A number of the events listed in this archive were recorded and broadcast on the World of Ideas program on WBUR, Boston's public radio station, and are available for listening in the show's archives on the Web. To listen to such broadcasts, click on the link provided below each event's description.

Saturday and Sunday, April 12-13, 2008
Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels
Featuring James Sturm, author of The Golem’s Mighty Swing

A conference organized by PhD students in Religion and Literature to explore religious content in the world of comics and graphic novels.

Click here for the full list of conference sponsors and events, including paper titles.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008
"Donne's Partings"
Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University Department of English

John Donne was preoccupied throughout his life with the subject of valediction. In this talk, Professor Targoff explored the ways in which this obsession with parting pervades both the erotic and devotional registers of his works, from his earliest love lyrics through his final sermons.

Ramie Targoff is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. She is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2001) and John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago, April 2008).

Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Sharon Portnoff, Pomona College Department of Religious Studies
“Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell:  Witnessing and Literature”

Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man relies heavily on Dante’s Inferno to witness to his eleven-month imprisonment in the death camp Auschwitz.  Beyond the more obvious trope of the journey to Hell, these two texts share the larger question: what is the human?  This lecture will explore what motivated Levi to witness to his real-life 20th-century hellish experience in the allegorical terms first coined by the great medieval Christian poet.

Click here for an event flyer.

Thursday, February 28, 2008
Susanna Caroselli , Luce Visiting Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts in the Department of Religion, Boston University
and Professor of Art History at Messiah College
“The Moralized Bible:  Life's Little Royal Instruction Book”

In the early 1200s a group of lavishly illuminated Bibles was produced in Paris for members of the royal house of France.   Unlike most illustrated Bibles or typological manuscripts, these so-called moralized Bibles paired images in which biblical episodes were interpreted and applied to the conduct of modern life.  Such lessons had as their object not the cultivation of a devout personal life, but the execution of significant royal policies, from issues as large as the treatment of the Jews of France to matters as specific as the orthodoxy of philosophers of the University of Paris.  This lecture analyzed imagery from the earliest moralized Bible, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, examined the messages conveyed by juxtaposition of text and image, and speculated on the identity of those who would dare to instruct a king.

Click here for an event flyer.

Thursday, February 7, 2008, 5:30pm
Shelly Rambo, Boston University School of Theology
“When Redemption Fails: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Gospel of John at the End of the World”
Boston University School of Management, room 412
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Is there redemption at the end of The Road? What does it means to survive? What does it mean to be one who remains? Reading through the lens of trauma theory, this talk explored Cormac McCarthy's vision of redemption in his searing and post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, and asked what likeness can be drawn between McCarthy's vision and the final chapters of the Gospel of John. 

Click here for an event flyer.

Monday, February 4, 2008
Terryl Givens, University of Richmond Dept. of English
“The Several Lives of the Book of Mormon”

The Boston University Department of Religion Annual Lecture.

The 19th century saw repeated calls for an authentic American Bible. When the century was over, the Book of Mormon had emerged as the foremost claimant for the title. This lecture will review that book’s history and composition, then move on to explore how the book's reception, more than its literary form, constituted its scriptural status. Borrowing from Saussure, Bakhtin, and reception theory, this examination of the Book of Mormon at the same time reveals how the modern history of this “golden bible” radically expands any notion of scripture emerging out of our experience of the Jewish or Christian Bible.

Click here for an event flyer.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: A Panel Discussion
Chaired by Donna Freitas, Boston University Department of Religion
and featuring
Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies and Midnighters trilogies
Jason King, St. Vincent College Department of Religious Education, co-author of Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials
Cristine Hutchison-Jones, PhD candidate, Boston University Division of Religious and Theological Studies

The panel was followed by a free advance screening of the New Line Cinema film The Golden Compass.

Thursday, November 29, 2007
Rosanna Warren, Boston University, University Professors Program
"An Evening with Rosanna Warren: A Reading"

A reading of Professor Warren’s own poetry, as well as the work of other poets who have inspired her as a writer and a teacher.

