Research Seminar in Inter-Religious Relations, Dr Susannah Ticciati (King’s College London) and Daniel H. Weiss (University of Cambridge) ‘Negotiating Conflicting Religious Truth Claims: Rabbinic and Christian Accounts in Dialogue’, Thursday 24 May 14:00-16:00, Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity
Dr Susannah Ticciati (Reader in Christian Theology, King’s College London)
Dr Daniel H. Weiss (Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Divinity)
Negotiating Conflicting Religious Truth Claims : Rabbinic and Christian Accounts in Dialogue
Thursday 24 May 14:00-16:00
Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity
All welcome. Please email team@interfaith.cam.ac.uk if you would like to attend so that we can track attendance
Abstract
This session will use philosophical and textual approaches to explore the question of asserting religious claims, whether to others or to oneself, in the context of the traditions of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism. Is there a basis for making 'universal' claims that apply not only to one's own community but also to those currently outside that community? Are there distinctive dynamics within both Christian and rabbinic traditions that expect core religious claims to be viewed as implausible by outsiders? The session will be structured as a dialogue between the two presenters, and will engage the potential epistemological implications of texts such as the discussion of 'foolishness' and 'stumbling block' in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, the suffering servant passages from Isaiah, and classical rabbinic presentations of conversion and the 'invisible' status of Israel's election.
Susannah Ticciati
Susannah Ticciati is Reader in Christian Theology at King’s College London. She read maths and theology for her BA at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she went on to do her PhD in theology, after which she held a research fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Her research is in constructive Christian doctrinal theology, with foci in apophatic theology and scriptural hermeneutics. She is the author of Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth, and of A New Apophaticism: Augustine and the Redemption of Signs.
Daniel Weiss
Daniel H. Weiss is Polonsky-Coexist Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Paradox and the Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication (OUP, 2012) and co-editor of Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2016).  He is actively involved in the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and in Scriptural Reasoning.