I'll be doing a Zoom lecture for UCLA's Center for the Study of Religion this Wednesday (May 20). You can sign up, RSVP, and register for it here. Here's a brief description:
The comparative study of religion provides multiple examples of how social, economic, and political crises have contributed to the transformation of cultural and religious systems in the past and can help us understand and anticipate how contemporary crises might be navigated in the future. Whether a crisis is envisioned as testing-by-trial, a punishment for disobedient violations of a covenant, the cause-and-effect results of karmic suffering, a convenient opportunity to transfer blame onto a scapegoat, a call invoking the need for “sacrifice,” or the apocalyptic solution of a battle between the forces of good and evil, it is to the language of religious discourse that we can turn to make sense and meaning of religion(s) in a state of crisis. This lecture will provide an exploratory, illustrative example of how different social groups responded differently to the catastrophic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, responses which ultimately facilitated the birth of rabbinical Judaism and Christianity.