Rosanna Warren is the author of four collections of poetry: Snow Day (1981), Each Leaf Shines Separate (1985), Stained Glass: Poems (1994), and Departure: Poems (2003).  She is also the editor of The Art of Translation: Voices From the Field (1989), to which she was a contributor; a translation of Euripides' Suppliant Women (with Stephen Scully, 1995); two volumes of William Arrowsmith's translation of the poems of Eugenio Montale (Cuttlefish Bones, 1992 and Satura 1998); three anthologies of verse by prison inmates (In Time with Teresa Iverson, 1995; From This Distance with Meg Tyler, 1996; and Springshine with Meg Tyler, 1998). Professor Warren was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004; from 1999 to 2005 she was a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.  In 2004 Professor Warren received the Boston University Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.  She has been teaching at Boston University since 1982.

Thursday, November 1, 2007
“Language as Sacrament in the New Testament”
The second Amos Wilder Lecture in Scripture and Literary Arts
delivered by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Franz Wright

Wright will explore the idea of language as sacrament in the Christian scriptures, as well as the poetic forms used by Jesus in his teaching.  He will also discuss the possibility of religious poetry in our own unpropitious time.
 
This event is possible thanks to a gift from the Wilder family, and to the co-sponsorship of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007
“Prayers for a Dark God: Rainer Maria Rilke among the Mystics”
Mark Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity,
Andover Newton Theological School

“My God is dark and like a clump
of a hundred roots which drink silently…”

What are we to make of a poet who addresses God as “you darkness,” and proclaims his belief in nights?  In an early collection first entitled Book of Prayers and later published as The Book-of-Hours (1905), Rilke addresses himself to the elusive “God” largely unspoken in confident pulpit-talk.  These poem-prayers voice a reticence often unheard in the formal discourse of theology, then as now.  Here, the poet addresses this “neighbor God” as a dark “you,” without falling back on the exhausted certainties of creedal faith.  Is this a voicing of the ancient mystical tradition expressed at the boundary of language and silence?  Is it an invitation to courage for those overcome by the gnawing sense of God’s absence?  Or is it what prayer has always been, a yearning at the place of emptiness and a wondering in which lament and hope are finally one?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
“Interpreting the Message through the Life of the Messenger: Muhammad and the Qur'an in al-Shafi'i's Legal Methodology”
Kecia Ali, Boston University Department of Religion

Professor Ali will discuss her current research on the life and work of al-Shafi'i, a ninth-century scholar who is generally viewed as the founder of Islamic jurisprudence.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007
“Filming Religion: The Documentary Art of Helen Whitney”
Helen Whitney, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker

Helen Whitney has spent a long and award-winning career making films. Her credits include Youth Terror: The View from behind the Gun for ABC, The Choice '96 for Frontline, and Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light for American Masters on PBS. Primarily, however, Whitney's work has focused on religion and personal experiences of faith. Such documentaries include Monastery, John Paul II: Millennial Pope (which won an Emmy), Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, and, most recently, The Mormons, which aired on PBS in April and May of 2007. In her current project, she explores the theme of forgiveness.

In this presentation, illustrated with clips from a number of her films, Whitney gave a retrospective of her life's explorations of religious faith. She considered the allure as well as the challenges of capturing religion and spirituality on film, especially as she confronted these issues in her 2007 documentary The Mormons.

Thursday, April 19, 2007
Lauren Winner, Author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath
Patton Dodd, Author of My Faith So Far, A Story of Conversion and Confusion

A reading and discussion on writing spiritual autobiography.

Lauren F. Winner, the former book editor for Beliefnet, is the author of three books,
Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and, most recently, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. She has appeared on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and Christianity Today. Her essays have been included in The Best Christian Writing 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Winner has degrees from Columbia and Cambridge universities and is currently at work on her doctorate in the history of American religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Griff Gatewood.

