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.
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 […]
Lauren Winner, Author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath Patton Dodd, Author of My Faith So Far, A Story of Conversion and Confusion 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 […]
David Morgan, Professor of Humanities in Christ College and Phyllis & Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts, Valparaiso University 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) andSecret Father (2003) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]