity. Rit-uals involving synchronous rhythmic movement, chanting or singing together can produce the oneness that triggers kama muta; it is congruent with Durkheim’s “collective effervescence.” When kama muta is intense, people may have a warm or other pleasant feeling in the center of the chest, goosebumps or chills, shed tears, take a deep breath, place a hand on the chest, and then possibly feel buoyant and exhilarated. People avidly seek to experience kama muta, give it to others, and have it together with others. The spread and durability of Vaishnavism, Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, and Shia Islam could be due in part to the affordances they provide for kama muta.

Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist, is Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. He received his BA in Social Relations from Harvard and his PhD in Human Devel-opment from the University of Chicago. He studies how psychology, culture, natural selection, and neurobiology jointly enable humans to cooperate. Previously, he worked in tuberculosis control, smallpox eradication, and development in Malawi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, and Burkina Faso. He then devoted two years to fieldwork in a small Moose village in Burkina Faso, working in the Moore language, studying patterns of social relations. He is the originator of relational models theory, which has now been tested, applied, and extended in over 300 publications by over 300 researchers. He is the author of Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations, and co-author of Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Hon-or Social Relationships. His current research focuses on the causes, consequences, and cultural evocation of the emotion called being ‘moved’, ‘touched,’ having a ‘heart-warming’ experience, or feeling mystical ‘rapture’.
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Islam and Jews in the Holy Land: Land and Nature and the Construction of Jewish Culture
2017-10-25 12:00 - 13:15
In this lecture, Dr. Mostafa Hussein will explore the ways the Jewish intelligentsia in pre-state Palestine interacted with Arabo-Islamic civilization, as demonstrated in Hebrew works treating the geography and the nature of the Holy Land. The talk will also highlight how the Jewish engagement with Islamic culture contributed to the Jewish connection to the land and its nature. It will demonstrate how Jewish individuals who viewed themselves as culture shapers and scholars incorporated and exploited Arabo-Islamic knowledge within the domain of yediʿat ha-arets [the intimate knowledge of the land].
The Hebrew scholarly treatment of the historical geography of Palestine/Israel generally runs along four axes : (1) an emphasis on the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge for the advancement of yediʿat ha-arets; (2) an effort at identifying place-names that appear in biblical and post-biblical sources with their equivalent in modern Palestine and associating them with Arabic place-names; (3) a prioritization of certain places of interest to Jews in view of data preserved in Arabo-Islamic sources; and (4) the construction of a pictorial account of Arab inhabitants’ relationship with the Land of Palestine/Israel.
Mostafa Hussein is a postdoctoral scholar and a teaching fellow in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. His doctoral dissertation titled “Hebrew Scholarship on Islam” explored the various ways of interaction between Jewish intellectuals and Arabo-Islamic civilization in Late Ottoman through Mandatory Palestine and during the early years of the state of Israel. His research focuses on the encounter between Jews and Islam in modern times in the Middle East as exploring main themes in the mutual perceptions of Jews and Muslims as they were represented in the writings of intellectuals from both sides.
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http://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/event/12694