Patton Dodd, the Protestant Editor for Beliefnet, is a PhD candidate in Religion and Literature in the Boston University Division of Religious and Theological Studies working on a dissertation that explores biblical literalism in contemporary American fiction.  His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Newsweek, Christianity Today, The Shambhala Sun and Books & Culture. He lives in Colorado with his wife Michaela and their children Isabel and Henry.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
David Morgan, Professor of Humanities in Christ College and
Phyllis & Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts, Valparaiso University
“Religious Visual Culture and the Conditions of Visibility”

This talk explored what it is that makes something visible within the different visual fields that constitute acts of seeing. The presentation began with Marian apparitions, specifically asking what makes Mary visible in the wake of her miraculous appearances. Morgan will then examine several different gazes or visual fields in American religious visual culture, arguing that the study of visual culture needs to move beyond mere iconography in order to unearth the social constituents of seeing. The talk was, finally, an attempt to clarify the social construction of vision as an object for the cultural analysis of religion.

March 11-13, 2007
“Little Women: Lesser-Known Characters from the Hebrew Bible, ” a conference

A conference exploring the reception history of stories of “minor” female characters in the Hebrew Bible. Speakers included religious historian Stephen Prothero; Bible scholars Katheryn Pfisterer Darr (Boston University), J. Cheryl Exum (University of Sheffield), Martien Halvorson-Taylor (University of Virginia), Erin Runions (Pomona College), and Ken Stone (Chicago Theological Seminary); art historians Gauvin Bailey (Boston College), Susanna Bede Caroselli (Messiah College), and Ena Heller (Executive Director, Museum of Biblical Art, New York); literary scholars Esther Schor (Princeton University) and Jay Twomey (University of Cincinnati); and writers Gregory Maguire, Jacqueline Osherow, and Robert Pinsky.

Click here to listen to Gregory Maguire's lecture as aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Click here for the conference schedule, including a full list of speakers, topics, times and locations.

This conference was co-sponsored by the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, and is being organized in cooperation with the Centre for the Reception History of the Bible at the University of Oxford.

Thursday, March 8, 2007
New Medieval Books: A Party

A reception to celebrate new books by the medievalist faculty in the Dept. of Religion:

Peter S. Hawkins has been Professor of Religion and Director of the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University since 2000. His work has long centered on Dante in such works as Dante's Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Standford, 1999) and The Poets' Dante: Twentieth Century Reflections, co-edited with Rachel Jacoff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). His most recent book, Dante: A Brief History, was published in 2006 as part of Blackwell's Brief Histories of Religion series. Professor Rachel Jacoff (Italian Studies, Wellesley College) will introduce Professor Hawkins and his new book.

Deeana Copeland Klepper joined the Boston University Department of Religion in 2000. Professor Klepper's research focuses on medieval Christian attitudes towards Jews and Jewish tradition. She has published articles on the medieval Christian study of Hebrew and use of Jewish traditon. Her first book, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Texts in the Later Middle Ages, will be published in March 2007 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Jewish Culture and Contexts series. Professor Clifford Backman (History, Boston University) will introduce Professor Klepper and her new book.

Diana Lobel is Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, where she joined the faculty in 2000. She has written extensively on the intertwined traditions of Jewish and Islamic mysticism and philosophy, particularly the impact of Sufi mysticism on Jewish thought. Her second book, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart was published in 2006 as part of the University of Pennsylvania's Jewish Culture and Contexts series. Scott Girdner, PhD candidate, Division of Religious and Theological Studies, Boston University) will introduce Professor Lobel and her book.

Thursday, February 22, 2007
“Modernity’s Usable Pasts: James Weldon Johnson, Aaron Douglas,
and Charles B. Falls’s God’s Trombones”
Kristin Schwain, Luce Visiting Assistant Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts,
Department of Religion, Boston University

In 1927, the African American author, diplomat, and songwriter James Weldon Johnson published a series of poems intended to preserve the sermons of “old-time Negro preacher[s]” before they vanished from the American scene. The opening prayer and seven sermons were accompanied by images produced by one of the foremost visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, and lettering fashioned by one of nation’s leading illustrators, Charles B. Falls. This lecture showed how the interplay between and among Johnson’s poems, Douglas’s illustrations, and Falls’s typography is central to achieving the writer’s explicit goal of reenacting the antebellum sermon, as well as his implicit aims of constructing a usable past and celebrating an African American spirit.

