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What if the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is not really about the origins of languages?

What if it’s also not about a tower and had nothing originally to do with Babylon?

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In Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy Sam Boyd explores evidence for redefining what this passage in Genesis 11:1-9 might have meant in its ancient context, and how it became a story about language with the editing of the first five books of the Bible. Even more, he frames this new reading with a critical study of the intellectual history of the passage, examining how it has served a particular function within the nation-state and modern nationalism and what a new reading might offer for understanding the political nature of the story.

"Samuel Boyd's refreshing new study of the Tower of Babel, one of the literary jewels of the Bible, is astonishing in its scope and originality. It is a tour de force: a demonstration of how much interpretive novelty may still be achieved when all of a dynamic scholar's many areas of expertise are brought to bear on even the most familiar of texts."  --Joel Baden, Yale Divinity School 

"It's rare that a scholar can navigate so deftly from the ancient settings of a biblical text's composition through the many stages of its reception, including our contemporary moment. But that is exactly what Samuel Boyd does in this absorbing and readable account of the Tower of Babel story. Moving among language, religion, politics, art, popular culture, and more, Babel accomplishes precisely what it intends: to explain the enduring influence of a biblical story and what that influence reveals about its many interpreters. This is a book for anyone interested in the Bible and its continued relevance." --Jeffrey Stackert, University of Chicago Divinity School

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Against the background of long-standing narratives in which Twelver Shi‘ism is viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, this talk builds upon recent scholarship in the fields of Religious Studies and Anthropology to argue that Twelver Shi‘ism is better understood as a discursive tradition. At a conceptual level, this solves the basic problem of how to integrate the extraordinary diversity of Twelver Shiism across time and space into a single historical category without engaging in a normative assessment of its underlying essence. Furthermore, it is in light of this conception of tradition that the School of Hillah stands out as a seminal period in the archive of Twelver Shi‘ism, though it has seldom been recognized as such in European-language scholarship.

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Religious Studies graduate student Chelsea Kennedy was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) award from the Center for Asian Studies. This competitive award is intended to support intensive language study in a formal modern Asian language program over the summer. Chelsea will use the award to study Arabic at the Middlebury College summer language intensive program. The award will cover tuition and fees, plus provide a stipend and travel costs.

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Sacred Responses to Climate Change: Seeking Common Ground
Friday, September 23, 1:00-5:00 pm
Abrams Lounge C4C

This inter-faith panel discussion focuses on sacred responses to environmental crisis. Panelists will discuss how religious ethics are shaping environmental ethics from a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Indigenous perspective. Panelists include: Loriliai Biernacki, Tink Tinker, Sam Boyd, David Takahashi, Christinia Eala,Nana Firman, and Lindsay Garcia. Each panelist will present on the topic from their particular perspective. We will then have a moderated discussion among the panelists, followed by a moderated discussion including questions from audience members.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and by the Department of Religious Studies at CU-Boulder.

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The CU Mediterranean Studies Group presents a public lecture: “The Demonization of Malcolm X, the Sanitization of Dr. Martin Luther King”
Dr. Nebil Husayn, Religious Studies, University of Miami
Thursday, September 15, 2022
6:00–7:30, HUMN 250

This lecture challenges the ways in which two icons of the 1960s, Dr. King and Malcolm X, are popularly characterized as rivals. Dr. Nebil Husayn argues that the two icons, in fact, represented a radical black tradition of political action that was subversive to narratives of American exceptionalism. As a consequence of myth-making and a process of collective remembering and forgetting, Dr. King is largely sanitized of this radicalism, which lingers with the legacy of Malcolm. Dr. Husayn argues that such mythmaking is also apparent in how we conceive of our presidents, police officers, and to the detriment of black activists, those who devote themselves to racial justice.

Nebil Husayn teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. His research explores authoritarianism in the Middle East, debates on the caliphate, and the development of Islamic thought. Dr. Husayn began his work as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, where he studied Arabic, Persian, Islamic history and Muslim cultures before pursuing study abroad in Syria and Yemen for four years. During his time abroad, he pursued a seminary education with traditionally-trained Sunni and Shiʿi scholars. Dr. Husayn returned to the United States to obtain an M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He is the recipient of a Fulbright award and the University of Miami Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities. The family of the Prophet Muhammad, Ali b. Abi Talib, and their descendants (known as Alids) occupy a central place in his research. Husayn’s first book, Opposing the Imam (2021), published with Cambridge University Press, examines the history of early Muslims who were hostile to Islam's fourth caliph, Ali, and his descendants. Husayn aims to continue interrogating the intellectual and political histories of the Alid family in his future work.
 

