In this essay, I consider the ideal ascetic leader depicted in the Life of Moses attributed to Gregory of Nyssa: that leader is not a bishop, but a leader who has more experience with the day-to-day struggles of monks, particularly the kind of struggles described by Evagrius and writers influenced by him.

This article explores the way assumptions about gender prevalent in twenty-first century readers impact our understanding of Sarai. It interrogates the way a mere glimpse allows us to instantaneously assign a person gender, something trans theorist Julia Serano calls gendering. Through this article, we see how the third-party accounts of Sarai in…[Read more]

A short version (Assignments and reading schedule only) of my Judaism and Medicine course for Fall 2020.

The mobilization of theological concepts within the political sphere is increasingly dependent upon the capacity of those concepts to bear the weight of a discourse of universalism; this universalization becomes problematic when such theo-political concepts are then taken up as terms of commonality in interreligious dialogue. This article will…[Read more]

In the wake of the 2015 killing of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, thousands of individuals – many of whom had never before seen a copy of the paper – changed their Face- book statuses and profile pictures, or broadcast Twitter updates, to proclaim ‘Je suis Charlie’. A month previous, a similar outpour…[Read more]

This article reads the design of the British Imperial War Graves cemeteries in the context of the religious pluralism of the late Empire. Reviewing the deliberations of the design committee and parliamentary debates on the design of the cemeteries, it notes that the Christian character of the cemeteries was relatively muted, a design decision…[Read more]

One advantage of investigating inter-religious exchange through the lens of ritual is that it permits attention to a range of extra-textual phenomena such as tone, gesture, pacing, costume, and locatedness, which are capable of adding nuance to, or even subverting, a textual tradition. In the case of post-Holocaust reconciliation, it is worth…[Read more]

Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in IHRA member states very often serves to mask problematic policies by offering reassurance that the Holocaust was perpetrated in another place, at another time, by other people. Rote commemoration runs the risk of moral anesthetization, and the further removed the original event becomes in place and…[Read more]