Click here to listen to Professor Schwain's lecture as aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Thursday, February 8, 2007
“On the Lookout: A Qur'anic Verse and its Sufi and Jewish Exegesis”
Professor Diana Lobel, Boston University Department of Religion

This text-based presentation explored traditional and Sufi interpretations of a mysterious Qur’anic verse. Sufi improvisation on this verse in turn provided the key to an enigmatic passage in Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, a profound guidebook of medieval Sufi-Jewish spirituality.

Diana Lobel has written extensively on the intertwined traditions of Jewish and Islamic mysticism and philosophy, particularly the impact of Sufi mysticism on Jewish thought. Her first book, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari, was published as a part of the SUNY Series in Jewish Philosophy in 2000. Her most recent book, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, explores the full extent to which Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart marks the flowering of the “Jewish-Arab symbiosis,” the interpenetration of Islamic and Jewish civilizations. Bahya’s book reveals an extraordinary time when Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers participated in a common spiritual quest, across traditions and cultural boundaries.

Tuesday, December 5, 2006
James Carroll: In Search of a Common Humanity

James Carroll was born in Chicago in 1943, and raised in Washington D.C. where his father, an Air Force general, served as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.   He is the author of numerous novels including the New York Times bestsellers Mortal Friends (1978), Family Trade (1982), and Prince of Peace (1984).  The City Below (1994) and Secret Father (2003) were both named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. 

Carroll has authored many prominent works of nonfiction as well.  His memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, received numerous awards, including the 1996 National Book Award for nonfiction. His book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, published in 2001, was a New York Times bestseller and was honored as one of the Best Books of 2001 by The Los Angeles Times.  Responding to the Catholic sex abuse crisis in 2002, he published Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform. Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, which appeared in 2004, isadapted from his Boston Globe columns since 9/11. His most recent book, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, a History of the Pentagon, which The Chicago Tribune called “the first great nonfiction book of the new millennium,” was published last year. 

Carroll’s essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Daedalus, and other publications. His op-ed column has run weekly in the Boston Globe since 1992.

This event was co-sponsored by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, which contains Mr. Carroll's collected papers.

Click here to watch a video of Mr. Carroll's lecture online at BUniverse, the BUToday media archive.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Sandow Birk, adapter and illustrator of Dante’s Divine Comedy
Sneak preview of the film Dante’s Inferno

In 2004-2005 Sandow Birk illustrated and, with Marcus Sanders, adapted Dante’s Divine Comedy, placing Dante’s classic text within the landscape of contemporary Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Tokyo. Working with director Sean Meredith and puppeteer Paul Zaloom, and utilizing the vocal talents of actors Dermot Mulroney (Dante) and James Cromwell (Virgil), Birk has adapted the text and illustrations of the updated Inferno into a film using the two-dimensional puppets of 19th-century "toy theatre" to tell the story. For more on the film adaptation, visit www.dantefilm.com. 

Thursday, November 2, 2006, 3-5pm
“The Importance of Language in the Study of Literature"
Professor Robert Alter, The University of California at Berkeley

Professor Alter led a symposium for graduate students and faculty exploring the role of the study of language in literary studies. 

This event was co-sponsored by the Humanities Foundation, the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts, the University Professors, and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University.

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
“The Challenge of Translating the Bible”
Professor Robert Alter, The University of California at Berkeley

Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.  He has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature, including The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry, and Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture.  He has also published new translations of Biblical texts including Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1996), The David Story: a Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (2000), and The Five Books of Moses: a Translation with Commentary (2004).   

This event was co-sponsored by the Humanities Foundation, the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts, the University Professors, and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University.

