Restrictions imposed on women in Mediterranean societies both past and present are often understood to reflect a gendered model of “honor and shame” that conditions men’s status on their female relatives’ sexual purity. This talk will use legal documents from the Cairo Geniza, an enormous corpus of everyday papers preserved in a synagogue in Cairo,...

Keynote Lecture for the UCLA Graduate Conference on Religion: Performing Devotion: Religious Rituals and Religious Practices   This talk explores the concept and representation of post-mortem paradises in Ancient Egypt and Early China. The notion of a paradise for the worthy, accessed through personal piety, ethical conduct or ritual knowledge, developed at a particular historical...

All three religions’ representations of how Jesus/Yeshu/`Isa died, developed over centuries, promoted very different understandings and valuations of the event itself, its aftermath, and its significance. At stake in these competing narratives were claims about messiahship, prophethood, divine sonship—and God’s favored people.  A close weighing side-by-side of (a) select Christian interpretations of the meaning of...

American Evangelicals believe prayer can do a lot, both for themselves and for the world. Yet just as prayer solves problems for them, it also creates them.  Two especially important problems are spontaneity and certainty: it’s important for Evangelicals to feel as though they “really mean it” when they pray and that they understand God’s...