Event Archive 2016 - Present

Please join us for a workshop with Khaled Furani to discuss his forthcoming book: “Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science” Khaled Furani Associate Professor of Anthropology, Tel Aviv University Please email Alireza Doostdar (doostdar@uchicago.edu) to RSVP and to receive the chapters we will be discussing. Redeeming Anthropology lifts a veil on anthropology as a modern academic discipline, constituted by its secular sovereign reason and membership in the Enlightenment-bequeathed university. Mining anthropology's biographical corpus, Khaled Furani reveals ways theology has always existed in its recesses, despite perpetual efforts at immuring encroachment by this banished other. Anthropologists have alternatively spurned, disregarded, and followed forms of religiosity, transmuting their theistic engagement in their professional work. Centrally, if unwittingly, theology remains in anthropology's consummate rite of ethnographic immersion, defying precepts on the autonomy of reason and knowledge production by immersing the seeker in the sought-after. Nevertheless, anthropology ultimately commits idolatry by largely adoring the concept of Culture, and its constructs, and upholding itself as pre-eminently an ethical triumph. Furthermore, by limiting its horizons to finite categories of 'human' and 'natural,' anthropology entangles itself in 'worship' of the State and conclusively of the sovereignty principle that powers modern reason. Recovery from idolatry might arrive should anthropological reason become attuned to its fragility, cease to fear theistic reason, and open pathways toward revitalization through revelation.

From its foundation, American culture has employed biblical texts and traditions in recurring and legitimizing the subordinate place and role of women, muting their voice and agency. This looks to be changing: women‘s voices are playing a prominent and forceful role in public discourse. The women‘s pussy-hat march on Washington DC and across the United States, the #metoo and Times Up movements, and the toppling like dominos of formerly untouchable assaulters are all landmarks urging the dignity of women and the need for deep social change. Uniquely in the Bible, The Song of Songs celebrates the voice and agency of women — domestic and erotic, natural and exotic. But it has long been marginalized by Judeo-Christian traditions, occluded by allegorical interpretations that explain away its frank eroticism, deflecting its human dimension with recourse to other discourses privileging the divine, history, or nationhood, for example. While the text of The Song of Songs enjoyed some rehabilitation during the rise of feminist and structuralist biblical interpretation in the 1980s and 1990s, such inquiry was deeply shaped by “second-wave” feminism, and has since receded from view. This conference aims to bring this text into a public dialogue shaped by the complex concerns of the current moment. It will provide a forum for religion in the public sphere, with The Song of Songs at the center of inquiry. This inquiry will move in two directions with a reciprocally informing dynamic: How might the text be a recoverable resource for public thought? How do currents in contemporary thought newly condition and challenge our understanding of this unusual ancient poetry?

Following the death of his son Uri, in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, David Grossman, one of Israel's most celebrated authors, wrote two books, To End of the Land (2008) and Falling Out of Time (2011), exploring the meaning of loss and bereavement. While both books give expression to Grossman's work of mourning, their political stances on collective grief are diametrically opposed. Join us for this lecture, 'David Grossman's Writing of Bereavement' by Michael Gluzman, associate professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University and visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. A reception will follow. For information, or if you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Nancy Pardee at npardee@uchicago.edu or 773.702.7108. Prof. Gluzman's visit is sponsored by the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.

Harriet Murav, Professor of Comparative and World Literature and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Greenberg Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, will present a paper for the Jewish Studies Workshop. For information, contact the workshop coordinators, Joel Swanson joelhswanson@uchicago.edu or Mendel Kranz mkranz@uchicago.edu.