Click here to listen to Professor Alter's lecture as aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
”Too Hot to Handle?: the Reception of the Woman Taken in Adultery”
Professor Jennifer Knust, Boston University School of Theology

Though the story of Jesus and the adulteress found in the Gospel of John is now widely known, its early history is, in fact, quite complex.  The pericope adulterae boasts both a unique transmission history and a remarkably diverse set of interpretations. Though potentially dangerous, the pericope was not suppressed. Rather, from late antiquity until today, it has been regularly invoked in liturgical contexts, in Christian art, and among Christian exegetes. Diverse representations of the woman – her guilt or innocence and her status as a sinner or saint -- have been a particular focus of this nearly constant retelling.  This paper proposes to examine one aspect of the reception of this remarkable tale, exploring diverse late antique and early medieval interpretations of the status and significance of the woman.   Discussing the pericope adulterae we discover Christian authors, artists and priests thinking with and through the story in ways that define their own version of Christian life and practice, even as they guarantee the further transmission and transformation of the tale and transformation of it, by the next generation of interested readers.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006
A reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright

Franz Wright was born in Vienna in 1953 and grew up in the Midwest and Northern California.  He has published more than 15 collections of poetry and 5 translations of modern and contemporary French and German poets, including Ranier Maria Rilke.  In 2003 he received the Voelcker Prize for Poetry and in 2004 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.  Wright and his father, acclaimed poet James Wright, are the only parent-child pair to win Pulitzer Prizes in the same category.  Franz Wright’s papers are in the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

This event was co-sponsored by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

Monday, September 18, 2006
“Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The Three-Way Debate in the Middle Ages”
Professor Daniel Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Guest lecture in Professor Deeana Klepper’s Religion/History seminar, Medieval Religious Cultures in Contact and Conflict: Jewish-Christian Encounter. Students and attendees will read selections (in English translation) of Jewish anti-Christian polemics from Islamic lands alongside Islamic anti-Christian polemics, as a way of exploring Jewish-Christian debate as a three-sided religious encounter.

♦    ♦    ♦

“The Jewish-Christian Debate: The Interplay of Philosophy and Polemics in the Middle Ages”

Professor Lasker will discuss the relationship between philosophy and polemics in medieval Jewish-Christian encounter. His now classic book, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages, is slated to appear in a new edition next year with a fresh introduction. Professor Lasker will present some of the highlights of that material, drawn from thirty years spent studying the subject. The lecture will be followed by a reception and is open to the public.

Professor Daniel Lasker is the author of four books and numerous other publications in the fields of Jewish philosophy and theology, the Jewish-Christian debate, Karaism, the Jewish calendar, and Judaism and modern medicine. He is Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he teaches and serves as chair of the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought. In addition, he has taught at a number of colleges and universities including Yale University, Princeton University, University of Toronto, Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary.

Click here to listen to Professor Lasker's lecture as aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006
“‘Read and Disbelieve’: The Bible as Instrument of Political Opposition from the Age of Hogarth to Contemporary Political Cartoons”
Professor Michael Suarez, Oxford University and Fordham University

This lecture will examine how the Bible has been used as a vehicle of political satire and dissent in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century England, in the Communist GDR (East Germany), and Tony Blair’s Britain.

Michael Suarez is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University and Fellow & Tutor in English at Campion Hall, Oxford.  During this academic year he has been a fellow of The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the recipient of a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently completing The Mock Biblical: A Study in English Satire, 1660-1750. 

Thursday, April 6, 2006
A Life in Poetry: An Evening with Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill is a University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, Associate Fellow of the Center for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Hill is the author of numerous publications including recent books of criticism and poetry: Canaan (1997), The Orchards of Syon (2002), Style and Faith (2003), and Scenes from Comus (2005). 

Professor Hill will read from texts he has enjoyed teaching during his nearly twenty-year career at Boston University: the Bible, 17th-century poetry (Donne, Herbert, Henry Vaughan), Gerard Manley Hopkins. The evening will conclude with selections of Professor Hills own poetry, read by members of the faculty chosen by Professor Hill himself.  Reception following.

This event is cosponsored by the University Professors Program and the BU Hillel.

