The Dean’s Forum is a long-standing Divinity School tradition. This important event (on hiatus during the COVID years)  puts Divinity School faculty members from across disciplines into conversation with each other to discuss their colleagues’ new works. The Divinity School warmly welcomes students from across our degree programs and areas to attend any or all of the upcoming Fora.

No prior reading of the book is necessary.

Dean’s Fora will be held from 12noon to 1:30 pm in the Common Room; boxed lunches will be provided free of charge to the first 50 people who arrive. You are welcome to bring your own lunch.

Friday, March 31

Jeffrey Stackert with Erin Walsh responding.

In Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch, Jeffrey Stackert navigates readers through the major topics in the interpretation of Deuteronomy and its relationship to the other four Pentateuchal books, introduces ongoing debates surrounding Deuteronomy, and offers a contemporary evaluation of the latest textual and material evidence.

Stackert, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of MA studies, will be in conversation with Erin Galgay Walsh, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Wednesday, May 3

Sarah Fredericks with Yousef Casewit responding.

In Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses, Sarah E. Fredericks documents the existence of environmental guilt and shame in the contemporary United States through the analysis of many popular texts, offering the most comprehensive documentation of these phenomena to date. She suggests that existing rituals need significant enhancement to fully address these moral emotions and the environmental degradation that catalyzes them.

Fredericks is Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics; Associate Professor of Qur’anic Studies Yousef Casewit will be responding.

 

 

 Previously

Monday, November 14

Richard Miller with Christian Wedemeyer responding.

In Why Study Religion?, Richard Miller, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Politics (and a Divinity School PhD alumnus), asks: Can the study of religion be justified? He observes that scholarship in religious studies, especially work in “theory and method,” is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that can motivate scholarship in the field.

Christian Wedemeyer is Associate Professor of the History of Religions; his research interests focus on Buddhist traditions.

 

 

Wednesday, January 11

 

Carolina Lopez-Ruiz with Jeffrey Stackert responding.

Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of the History of Religions, Comparative Mythology, and the Ancient Mediterranean World is one of our newest faculty members, having joined the faculty in July of 2022.

In Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean, López-Ruiz writes the first comprehensive history of the cultural impact of the Phoenicians, who knit together the ancient Mediterranean world long before the rise of the Greeks. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, she offers the first full study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. This book was awarded this year's Frank Moore Cross book award, given by the American Schools of Overseas Research (ASOR).

Respondent Jeffrey Stackert is Professor of Hebrew Bible as well as our Director of MA Studies.