A Lecture by Professor David Shulman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Many languages claim to be God’s most intimate and natural medium of communication. In southern India this theme involves the relations between Sanskrit and Tamil, two languages that are often seen as hostile entities by Tamil nationalists. However, in pre-modern south India they were […]
A Lecture by Professor Nicholas Watson, Harvard University It is often claimed that medieval Christian Europe had no vernacular Bibles, which were a triumphant invention of sixteenth-century Protestantism, aided by the rise of print. One way this is wrong is in its narrow view of what counts as a Bible. Between the twelfth and fourteenth […]
A Lecture by Professor Emily Hudson This talk offers a rereading of a central text in the study of Hinduism, the Ramayana, by interrogating its central protagonist’s status as a moral paragon. Location: Judaic Studies Boardroom, Rm 201, 147 Bay State Road Reception immediately following Time/Date: March 20, 2012, 5:00pm Open to General Public Admission […]
A lecture by Professor Elizabeth Castelli, Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Barnard College. Not long before his untimely death in the mid-1970s and following on his masterpiece “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”, Italian Marxist cultural worker and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a script for a film about Saint Paul that […]
A lecture by Professor Emine Fetvaci, Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture at BU A seventeeth-century album made for the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I brings together Persian mystical poetry, Ottoman paintings, and Netherlandish prints with Christian and mythological subject matter. The talk will examine the intersection of the sacred and the secular […]
A lecture by Professor Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago’s Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, with a response from Professor David Frankfurter, Aurelio Chair, BU Department of Religion. Join us for a renowned expert’s view of the history of Hindu oral and written texts from antiquity to the present Internet Age, […]
Screening of the film and a conversation with filmmaker Nina Paley Boston University’s Program for Scripture and the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Distinguished Teaching Professorship welcome filmaker Nina Paley to Boston University. On April 4 we will present a showing of the groundbreaking animated film Sita Sings the Blues, followed by […]
A Lecture by Professor Thomas Michael, Boston University On March 23, the Program for Scripture and the Arts will present a lecture by Professor Thomas Michael: Ge Hong’s (283- 343) Shenxian Zhuan stands out as one of the most powerfully innovative and influential texts of the entire Daoist religion. This work successfully established the image […]
U.S. Premiere of an exciting new work by Israeli composer Matti Kovler Join Boston University’s Program for Scripture and the Arts, The Jewish Cultural Endowment and the Boston University Humanities Foundation as we present The Escape of Jonah, an oratorio written by Matti Kovler, a Russian-born Israeli composer. This work of music theater retells the […]
An exploration of shared scriptural traditions Musical group DUNYA returns to Boston University! Join us for an evening with DUNYA Ensemble, as we explore a tableau of scriptural music and traditions from the Ottoman Empire, including Islam, Sephardic Judaism and greek Orthodoxy. Introduced by Assistant Professor of Art History Emine Fetvaci, DUNYA Ensemble will present […]