Click here to listen to "A Life in Poetry" as it aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Tuesday,  March 21, 2006
"The Mestizo Style Architecture of Colonial Peru"Gauvin Bailey, Luce Visiting Professor Gauvin Bailey
Luce Visiting Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts, Boston University Department of Religion

This lecture will explore the estilo mestizo (“Mestizo Style”) school of architecture, which developed in the southern Andes during the last century and a half of colonial rule (1650-1800) in Latin America.  Combining characteristics of European Renaissance and Baroque architecture with indigenous motifs, the style is a brilliant blend of Spanish colonial and indigenous forms. It is one of the most vigorous and original artistic styles ever to result from the meeting of two cultures.

Thursday, March 2, 2006
Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow

In the context of the Religion Department’s course on “Death and Immortality,” Pearl will speak about his upcoming novel, The Poe Shadow, and his own research on Poe’s life, death, and work.

This event is cosponsored by the BU Department of Religion.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006
"Memoir As Midrash"
Peter Manseau

The author of Killing the Buddha: a Heretic’s Bible and Vows: the Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son will discuss the theme of biblical afterlife in his work as well as in American culture more generally. The talk will focus on the ways stories from scripture can become entwined with the stories people tell about their own lives.

Click here to listen to "Memoir As Midrash" as it aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

February 23, 2006
“Ambiguous Baroque: The Sensual, the Sexual and the Sacred in Devotional Art of Seventeenth-Century Italy”
Professor Franco Mormando, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Boston College

This lecture will explore the variously ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, often surprising and at times shocking presence of the sensual and even the sexual in baroque art.

Sunday, February 19, 2006
"Cosmic Disintegration, Ritual Repair, and the Search for Violence in Israelite Religion" Keynote adress of Religion and Violence: The Biblical Heritage, a conference
Professor Ziony Zevit, University of Judaism

This event was sponsored by the Wellesley College Department of Religion with the cooperation of the Boston University Department of Religion.  Funding was provided by The Elizabeth Luce-Moore Fund for Christian Studies – Wellesley College.

Thursday, February 9, 2006
"A Few Wicked Years"
Gregory Maguire

Maguire will consider the origins of his best known novels, Wicked and Son of a Witch, as well as others, and will ruminate on the impact of childhood reading and writing, of faith and doubt, of history and politics, on his development as a writer. He will also comment on the surprising success of the musical Wicked.
 
Gregory Maguire is the best-selling author of books for adults and children, including Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Son of a Witch (all published by Harper Collins).  Formerly a professor and associate director in the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, he is a founder and co-director of Children’s Literature New England, Incorporated, a non-profit educational charity established in 1987.  He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University in 1990.

Click here to listen to "A Few Wicked Years " as it aired on World of Ideas on WBUR radio.

Tuesday, November 18, 2005
"Mistress Bradstreet: America’s First Poet"
Charlotte Gordon

Charlotte Gordon began her writing life as a poet and has published two books of poetry, When The Grateful Dead Came To St. Louis and Two Girls on a Raft.  Charlotte received an undergraduate degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University and a PhD from Boston University, where she received the Alumnae Award for the most distinguished dissertation. A post-doctoral fellow at Boston University, she taught Religion and Literature in the Department of Theology.  Charlotte has also taught writing, history, literature, and theater at both the college and secondary school level. She currently teaches drama at the Glen Urquhart School in Beverly Ma and conducts writing workshops for adults from her home in Gloucester, MA.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005
The Book of Esther in Performance
Professor Richard Ward, Iliff School of Theology
Todd Farley, Mimeistry inc.

Thursday, October 6, 2005
“The Jew as Hagar in Medieval Christian Imagination”
Professor Deeana Klepper, Department of Religion, Boston University

“Abraham had two sons,” wrote St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “one by a slave woman and one by a free woman.” Paul associated the child of the slave woman, Hagar, with Jews living under the Law given at Sinai and the child of the free woman, Sarah, with the followers of Christ.  Medieval Christians embraced this typological framework to explain both theological and practical relationships between Jews and Christians. This talk will explore medieval Christian associations of the Jews with Hagar in word and image. 

