This article focuses on Jewish women’s experiences of the amen meal ritual. The central intention of this meal is to achieve many recitations of the word “amen” in response to benedictions recited for different sorts of food. The women’s voices and experiences, reflected in in-depth interviews with participants and participant observa…[Read more]

In the area of dispute resolution, the U.S. FTAs with Arab countries share some commonalities. However, the US – JO FTA clearly differs from other U.S. FTAs with Arab countries. Areas of difference include treatment of perishable goods, appeal, panel report, and implementation of panel report. The dispute settlement mechanism in the US – JO FTA…[Read more]

Arab countries are attempting to broaden their engagement in the multilateral trading system in a manner that has many implications. Not only have some Arab countries either acceded or are in the pipeline of acceding to the World Trade Organization (WTO), but their new commitments coincide with reorientations in their economic strategies. The…[Read more]

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]

This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose, with a focus on how literary texts function as a tribunal, delivering forms of justice missing from the existing legal system. It constructs from the prison memoirs of a range of dissident writers (Dashti, ʿAlavi, and Baraheni) a genealogy of prison consciousness in…[Read more]

Syllabus for my course 3UU3, Buddhism in East Asia planned for Winter term 2019

This is the version of the syllabus for Asian Meditation Traditions at the end of the first term in which I offered it–Fall 2018.

Draft version of syllabus for graduate seminar on Nirvana Sutra

This article is a detailed review of Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred, ed. Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen J. Wenell (Bloomsbury, 2016); and The King and the Land: A Geography of Royal Power in the Biblical World, by Stephen C. Russell (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The paper argues that the pesaḥ is a ritual with no origins in the literature we have, from the earliest recoverable fragment, through the first revision that introduces as many problems as it aims to solve, to subsequent extensions in multiple directions, with no arc, no trajectory, no telos, but recurrent hermeneutic expressive engagement.

This book is one of the few in a great corpus of literature on meditation, that makes understanding meditation effortless. Not posing as a one-cure-for-all instant solution, this book attunes and trains a person’s mind, and makes one ready to get immersed in meditation, which according to Kamlesh D Patel and Joshua Pollock can be done only t…[Read more]

Psychoanalysis and its father in the West, Sigmund Freud, have often been seen as the antitheses of religion and faith. This book seeks to dispel this misconception and place Freud and psychoanalysis as hopes to the faithful and the hedonist alike. Ethics and morality do not get compromised and unethical and immoral behaviour do not get free…[Read more]

An examination of Mourning and Tears in the works of John Chrysostom, with comparison to his classical and hellenistic predecessors (Aristotle, Seneca, Plutarch).

An article on the Armenian manuscripts at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana).

An examination of the debate over the Theory of Names between Origen and Celsus in Origen’s Contra Celsum and its implications for late antique ritual worship.

A translation and study of seven hymns (madrashe) on vigil of Ephrem the Syrian preserved in Classical Armenian.