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Organized by the CU Mediterranean Studies Group and the Mediterranean Seminar, the 3^rd Summer Skills Seminar gets underway on May 12^th, 2020. Originally planned as an in-person event at CU Boulder, in the face of the present public health crisis the seminar was quickly reconfigured as an on-line remote learning experience. Far from putting a dent in the event, moving online has enabled the Seminar to accommodate more participants. Twenty-three faculty members and graduate students from twenty-one universities from around the world (including CU Boulder) have registered for this four-day course.

This year’s edition, “Introduction to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (documents in Latin to ca. 1350)” will be taught by Prof. of Religious Studies at CU Boulder, who has done research at the ACA for the last twenty-five years. Over the course of four days of intensive collaborative learning, participants will be introduced to the collections of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, and the fundamentals of reading and analyzing unedited Latin diplomatic (administrative) documents, as well as research techniques and document editing.

The Archive of the Crown of Aragon is one of the largest and most important medieval archives in Europe, with a volume and variety of documentation for the eleventh- to thirteenth centuries which is rivalled only by the Vatican, and includes hundreds of thousands of documents that have not been edited or catalogued in modern times. The Crown of Aragon was a major political entity which spanned the medieval Mediterranean (including parts of Italy, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean) and had substantial populations of Muslims and Jews. The archive’s documentation can be used to study a whole gamut of themes, including political and institutional history, economics, culture, art history, literary history, history of science, social history, legal history, and religious history.

The Summer Skills Seminar is another innovative program organized by the through the . Based at CU Boulder and housed in the Department of Religious Studies, the Seminar is the leading initiative in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies, and has over 1,600 scholarly associates in over 40 countries.

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Please join us for a lecture by Erik Braun (University of Virginia) on "Seeing through Mindfulness: Bare Attention, Brain States, and the Formation of the Self." The lecture will take place at 6pm on Thursday, February 27 in Hale 270. It is co-sponsored by the Religious Studies Department, Crown Wellness Institute, and CU Libraries in conjunction with the Contemplative Resource Center. 

"Seeing through Mindfulness: Bare Attention, Brain States, and the Formation of the Self" 

Mindfulness is now seen by many as a basic human quality, a natural ability to see things just as they are that is liberative and healing. This talk will explore how the practice of mindfulness has come to be viewed in this way. By examining the translation of the Buddhist concept of sati as mindfulness, shifts in the uses of the English term under the influence, especially, of the concept of “bare attention,” the reformulations of understandings of mindfulness under the influence of therapeutic modalities such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and the recent turn to neurological study, Erik Braun will show that mindfulness’s variability contravenes any stable characterization of it. Seeing through mindfulness means seeing it for the unfinished series of projects, including secularization, that make up its formations.

Erik Braun, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, is co-editor with David McMahan the volume Buddhism, Meditation, and Science (Oxford University Press, 2017) and author of The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was a co-winner of the Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism in 2014. He received his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University, and his research focuses on Burmese Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pāli literature, and the roots of modern forms of meditative practice. Currently, he is working on a book project about contemporary transformations of meditative practice on the global stage. 

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Religious Studies professors Brian Catlos and Holly Gayley will be featured at an event celebrating 2019 faculty achievements hosted by the Center for Humanities & the Arts. Professor Catlos will be recognized for his book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. Professor Gayley also published a book in 2019: Inseparable Across Lifetimes: The Lives and Love Letters of Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tare Lhamo. 

CHA Faculty Celebration:

Monday, February 10, 2020, 3:00-5:00 PM
Norlin Library British and Irish Studies Room (M549)
Refreshments will be available

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The CU Mediterranean Studies Group presents Professor Hiroshi Takayama, of the University of Tokyo, who will present a lecture and a research talk.

lecture
"Islamic Sicily: An Introduction"
Tue., Nov. 12, 12:30-1:45, HUMN 1B90

research talk
"Muslim Peasants in Norman Sicily: Reconsidering Established Categories"
Wed., Nov. 13, 4:30-6:00, CASE E351
Respondents: Brian Catlos (Religious Studies), Céline Dauverd (History); Blanca Garí (History, Univ. of Barcelona); Paul Sidelko (History, MSU Denver)

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