Events

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Elie Wiesel Fall Lecture Series

Professor Elie Wiesel will be giving three lectures at Boston University this fall:

• In the Bible: Ezekiel and His Vision of Our Time

Introduction by Dr. John Silber, President Emeritus, Boston University

October 15, 2012 at 7pm (doors open at 6pm)

• In the Talmud: Is Martyrdom or Sanctification of His Name a Valid Response?

Introduction by Dr. Steven Katz, Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University

October 22, 2012 at 7pm (doors open at 6pm)

• In Contemporary Writings: Open Heart

Introduction by Rabbi Joseph A. Polak, Director, Hillel Foundation; Rabbi to the Jewish Community, Boston University

November 19, 2012 at 7pm

These are free and open to the public.  Tickets not required. The lectures will be held in Metcalf Hall in Boston University’s George Sherman Union.  For further information, call 617-353-2238.

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“A Treasure of Honor” – A lecture by Dr. William S. Sax

September 26, 2012

William S. (‘Bo’) Sax, Chair of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg and an expert on ritual healing will deliver a paper on the pastoral societies at the headwaters of the Tons and Pabar Rivers in the Western Himalayas of North India, where tiny kingdoms were ruled by local deities through their oracles, defended by a special caste of warriors, and had more-or-less permanently hostile relations with their neighbors involving ritualized sheep rustling, headhunting, and related practices. Drawing on local ballads (pawara), Sax argues that honor was as much at stake in these hostilities as were material resources such as sheep and grazing rights. At the same time, he makes a plea for the continuing relevance of folklore for ethnological research. Sax has published extensively on pilgrimage, gender, theater, aesthetics, ritual healing and medical anthropology.

5:00 pm to 6:30 pm on Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Sargent College | 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 300

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Religion and Anthropology.

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Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority Lecture Series

March 31, 2012

This speaker series will bring sustained attention to negotiations over authority in a range of times and places.  Speakers will address Muslim women’s own authority to write and interpret texts, to structure their own spiritual lives, to manage wealth and make marital choices and the authority wielded by husbands and kin, governments, religious leaders, and normative texts.

The series is sponsored by: The Institute on Culture, Relgion and World Affairs; BU Center for Humanities; Institute for Philosophy and Religion; the Department of Religion; Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and the New England/Maritimes Regional American Academy of Religion.

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“Why Do Hindus Argue About Their Scripture and Who Is Allowed to Hear It?”

A lecture by Professor Wendy Doniger

Thursday, September 22nd, 5:30PM
Room 102, Sargent College
635 Commonwealth Ave, Boston

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Reception to celebrate Kecia Ali’s new book Marriage and Slavery In Early Islam.

The Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program will be hosting a wine and cheese reception to celebrate Kecia Ali’s new book Marriage and Slavery In Early Islam next month. The party will take place Thursday, May 5 at 4pm  in the WGS Sitting Room at 704 Commonwealth Ave, Suite 102.

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Was the Last Supper a Seder?

A Lecture with
Jonathan Klawans
Associate Professor of Religion

Thursday, April 14, 2011
7:00 PM

The Florence & Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University
213 Bay State Road

The Department of Religion, The Boston University Hillel House,
The Boston University Catholic House and Marsh Chapel

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A lecture by Noami Seidman, “Sexuality, Secularization, and the Rise of Modern Jewish Literature”

Presented by Noami Seidman, the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California

March 31, 2011, 5:00
Boston University Hillel, 213 Bay State Road, 4th Floor

This lecture is sponsored by “The Other Within,” an initiative funded by the Center for Cultural Judaism with generous support from the Jewish Cultural Endowment.

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Department of Religion 15th Annual Lecture

Listen to WBUR’s broadcast of the lecture.

David Frankfurter 

Exorcising the World: New Perspectives on Christianization and Culture

Join us for a lecture by BU’s William Goodwin  Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture,  David Frankfurter, when he discusses the spread  of Christianity in the ancient world.  What was Christianity’s appeal as it moved through Europe and the Mediterranean, and later through the Americas and Africa?  Based on new anthropological models of Christianization and  comparative religions,Professor Frankfurter  proposes some reasons that cultures and peoples  embraced the new religion.

