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.<\/p>\n
Professor Lobel\u2019s first two books explore the intertwined nexus of Jewish and Islamic thought in two medieval Judeo-Arabic classics\u2014Judah Halevi\u2019s philosophical dialogue\u00a0The Kuzari<\/em>\u00a0and Bahya Ibn Paquda\u2019s manual of Jewish pietism,\u00a0Duties of the Heart<\/em>\u2013\u2013and 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. \u201cSilence is Praise to You\u201d addresses the connection between silence, awe, and religious experience. \u201cBeing and the Good: Maimonides on Ontological Beauty\u201d explores Maimonides\u2019 aesthetic appreciation of Being as the absolute good and the source of all beauty and value.<\/p>\n Her third book,\u00a0The Quest for God and the Good: World Philosophy as a Living Experience<\/em>\u00a0(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\u00a0<\/em>(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<\/em>, the\u00a0Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101, <\/em>and the Sufi poem Conference of the Birds, <\/em>in dialogue with contemporary studies of mindfulness and happiness.<\/p>\n Her most recent book, Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine<\/em> (Academic Studies Press, 2021), returns to the Judeo-Arabic tradition. The book demonstrates the way Abraham Maimonides\u2019 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\u00a0Ehyeh asher Ehyeh\u00a0<\/em>(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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20263,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/1334\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/medieval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}