Past Events



"The Vicissitudes of Divine Desire: Mind, Pain, and Discernment in Chinese Charismatic Christianity and Spirit Mediumship"

Center for East Asian Studies Humanities Colloquium
Emily Ng (Penn)
Mar 28, 2024 - Dec 19, 2023 at -



An Uncouth Monk: The Moral Aesthetics of Buddhist Para-Charisma

CEAS/RELS/TRAP Faculty Working Group Joint Lecture on Southeast Asian Religions
Sara A. Swenson, Dartmouth College
Mar 21, 2024 at -

In this talk, I propose a theory of Buddhist “para-charisma” by analyzing the case of an iconoclastic monk in Vietnam. My argument draws from twenty…



What Not to Do: Anti-Lessons for Ethnographic Fieldwork

RELS Colloquium/TRAP Faculty Working Group Ethnography Workshop
Sara Swenson, Dartmouth College
Mar 21, 2024 at -

This special event will feature an ethnography of religion workshop during our normal colloquium time (3:30–5:00 PM), followed by a public lecture featuring Dr. Swenson's research. 

What Not to Do:…



Divine Comedy

Vaughn Booker, Justin McDaniel, Ben Wasserman
Mar 14, 2024 at -

Insights (and jokes) about the role of humor in religion, mourning, and the quest for ultimate meaning. 

RSVP by emailing wsteve@upenn.edu.

Cosponsored by the Office of the Chaplain.



Teaching Religion in the Premodern World

CETLI Teaching Workshop
Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania)
Mar 14, 2024 at -

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “religion” as we know it today is a post-Enlightenment concept. But this fact has not changed common discourse that assumes the universality of religion, nor has it stopped…



A Queen in the Tomb of the Kings: An Ancient Monument and its Modern Legacy

RELS Colloquium
Sarit Kattan Gribetz (Fordham University)
Feb 22, 2024 at -

According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, Queen Helena of Adiabene traveled from her kingdom in northern Mesopotamia to Jerusalem to worship the Jewish God in the temple. She ended up…



Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality

RELS Colloquium/Global Islamic Studies Lecture
Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Georgetown University
Feb 15, 2024 at -

Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji…



Teaching With Audio: CETLI Teaching Workshop

Samantha M. Cooper, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
Feb 6, 2024 at -

Many instructors in the humanities are accustomed to using the “reading” as the primary unit of analysis, and we are often trained to guide our students through an analysis of a written text. But cultural artifacts…



Ancestors, Inheritance, and Reparations: Why Ancestral Fault Might be a Good Idea

RELS Colloquium
Laura Nasrallah, Yale Divinity School
Feb 1, 2024 at -

At first blush, we might want to reject the idea of ancestral fault, the idea of visiting upon the sons the sins of the fathers (e.g., Deut. 5:9–10), from generation to…



Black Belief from the Back of the Church

RELS Colloquium
Vaughn Booker (Africana Studies, Penn)
Jan 25, 2024 at -

What is happening when groups of people treat their sacred beliefs, spaces, rituals, histories, and institutions as a foundation for humor, comedy, or satire, at the…