Wednesday, May 8 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 pm
Jonathan Z. Smith is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities College at the University of Chicago,
where he also serves on the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the Committee of History of Culture, and is an associate faculty member at the Divinity School. Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions whose research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map is Not Territory (Brill, 1978); Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago, 1982); and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987). In his book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity(University of Chicago, 1990), he demonstrates how four centuries of scholarship on early Christianities manifest a Catholic-Protestant polemic.
Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster.