CU Carbondale: Featuring Professor Sam Boyd

CU Boulder, Carbondale Arts, and the Carbondale Branch Library present CU Carbondale, a series of lectures by CU Boulder professors. This month's speaker will be Professor Sam Boyd.

Religion and magic are often categories that are considered to be distinct, if not opposites, from one another. In this talk, Professor Sam Boyd will show why the study of magic is valuable for understanding our own preconceptions and biases in the modern era. We will look at some theories regarding the study of magic and religion in light of Jewish texts and traditions. Professor Boyd will begin with the ancient Near Eastern context of the Bible and discuss the ways in which understandings of magic have fluctuated over time in biblical texts as well in as in the Jewish interpretive traditions and imagination.

Samuel Boyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a scholar of biblical texts and the ancient Near East. He researches the Bible in light of wider historical contexts to understand both the production of these documents as well as their history of interpretation. His areas of research include the development of the Pentateuch (or first five books of the Hebrew Bible), law collections in the ancient Near East, language ideology in the ancient world, and ritual theory applied to biblical texts. Professor Boyd was the recipient of the 2016 Society for Biblical Literature Regional Scholars award and served as a Martin Marty Junior Fellow at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

For more information visit the CU Boulder Peak to Peak Lecture Series page.

Saturday, April 15
5:30 pm

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