Thursday, September 29, 2005
"Between Dust, Daemons, and Desire: God As Religious Imagination in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials"
Professor Donna Freitas,Department of Religious Studies, St. Michael’s College, Vermont

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, published between 1996 and 2000, is emerging as a cultural classic.  Though marketed to a young adult audience, this sweeping tale is filled with questions that captivate mature readers as well as the young.  In short, this is a story for anyone who dares to confront life’s biggest questions. More particularly, the trilogy raises specifically theological issues -- though in quite different ways from such authors as C.S. Lewis. Is it about the death of God, or about an interpretation of a divinity Pullman believes is lost in the hierarchy and politics of institutional religion?  With its heroine (Lyra) and hero (Will), magical witches, armored bears, and an Oxford imbued with the fantastic, His Dark Materials, like the best literature, seduces the reader. We, its audience, are left to grapple with its implications, scope, and meaning in the many-layered world we live in -- one fraught with religious conflict, uncertainty, and a crisis of imagination.

Donna Freitas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont. She is the author of several books, including “After the Death of God,” which explores the religious and ethical dimensions of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (forthcoming from Jossey-Bass, 2007).  She is also working on a book called “Sex and the Soul,” to be published by Oxford University Press.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005
“Between Religion and Culture: Two Sites of Jewish Memory in Vienna Today”
Professor Abigail Gillman
Boston University Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures

This lecture analyzes two newly established sites of Jewish memory in the heart of Vienna: The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, re-opened in 1993, and Rachel Whiteread's “Nameless Library,” a monument to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, erected in 2000. Both were designed to commemorate the Austrian Jewish past in the wake of the Shoah, as well as to confront the ongoing exclusion of Jewishness from the public sphere in the postwar period. As a reflection of this complex agenda, each incorporates a variety of recollective strategies--traditional-religious, historical, and postmodern ("virtual"). Compelled to lay bare chapters of the Austrian Jewish past too long hidden from view within a highly tendentious atmosphere, the monument and museum take a strikingly similar approach: they not only retrieve the past, they represent their endeavor as problematic and unresolved.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005
“Medieval Hebrew Poetry: Some Texts and Problems”
Professor Susan Einbinder
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study

A seminar exploring several examples of medieval Hebrew poetry both as literary works and as historically anchored in time and place. Key to the discussion are questions as to how medieval Hebrew poems make meaning and how they reflect the divergent cultural concerns of Jewish communities in different settings.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005
“The Myth of a Hebrew Troubadour: Isaac b. Abraham haGorni”
Professor Susan Einbinder
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study

The late thirteenth-century poet, Isaac haGorni, entered twentieth-century scholarship as a braggart and bohemian, a wandering singer-poet who was described as a Hebrew counterpart to the famed troubadours of medieval Provence. This talk returns to haGorni, both in historical context and in the material context of the unique manuscript containing his poems. Together, these contexts suggest a much different vision of both the poet and his poetry as they illuminate the lively interests and debates of Jewish intellectuals in Provence.

Thursday, January 27, 2005
“The Jewish Background of Jesus: A Jewish Folk-healer and Magician”
Professor Meir Bar-Ilan, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Jewish Studies

Dr. Bar-Ilan teaches courses on Talmud and Judaism in Antiquity. He has published extensively on magic, medicine, mysticism, astronomy, astrology, mathematics and numerology in the ancient Jewish world.

Thursday, December 2, 2004
“Rereading Religious Feminism”
Dr. Ann Braude, Senior Lecturer on the History of Christianity, Harvard Divinity School

Pundits on both the right and the left portray feminism and religion as opposing forces in American culture. “Rereading Religious Feminism” historicizes this interpretation of American history, analyzing both its sources and its implications. The lecture will explore the role of religion in the early years of the National Organization for Women (1967-73) with a special focus on three founding figures: Protestant Pauli Murray, Catholic Joel Read, and Jewish Betty Friedan. The “text” around which the paper is centered is a 1967 photograph of the founders of NOW.

Wednesday, December 1, 2004
“Texts and Contexts: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Religious History of American Women”
Dr. Ann Braude, Senior Lecturer on the History of Christianity, Harvard Divinity School

This seminar will explore gender and religious experience in nineteenth-century America through the lens of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All participants should have read Uncle Tom's Cabin and Professor Braude’s article “Women's History Is American Religious History” (in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed., Thomas Tweed).