Thursday, February 17, 5pm
Boston University School of Law,  Room 1270
765 Commonwealth Avenue

Reception to follow lecture.

Free and open to the public    Handicapped accessible
For more information contact Wendy at 617-353-2635

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Edwin Seroussi: “The Musical Other Within”

Starts: 5:00 pm on Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Ends: 7:00 pm on Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Location: BU Hillel House (Reform Chapel)

URL: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111748668897013

Ethnomusicologist and Hebrew University Professor Edwin Seroussi will lecture on “Musical Others Within: Sephardic Liturgy and the Soundscape of the Reform Movement of Judaism.”
The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology and Director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Born in 1952 in Montevideo, Uruguay, immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he took undergraduate and graduate degrees in Musicology at Hebrew University receiving his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1987.  He taught at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities in Israel, and was visiting professor at SUNY Binghamton, UCLA, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, Institut für Musikwissenschaft in Zürich, Moscow University, and this year (2010) at the University of California Berkeley.  Since 2008 he is head of the new School of the Arts at Hebrew University.  He has published extensively on North African and Eastern Mediterranean Jewish musical traditions, on Judeo-Islamic relations in music and on Israeli popular music.  He founded Yuval Music Series, and is editor of the acclaimed CD series Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel.

Organized by the BU faculty initiative “The Other Within.”

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November 29 , 2010

Classic Jewish Thought in Germany

A conference hosted by the Department of Philosophy and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies with the generous support of the Boston University Humanities Foundation

“Hermann Cohen’s Discovery of the Transcendental”
by Frederick Beiser (Syracuse)

“Why Study Hermann Cohen”
by Reinier Munk (Amsterdam)

Moderated by Michael Zank (Boston University)

November 29, 2010
3-6 pm
Boston University
School of Theology, Room 525
745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts

Dr. Beiser, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University, is the author of numerous acclaimed books on the history of German thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, e.g., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard, 1993) and The Romantic Imperative (Harvard, 2003); Schiller as Philosopher (Oxford, 2005); and Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford, 2010).

Dr. Munk is an Ordinarius Professor in the History of Modern Philosophy and Modern Jewish Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Dr. Munk is an internationally renowned specialist in eighteenth century Jewish thought, particularly in the roles played by such figures as Moses Mendelssohn and Solomon Maimon in the German Enlightenment, and in the work of the leading figure of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, Hermann Cohen. His publications include numerous articles and the monograph, The Rationale of Halakhic Man. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought. Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought (Amsterdam, 1996).

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November 30 , 2010

The Mendelssohn-Kant Debate
by
Professor Reinier Munk (Amsterdam)

A talk hosted by the Department of Philosophy and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies with the generous support of the Boston University Humanities Foundation

Moderated by Daniel Dahlstrom (Boston University)

November 30, 20103:30 – 5 pm
Boston UniversitySchool of Theology, Room 508
745 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts

Dr. Munk is an Ordinarius Professor in the History of Modern Philosophy and Modern Jewish Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Dr. Munk is an internationally renowned specialist in eighteenth century Jewish thought, particularly in the roles played by such figures as Moses Mendelssohn and Solomon Maimon in the German Enlightenment, and in the work of the leading figure of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, Hermann Cohen.  His publications include numerous articles and the monograph, “The Rationale of Halakhic Man. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Conception of Jewish Thought”. Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought (Amsterdam, 1996).

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The Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs
Announces the 2nd lecture in the
Fall 2010 Luce Seminar Series on Religion and World Affairs

“Rabbinic Conceptions of Civil Society: Problems and Possibilities”
by Suzanne Last Stone

Tuesday November 30, 5pm, 10 Lenox St.

Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Yeshiva University, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Cardozo Law School. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and also has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law.

She is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School and was a Danforth Fellow in 1974 in Jewish History and Classical Religions at Yale University. In addition to teaching course in Jewish Law and Political Thought and Jewish Law and American Legal Theory, she currently teaches Federal Courts and Law, Religion and the State.

