Cole Lecture: Thursday, October 17, 2024
"What History offers Theology in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam”
This talk explores the intimate relationship between history and theology in the interconnected religious traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. It shows how this relationship deeply shaped the capacity of Jews, Muslims, and Christians to think about the past and conceive the future. And it suggests that drawing on the past can help us imagine new futures today.
Bio
David Nirenberg is the 10th Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. A historian and author, Nirenberg is recognized for wide-ranging scholarship on the interaction of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. His books include Communities of Violence: the Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, and Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition.
His most recent book, co-authored with his father (Ricardo Nirenberg), is Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which seeks to understand the powers and limits of the sciences and the humanities. He is currently at work on a history of racial thought in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
About the Cole Lectures
Philanthropist Edmund W. Cole, president of Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and treasurer of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, endowed the annual Cole Lecture Series in 1892 "for the defense and advocacy of the Christian religion." Cole's gift provided for the first sustained lectureship in the history of Vanderbilt University.
The lectures have been delivered by such distinguished scholars as Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Rudolph Bultmann, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Walter Brueggemann, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, James Barr, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Edward Farley, Don Beisswenger, Gene TeSelle, David Buttrick, Jim Wallis, Lamin Sanneh, Mark Noll, Randall Balmer, James Lawson, John O'Malley, R. Scott Appleby, M. Shawn Copeland and many others.
The Cole Lectures are free and open to the public.
Click here for a complete list of Cole Lectures from 1894-2015.