Thursday, April 22, 2004
David’s Lyre: The Psalms in Performance

Readings and musical performances from the Psalms by Boston University faculty and members of the larger Boston community. Featuring tenor Dana Whiteside and pianist Steven Morris.

Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Sing unto the Lord a New Song: A Concert of Music Inspired by the Psalms
Marsh Chapel, 735 Commonwealth Avenue

Directed by Rabbi Norman Janis of the Harvard Hillel. Featuring the Marsh Chapel Choir (Scott Jarrett, Choirmaster) and Jubal’s Lyre.
Cosponsored by the Core Curriculum at Boston University.

Thursday, March 25, 2004
“Christ As Gardener”
Professor Del Kolve
UCLA Department of English

Del Kolve is an Emeritus faculty member of the Department of English at UCLA. His research interests include the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and the visual arts in the Middle Ages. He is the author of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales and Play Called Corpus Christi.

Thursday, March 18, 2004
“Skinning Our Lives: Recovering from the Spectacular in South Africa”
Professor Diana Wylie
Boston University Department of History

Using text and images, Professor Wylie will mark the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections. She will base her observations on a biography she is currently writing about a South African artist, as well as on frequent research trips to that country.

Thursday, February 26, 2004
“The Rhetoric of Confession”
Laure Murat, Winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt

The notion of “confession” is a common theme in the 19th century that uncovers many of the century’s anxieties and strategies of power related to its unceasing questioning of the links between morality and science. The birth of psychiatry in the 19th century instituted a system of moral therapy based on intimidation, the main device of which was to make the patient “confess” his or her insanity. This lecture seeks to understand why this system became central to the asylum; to ascertain its nature and the extent to which it was thought to bring about a cure; and how it is connected to principles of penance and religious confession.

Thursday, February 5, 2004
“God’s Song in a Foreign Land: Conjuring an Answer in the Psalms”
Professor Jacqueline Osherow
University of Utah Department of English

Jacqueline Osherow teaches poetics and Hebrew Bible and literature in the Department of English at the University of Utah. She has published several collections of poetry, including Dead Men's Praise (Grove 1999), Conversations with Survivors (Georgia 1994), and Looking for Angels in New York (Georgia, 1988).

Tuesday, November 4, 2003
“‘The Contract’: Torah and Fiction”
Professor John Clayton, The University of Massachusetts
The University of Massachusetts and Mt. Holyoke College, Departments of English

A short story reading and lecture by Professor Clayton of his own work, “The Contract.”

Thursday, October 23, 2003
The Amos Wilder Lecture in Scripture and Literary Arts
“The Bible Open and Closed”
Gabriel Josipovici, Author of The Book of God: A Response to the Bible

Gabriel Josipovici, renowned novelist, dramatist, and literary critic, is perhaps best known for his examination of the literary nature of the Scriptures.  The lecture will be a continued exploration of questions raised in his The Book of God.

This event was made possible through the generosity of the Wilder family.

Monday, February 3, 2003
"Man, Woman, Serpent: Genesis and Its Afterlife"

An evening of readings and performances from Genesis 2 and 3 by faculty and students from Boston University.  Readers: Archie Burnett, Editorial Institute; Bonnie Costello, Department of English; Kathe Darr, School of Theology;  Abigail Gillman, Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures; Shahla Haeri, Women’s Studies Program; Geoffrey Hill, University Professors; Shakir Mustafa, Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures; Bruce Redford, University Professors; Christopher Ricks, Editorial Institute; Adam Seligman, Department of Religion; Sassan Tabatabai, The Core Curriculum; Rosanna Warren, University Professors; Diana Wylie, Department of History.

Click here to listen to “Man, Woman, Serpent” as it aired on WBUR radio.

Thursday, February 1, 2001
“Genesis One: A Reading”

An evening of readings by faculty and students from Boston University.  Texts are drawn from and inspired by the first biblical creation story in Genesis 1. 

Click here to listen to “Genesis” as it aired on WBUR radio.