Race and Religion, in History and Today - How do our Faiths Shape our Prejudices and Ideals?

The lecture will explore how contemporary Christian white supremacist groups read certain passages of the Bible, and how similar attitudes are shared with strands of other faith traditions. This session will examine where these attitudes developed in the ancient world, and why they proved so powerful, as well as what this implies about the interaction between religion and racism today.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: How do our Faiths Shape our Prejudices and our Ideals?

Dr. David Nirenberg, author of numerous books on the history of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian relations, will be returning to our area following his distinguished career at the University of Chicago where he was a Distinguished Professor and Dean of the Divinity School. This year he was appointed Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N,J., the home to such famous scholars as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, and John von Neumann.

This event was part of our West Michigan Academic Consortium. In 2001, Sylvia Kaufman brought together a group called the West Michigan Academic Consortium in order to extend the work of the West Shore Committee for Jewish-Christian Dialogue and the Kaufman Interfaith Institute. The mission of these groups is to provide programming that leads to greater interfaith understanding and mutual acceptance.

The committee consists of representatives from Aquinas College, Calvin College, Calvin Theological Seminary, Cornerstone University, Grand Valley State University, Hope College, Kuyper College and Western Theological Seminary. They jointly choose the speakers and plan the conferences; the participating schools rotate hosting the conferences.

For more information, visit interfaithunderstanding.org