Religion

“This talk will focus on the ideas and processes that went into creation of the multimodal digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022). I will emphasize that successful digital composition requires a close connection between the argument one wishes to make regarding one’s topic (in my case the relationship between Islam and time) and possibilities available in digital representation. I will also expand beyond my own published work to share examples of how projects of various historical scales can put digital tools to use for quite different ends.”

The Vermont Humanities Council and the Ilsley Library present Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard, and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, who will speak about their new book, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Hosted by the East Asian Studies program, the History Department, and the Religion Department.

MacArthur Fellow Peter Cole has taught during Winter Term and lectured at Middlebury in the past, most recently on Jewish mystical poetry.

This talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime?

Some reflections on inter-faith dialogue: its necessity in the contemporary world, and some of its philosophical and theological obstacles. A Lecture by Professor Jafar Morvarid of the Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran.

Dr. Richard Cash and his colleagues conducted the first clinical trials of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) at the Cholera Research Laboratory in Bangladesh, as well as the first field trials and community-based trials of ORT. Scaling up health programs is a major interest and he is the senior editor of “From One to Many: Scaling Up Health Programs in Low-Income Countries”.

Professor Reuven Firestone was born in northern California and educated at Antioch College, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Hebrew Union College, where he received his M.A. in Hebrew literature in 1980 and Rabbinic Ordination in 1982, and New York University where he received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1988. For his research on holy war in Islam and in Judaism he was awarded the Yad Hanadiv Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Brain, body, and mindfulness: New understandings of the “self” Lecturer: Catherine Kerr, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine, Director of Translational Neuroscience Contemplative Studies Initiative, Brown University This talk will describe recent studies drawn from the neuroscience of embodiment in order to lay out a novel understanding of the “self”.

Body feelings: Investigating neural mechanisms underlying embodiment and contemplative practice Lecturer: Catherine Kerr, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine, Director of Translational Neuroscience Contemplative Studies Initiative, Brown University This presentation describes recent investigations into two body perception networks in the brain.