Last Thursday, February 16, the Religious Studies department hosted a trivia night with food and prizes. It was an opportunity for undergraduates (majors, minors, and others interested in religious studies) to get together for a social evening with faculty and graduate students.

Religious studies professor Joseph Lam has recently released a 12-lecture course on Wondrium (formerly The Great Courses). This course, entitled “Creation Stories of the Ancient World,” is now available online. You can watch the trailer and see more information here: 

Creation Stories of the Ancient World | Wondrium 

Overview of the course: Creation stories—which recount the origins of the universe, the earth, and humanity—show us how ancient cultures made sense of the human condition. In this course, you’ll explore great creation texts such as the Babylonian Creation Epic, the Egyptian Memphite Theology, the Hittite Kumarbi Cycle, the Greek Theogony of Hesiod, the two contrasting accounts of creation in the biblical Genesis, and more.

Joseph Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept, as well as a number of scholarly articles in the fields of Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic studies. He teaches ancient languages beyond Hebrew, such as Akkadian, Aramaic/Syriac, and Ugaritic.

Click below to listen to a fantastic podcast entitled “Trifecta of the Abrahamic Religions” from our Kenan Distinguished Professor in teaching excellence, Jodi Magness:

FEBRUARY 16TH, 6PM. CAROLINA HALL, room 220. Be there!

The Bart Ehrman Blog raised just over $500,000 last year for charity. The membership-based blog donates all monies it receives to combatting hunger and homelessness and to supporting health and literacy. In 2022, it benefitted five organizations: three that focus on local communities and two that work internationally. See more at https://ehrmanblog.org/

Fees go directly to charities

Religious studies scholar Lauren Leve partnered with a computer science class last semester to further her ongoing work to create an annotated 3D model of Swayambhunath, an ancient holy site in Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley.

Lauren Leve, an expert in Himalayan Buddhism, was conducting research in Nepal in 2015 when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit, demolishing many cultural and religious monuments.

In all, about 9,000 people were killed as a result of the severe earthquake, and more than 600,000 structures in Kathmandu and nearby towns were damaged or destroyed.

“Architects and engineers were trying to reconstruct these monuments, and they didn’t have the information to do that at the precision that was needed,” said Leve, a UNC associate professor of religious studies who has been conducting research in Nepal for over 30 years. “Cultural preservationists were also concerned that knowledge about the monuments would be lost forever.”

To read more of this story, check out the original article, written by Kim Spurr, here!

Join us in congratulating one of our 2007 Religious Studies majors: Glenn Butner. After completing his Ph.D. at Marquette University, Glen Butner became an assistant professor and director of the Honors Program at Sterling College. Professor Butner published his first book, Trinitarian Dogmatics: Exploring the Grammar of the Christian Doctrine of God, last summer. His new book, Jesus the Refugee: Ancient Injustice and Modern Solidarity, drops this week!

Images of modern refugees often invoke images of the infant Christ and the historical circumstances of the holy family’s flight to Egypt in the face of persecution. But rather than leaving this association at the merely symbolic level, Jesus the Refugee explores Jesus’s flight through modern legal conventions on refugee status in the United States and the European Union. Would Jesus and his parents be protected from refoulement? Would they receive rights to employment and civic engagement? Would they be turned away? Is the holy family a refugee family?

Jesus the Refugee argues that the holy family has a limited set of legal options for protection, but under current law is unlikely to receive any. This shocking claim stands or falls on legal details like the ability to demonstrate reasonable fear of persecution, or whether fleeing Palestine (but not the Roman Empire) affords protection for internally displaced migrants.

Besides introducing the basics of modern refugee law and processes, Jesus the Refugee aims to raise ethical challenges to our current refugee system by highlighting Jesus as one of the “least of these,” indicting our moral failures and challenging us to make amends.