Jonathan Z. Smith to Give 25th Witherspoon Lecture at UNC Charlotte
The Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is pleased to announce that Jonathan Z. Smith, the distinguished historian of religion, will give the 25th annual Loy H. Witherspoon Lecture in Religious Studies. Professor Smith’s lecture, “Things Said/Things Done: The Relations of Myth and Ritual,” will be presented on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, at 7:30 p.m. in Rowe 130, and is open to the public. He is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Professor of Humanities at The University of Chicago.
Jonathan Z. Smith is an historian of religion whose research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map Is Not Territory; Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown; and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. In his book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, he demonstrates how four centuries of scholarship on early Christianities manifest a Catholic-Protestant polemic. His latest work is a collection of essays entitled Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, offering a retrospective look at his work. Smith moves easily in the worlds of religious studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and history. He is editor of the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. He has served as the Dean of the Faculty of the College of Humanities at the University of Chicago, President of the North American Society for the Study of Religion, and most recently, President of the Society of Biblical Literature.
The Loy H. Witherspoon Lectures in Religious Studies, the oldest and most prestigious endowed lecture series at UNC Charlotte, was established in 1984 to honor the distinguished career and service of Professor Loy H. Witherspoon, the first chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion in the Department of Religious Studies.
Previous lecturers and speakers have been:
1984-85 “Religion and Religions: The Problem of Living in a Multireligious World” by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Washington University.
1985-86 “The Question of the Book: Religion as Texture” by David L. Miller, Syracuse University
1986-87 “Evolving Jewish Views of Jesus” by Michael J. Cook, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
1987-88 “In the Combat Zone Over American Values: The Vision of One America versus the Vision of Many Americas” by Martin E. Marty, University of Chicago
1988-89 “The Banality of Evil: The Darkness at the Center” by William H. Poteat, Duke University
1989-90 “Sexual Masquerades in the Hebrew Bible: Rachel and Tamar” by Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago
1990-91 “Religiopolis: Beyond the Secular city” by Harvey G. Cox, Harvard University
1991-92 “Ecofeminism and Christian Theology: Symbolic and Social Connections between the Domination of Women and of Nature” by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Garrett-Evangelical theological Seminary
1992-93 “Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare” by James H. Cone, Union Theological Seminary, New York City
1993-94 “Satan in the New Testament Gospels” by Elaine Pagels, Princeton University
1994-95 “Schindler’s List” by Thomas Keneally, University of California at Irvine
1995-96 “Re-Viewing Religious Knowledge” by Vine Deloria, Jr, University of Colorado at Boulder
1996-97 “Translating Womanism into Pedagogical Praxis” by Katie G. Cannon, Temple University
1997-98 Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: What do we Know After Fifty Years?” by James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary
1998-99 “Jerusalem: The Contested Inheritance” by Francis E. Peters, New York University
1999-00 “Searching for Shangri-La” by Donald S. Lopez, University of Michigan
2000-01 “Caring for Creation: Religious Faith and the Challenge of Building a Sustainable World,” by Max Oelschlaeger, Northern Arizona University
2001-02 “Can the State be Virtuous? Muslim Political Philosophy, Old and New”, by John Williams, College of William and Mary
2002-03 “What Does It Mean to Say I Saw?: On the Varieties of Visionary Experiences” by Barbara Newman, Northwestern University
2003-04 “Christians and the So-called State (We Are In) A Meditation on Loyalty after September 11, 2001” by Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University Divinity School
2004-05 “Wooing Rebekah: How Issac Got a Wife” by Jack Sasson, Vanderbilt University
2005-06 “Misquoting Jesus: Do We Have the Original New Testament?” by Bart Ehrman, UNC Chapel Hill
2006-07 “No Free Pass: An Apocalyptic Call for Prophetic Witness in the Book of Revelation” by Brian Blount, Union Theological Seminary
2007-08 “Jesus in Jerusalem: New Archaeological Discoveries” by Shimon Gibson, Senior Fellow W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Adjunct Professor at UNC Charlotte
