Associate Professor of Religion
Professor Lobel teaches comparative religious thought. Her teaching emphasizes interactions between philosophy and religion, close textual reading, and religious experience. She is also fascinated by the way religious traditions continually renew themselves through the ongoing process of interpretation. Her classes thus feature interactive study, highlighting creative dialogue between varied modes of reading and interpreting texts.
Professor Lobel’s first two books explore the intertwined nexus of Jewish and Islamic thought in two medieval Judeo-Arabic classics—Judah Halevi’s philosophical dialogue The Kuzari and Bahya Ibn Paquda’s manual of Jewish pietism, Duties of the Heart––and the impact of Sufi mysticism on Jewish philosophy. In several articles, she has also investigated the work of the medieval Judeo-Arabic thinker Moses Maimonides. “Silence is Praise to You” addresses the connection between silence, awe, and religious experience. “Being and the Good: Maimonides on Ontological Beauty” explores Maimonides’ aesthetic appreciation of Being as the absolute good and the source of all beauty and value.
Her third book, The Quest for God and the Good: World Philosophy as a Living Experience (Columbia University Press, 2011) explores concepts of divinity and goodness across philosophical and religious traditions, East and West. Her fourth book, Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life (Columbia University Press, 2017) continues the theme of Eastern and Western conceptions of the flourishing life, in sources such as Aristotle, Maimonides, the Confucian Analects, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Sufi poem Conference of the Birds, in dialogue with contemporary studies of mindfulness and happiness.
Her most recent book, Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine (Academic Studies Press, 2021), returns to the Judeo-Arabic tradition. The book demonstrates the way Abraham Maimonides’ Torah commentary engages the philosophical interpretations of his father Moses Maimonides, Biblical exegetes such as Saadya, and Sufi-flavored illuminative mysticism. In addition, the book explores the intersecting approaches of Moses and Abraham Maimonides to the divine name Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (I am that I am/I will be who I will be) and its relationship to the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable four-letter name of God.
She is currently completing a study on conceptions of faith and trust in Judeo-Arabic thought. Her next project turns to conceptions of the heart-mind in Biblical and other traditions.