How is it that Jesus came to be viewed by the earliest Christians as "sinless," and what did this mean for them? In this presentation I will explore the process by which early Christianity claimed that Jesus was a perfectly sinless human being, setting the stage for his apotheosis as God. As we will see,...

In this talk I examine recent sociological research on the relationship between religion and science for the public. This research suggests that while religion may have at one time been concerned with fact claims in the natural world that could be contradicted by science, it largely is no longer. This post-1960s development has coincided with...

Sponsored by: Center for Korean Studies Co-Sponsored by: Center for Study of Religion, Center for Buddhist Studies   In 1801, in the midst of a bloody anti-Catholic persecution, one of the persecuted Catholics, Hwang Sayŏng, tried to send a letter to the bishop in Beijing requesting European military intervention to force Chosŏn to stop killing...

During the previous half-century, Johannes Vermeer has emerged as one of the greatest painters of the Baroque era. Nevertheless, the uncommon depth and subtlety of his religious allegories have not been adequately noted in scholarship. In this lecture, we will look at a pair of paintings that figures forth the doctrine of Jesus Christ as...