Stone is the co-editor-in-chief of Diné Israel, a peer review Journal of Jewish Law, co-edited with Tel Aviv Law School. She is also on the editorial boards of the Jewish Quarterly Review and of Hebraic Political Studies.

Professor Stone writes and lectures on the intersection of Jewish law and legal theory. Her publications include: “In Pursuit of the Counter-text: The Turn to the Jewish Legal Model in Contemporary American Legal Theory,” (Harvard Law Review); “The Jewish Conception of Civil Society,” in Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton University Press); “Feminism and the Rabbinic Conception of Justice” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University); and “Rabbinic Legal Magic,” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities).

This event will be held in the first floor conference room at 10 Lenox Street, Brookline.
If you have any questions, please email us at cura@bu.edu.

View event flyer here

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November 17 , 2010

BU Program for the Scripture & the Arts Presents:

An Ottoman Tableau of Faith
DUNYA ENSEMBLE
An exploration of shared scriptural traditions

Musical group DUNYA returns to Boston University, this time exploring scriptural music across Sufi Muslim, Christian and Jewish sacred traditions, exploring dialogues among them.

Location: Boston University HIllel House, 4th Floor
Time/Date: November 17, 2010 6pm

click here to view flyer

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November 18, 2010

The Boston University
Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies

Invites you to a lecture
Reconsidering the Pharisees

Dr. Al Baumgarten

Professor Emeritus of Jewish History
at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

Thursday, November 18th, 5pm
Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies
147 Bay State Road, Second Floor

Albert I. Baumgarten is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. His publications include studies of Jewish History of the Second Temple period, such as The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation, Leiden: Brill, 1997. His most recent book is Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale, Texts and Studies on Ancient Judaism, Volume 131. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. A major focus of his research since the 1980s has been on the Pharisees.

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A Conversation on Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy

with Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Prothero

Join bestselling authors and Boston University professors Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Prothero for a discussion on the role played by religious ideas in U.S. public policy today, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the “Ground Zero Mosque” debate. This interactive event will be moderated by Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore, and will be streamed live online.

Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Time: 7 to 8pm
Location: George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue
(George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium, 2nd floor)

Video of event held October 27, 2010 available on BU Today.

The professors will also discuss their most recent books–Bacevich’s Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, and Prothero’s God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–available for purchase and signing at the event.

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Gay Liberation Reconsidered

Henry Abelove will speak on “Gay Liberation Reconsidered”

as the First Annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwic Memorial Lecture in
Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Henry Abelove is is the author of The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists, and of Deep Gossip; and he is co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, and of Visions of History. He is presently at work on two new projects. One is a book on George Berkeley and colonialism. It is tentatively titled A Cure for Empire. A first installment will soon appear in Raritan. The second is a book on the cultural expressions of gay liberation in its formative years. This is tentatively titled The Poetics of Gay Liberation.

Thursday October 28 at 5 p.m.
Florence and Chafetz Hillel House, 215 Bay State Road
Reception to follow

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Food and food for thought – Monday Oct. 11, 6 pm,
145 Bay State Rd, room 404
Join us for pizza and a discussion of Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan’s ideas about religion, ethics, and society in preparation for his upcoming lecture

“Beyond Tolerance: Islam and Pluralism”

Tariq Ramadan, HH Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani
Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies, Oxford University

This event co-sponsored by Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and
Religion and Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs

Wednesday, October 13, 5:00 pm
Boston University School of Law Auditorium 765 Commonwealth Avenue

View event flyer here

Tariq Ramadan is an important contemporary Muslim thinker and a controversial figure whose ideas have generated extensive debate and discussion. Time named him one of the world’s one hundred most influential people in 2004 and he currently teaches at teaches at Oxford. Ramadan will be visiting BU for a lecture on 10/13 entitled “Beyond Tolerance: Islam and Pluralism.” In preparation for this lecture, the BU Religion Department invites you to an informal discussion of Ramadan’s ideas about religion, ethics, and society.

What I Believe

Radical Reform: Islam Ethics and Liberation