Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – the international religious leader, philosopher, best-selling author and 2016 Templeton Prize laureate – will lecture on “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,” Wednesday, April 20, at 5 p.m. in Cornell’s Anabel Taylor Hall Auditorium. The talk is free, and the public is invited.
Sacks will explore the roots of violence and its relationship to religion. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, then it must also form part of the solution, argues Sacks, who holds professorships at New York University, Yeshiva University and King’s College London.
Using innovative biblical analysis and interpretation, Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has, as its source, misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Sacks offers a radical re-reading of many of the Bible’s seminal stories of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers.