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2003-2004 Calendar of Events

Fall 2003 events

Brown Bag Lunch with Valarie Kaur Brar

Sept. 15, 2003, 12:30 pm
Callaway Center S221
Bring your lunch and join in conversation with activist/documentarian Valarie Kaur Brar who will be speaking later in the day on prejudice faced by Sikh Americans since 9/11. (See below.) For more information, contact the Religion Department at 404-727-7596.

Targeting the Turban: Sikh Americans After September 11th

VALARIE KAUR BRAR
Sept. 15, 2003, 4:00 pm
Dobbs University Center, Room 355
Presentation and Discussion on the two-year memorial of the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the first person murdered in a post-September 11th hate crime. Valarie Kaur Brar is a 3rd-generation Sikh American and recent graduate of Stanford University who has been documenting stories of Sikh Americans and others who have been targeted by prejudice and hate since 9/11. Sponsored by the Department of Religion and the Asian Studies Program with co-sponsorship by ICIS (Institute for Comparative and International Studies) and the Violence Studies Program. This event is open to the public, but seating is limited. For more information, contact the Religion Department at 404-727-7596 or click here for event flyer (new window opens in pdf).

Brown Bag Lunch with Red Pine

Nov. 10, 2003, 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Callaway Center S221
Bring your lunch and join in conversation with translator/author Bill Porter ("Red Pine"). For more information, call 404-727-7596.

An Evening of Chinese Poetry and Music

Bill Porter ("Red Pine") and Angela Lee
Wed., Nov. 12, 2003, 7:30-9:00 pm
Cannon Chapel
Enjoy classics of Chinese poetry of nature and spiritual peace, in the Chinese and in translation, with classical music on the gu-zheng (Chinese zither).

Bill Porter, who publishes under the pen name Red Pine, is an accomplished translator of Chinese poetry and Buddhist scripture. His books include: The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, The Diamond Sutra, and his poetic ethnography Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. Angela Lee will be playing the gu-zheng, the “Chinese zither.” She has just released The Moon is High, her second CD of classical gu-zheng pieces. Sponsored by Emory's Center for International Living, East Asian Studies Program, Graduate Division of Religion, Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Emory Zen. For more information, call 404-727-7596.

Tennenbaum Lecture Series: "Strangers in a Strange Land: Jews Confront a New World"

Professor Jonathan D. Sarna
November 18, 2003, 7:30 pm
Reception Hall of the Michael C. Carlos Museum
This lecture series is sponsored by The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and The Hightower Fund with co-sponsorship from the Department of Religion (among many others).

Contesting Religion and Religions Contested: The Study of Religion in a Global Context

Nov. 19-21, 2003
Emory University Conference Center Hotel
This conference is a project of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. All plenary addresses and panels are open to the public. Workshops are open to invited participants only. The project and conference are supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, in cooperation with Emory University and the American Academy of Religion. For more information, contact AAR at 404-727-7928 or visit the conference Website by clicking here.

Spring 2004 Events

Vernon Robbins on "Biblical Tradition in the Qur'an"
This is the first in a series of departmental colloquia for Spring 2004.

Wed., January 21, 2004, 4 pm
Candler Library 101
The Qur’an contains significant information about more than twenty-five people who play an important role in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Interactive interpretation reveals dynamic processes of selection, special emphasis, and reconfiguration in alternative contexts of religious tradition and belief. Vernon K. Robbins is Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Religion Department, Emory University.

Don Seeman on "Useless Suffering: Geertz, Weber and Levinas on Meaningless Religion"
Religion Department Colloquium

Wed., February 25, 2004, 4 pm
Candler Library 101

Interpretive accounts of religion in the social sciences and elsewhere have described the close relationship between human suffering and the human drive to create meaning. Influential voices like Max Weber and Clifford Geertz have taught that the drive to give suffering meaning is at the very heart of religious experience. Yet by focusing on the meaning of pain, we focus on cultural systems rather than the experience of sufferers. We continue the traditional work of theodicy undertaken by religious apologists. By contrast, I will argue that a different approach to the study of religion is possible, based on the analysis of radical pain offered by Emmanuel Levinas, and cognizant of our responsibility after the Holocaust to question the “usefulness” of suffering presumed by secular as well as religious forms of theodicy. We need a paradigm that is not limited to interpreting the meaning of pain, and we need to consider how it might be possible to document aspects of religion—ethnographically and otherwise—that have typically been ignored. Pain is indeed central to religious experience, but not necessarily in the way that anthropologists and other students of religion have emphasized. Join me for a reflection on a work in progress.

Don Seeman is assistant professor of Religion and of Jewish Studies at Emory University. He previously taught in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard. His interests include medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion, ethnography of Jewish communities, and modern Jewish thought.

Panel Discussion
"Viewing Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of Christ': Cinema, violence, anti-Semitism, religion and popular culture in contemporary America"

Thurs., March 4, 2004, 6pm
White Hall 208
Emory's Department of Religion brings together scholars to reflect on film from the perspectives of the academic study of religion, the history of cinematic presentations of Jesus, understandings of Jesus in Christian theology, the film's use of Gospel sources, the film in the historical context of the Passion Play tradition and anti-Semitism, the impact of cinematic violence on audiences, and religion as entertainment.

With panelists: Paul B. Courtright, Interim Chair and Professor, Department of Religion; David A. Cook, Director and Professor, Film Studies; Barbara DeConcini, Executive Director, American Academy of Religion; Art Linton, Administrator, Violence Studies Program; Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Department of Religion and Director, The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute of Jewish Studies; Vernon K. Robbins, Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities, Department of Religion .

No reservations necessary. Note: this is not a screening of the film, only a panel discussion. Click here for flyer with more info (in pdf format).

Bruce Lincoln
"The Cyrus Cylinder, the Book of Virtues, and the 'Liberation' of Iraq: On Political Theology and Messianic Pretentions"

Sun., March 7, 2004, 4 pm
Callaway Center S221
Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the History of Culture, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Associate member of the Departments of Anthropology and Classics Professor. Lincoln emphasizes critical approaches to the study of religion. He is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict, and the construction of social borders. He works in the religions of pre-Christian Europe and pre-Islamic Iran, with occasional excurses into African, Melanesian, and Native American traditions. His most recent publications include Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 and Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in 2000 and the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press in 2003.

Wendy Farley on “Knit and Oned in God: An Interpretation of ‘No Self’ in Christian Theology”
Religion Department Colloquium

Wed., March 24, 2004, 3 pm
Callaway Center S221
The idea of “no-self” in Buddhism often provokes bewilderment and misunderstanding within Christianity in part because it seems so alien to the substantial self understood to be an object of redemption. But Christian theology contains within itself an ideal of the dismantling of the self as we are “knit and oned with God,” as Julian of Norwich puts it. One way to explore this ideal is through an analysis of desire. Admittedly, desire does not sound like a very close approximation of either Buddhist essencelessness or Christian ideals of salvation. And yet eros is a distinctively western and Christian description of the dismantling of the economy of egocentrism which allows intriguing comparisons with Buddhism.

Wendy Farley is an associate professor in the Department of Religion. She teaches Christian ethics, philosophy of religion, and theology. She is currently working on a theological anthropology which integrates the Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions with Christian theology.

NOTE: The April 8th Department Colloquium has been cancelled.

Samuel Weber
Lecture: "Targeting Opportunity: Violence and Representation"

Thursday, April 8, 2004, 4:30 pm
Jones Room, Woodruff Library
Samuel Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities in the Department of German at Northwestern University. His visit is sponsored by The Comparative Literature Graduate Student Speakers Committee, The Psychoanalytic Studies Program and the Program in Comparative Literature, with co-sponsorship from The Graduate Student Council, The French & Italian Department, The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, The Institute for Liberal Arts, The Department of Religion, and the Hightower Fund. For more information on the event, contact Comp Lit at 404-727-7994. For more information on Samuel Weber, visit his Northwestern University page.

Samuel Weber
Seminar: "Laying Out the Net: Benjamin's 'Capitalism as Religion' & 'Two Poems of Holderlin'"

Friday, April 9, 2004, 2-4 pm
Comp Lit Seminar Room, Callaway N106
Samuel Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities in the Department of German at Northwestern University. His visit is sponsored by The Comparative Literature Graduate Student Speakers Committee, The Psychoanalytic Studies Program and the Program in Comparative Literature, with co-sponsorship from The Graduate Student Council, The French & Italian Department, The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, The Institute for Liberal Arts, The Department of Religion, and the Hightower Fund. For more information on the event, contact Comp Lit at 404-727-7994. For more information on Samuel Weber, visit his Northwestern University page.

Mark C. Taylor
"Rustling Religion"

Thursday, April 15, 2004, 4 pm
Candler Library 114
In a series of books and essays dating back to the 1970s, Taylor has developed a philosophy of culture in which he explores the relationship of religion, literature, art, architecture, technology and economics. In his most recent book, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, he examines the ways in which financial economics and postmodern art influence each other. In his lecture "Rustling Religion" he will explore the complex interplay among neo-liberal economics, neo-conservative politics and neo-fundamentalist religion during the past several decades. Sponsored by the Religion Department with support from the Graduate Division of Religion and the Hightower Fund. Download the lecture flyer (in pdf format).

Mark C. Taylor is visiting Professor of Architecture and Religion at Columbia University and the Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College. He received a Doktorgrad (Philosophy) from the University of Copenhagen in 1981, a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1973, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1968. Taylor has written numerous books and essays on topics ranging from philosophy, theology and literature to art, architecture, technology and economics. His most recent books are: The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Grave Matters (Reaktion, 2002) and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Taylor has also produced an interactive CD ROM, Motel Real: Las Vegas, Nevada and has mounted at exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (Grave Matters, 2002-3). His current multimedia projects include constructing a website, www.realfakes.org, and work with digital photography.

In 1997 Taylor co-founded the Global Education Network (GEN) with Herbert Allen. GEN is a web-based company that strives to develop the highest quality college-level courses in the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences, and sciences, and distribute them online for an affordable price. (www.GEN.com) In 2000 GEN was featured in a cover story for the Sunday Magazine in The New York Times. Taylor has received many awards including the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan University, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching National College Professor of the Year award, the Rector's Medal from the University of Helsinki, and the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence for his books Nots and Altarity. For more information on Mark C. Taylor, visit his Web site: http://www.williams.edu/mtaylor/

You may also be interested in the Institute for Jewish Studies calendar of events, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Department events and Asian Studies Program events.

Past Religion Department events:

Fall 2002-Spring 2003 events

Fall 2001-Spring 2002 events

Spring 2001 events

Fall 2000 events

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