Many heinous actions reported throughout history are linked to individuals or groups that claim to be people of faith. Our two experts in religious studies, Professor Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College, and Professor Terrence Johnson, Harvard Divinity School, considered some consequences of engaging with Judeo-Christian scripture and its relevancy for the current, alas violent, political moment. Moderated by Professor Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
In partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation
Biographies
Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on the history of Jewish and Protestant religious thought in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she has brought post-colonial theory and feminist theory to her analyses. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung, as well as several edited volumes, including Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism and Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Forthcoming this year is a monograph written with Sarah Imhoff, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, and a co-edited volume, New Paths: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson, with Glenn Dynner and Shaul Magid. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, she has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Maimonides Institute in Hamburg, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Terrence L. Johnson is the Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. A graduate of Morehouse College, Johnson received his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Brown University. He is a Faculty Associate of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and affiliate faculty of the Program in American Studies. Johnson is the author of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue (2022, with Jacques Berlinerblau); We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter (2021); and Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (2012). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Torn Asunder: Race and Religion in the Shadow of Law and Justice, which is under contract with Columbia University Press. Johnson serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press Series "Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People" and co-editor of the Harvard Theological Review. He is also a member of the Corporation of Haverford College.
Along with writing scholarly articles, Johnson has written for or appeared on CBS This Morning, Salon, NPR, and the Literary Hub.
Photo by Roshni Khatri
Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Kacandes holds the Dartmouth Professorship #2 at Dartmouth College, where she teaches in the fields of German Studies, Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012), proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter 2022). Kacandes has held a number of top positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter, Germany.