Date/Time
Date(s) - 10 Sep 2013
7:00 PM - 8:15 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Tuesday, September 10, 7pm (dinner at 6pm $25)
“Trial by Fire: Religion and Book-Burning”
David Greetham, Professor Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center
A meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on Religion and Writing
Faculty House of Columbia University
400 West 117th Street, New York, NY
Please RSVP to Hannah Barker at [email protected]
Book burning, all-too-frequently undertaken for religious purposes, has both a long history and a disturbing continuity, from the Athenian destruction of Protagoras’ agnostic On the Gods to Alexander’s destruction of Zoroastrian scriptures to the worldwide burning of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and on to Terry Jones’s burning of a Quran in March, 2011. And the burning of books has often been accompanied by an auto-da-fé for their authors, as in the burning of Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva in 1553, with his works tied around his waist, or Hadrian’s burning of both Rabbi ben Haninah and a Torah scroll. This seminar will investigate why and how fire has been used as a religious purgative as well as punishment: flames seem to have an almost spiritual quality, and the book not just a phenomenological nature but an ontological as well. For more details about this talk and the Seminar on Religion and Writing, see https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/