Reasoning for Repair

A Celebration

Peter Ochs, Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at UVA, is retiring this spring. The Jewish Studies Program and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion co-sponsored an afternoon textual study and an evening panel, "Reasoning for Repair: Peter Ochs as a Practical Philosopher," to honor Professor Ochs' illustrious career. This event was organized by Professor Shankar Nair and Jewish Studies Professor Asher Biemann.

Schedule of Events

Lunch Chevruta

12pm – 2:00pm, Nau 342

Text Study Session for graduate students and interested faculty.

Panel, “Reasoning for Repair: Peter Ochs as a Practical Philosopher”

5:00pm – 6:30pm, Solarium Room (Colonnade Club)

A panel discussion featuring some of Peter Ochs’s most accomplished students as they reflect on how they applied his teaching and philosophy in their professional and everyday lives. Panelists included Deborah Barer, Ashleigh Elser, Nauman Faizi. The panel was moderated by Mark James.

The panel was followed by a public reception.

Panelists

Deborah Barer ('16) is Assistant Professor of Ancient Judaism at Towson University, where she teaches courses in rabbinic literature, biblical interpretation, and Jewish ethics. Her research explores approaches to ethical and legal decision-making in the Babylonian Talmud. She currently lives in Washington DC with her husband and two children.

Ashleigh Elser ('17) is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Hampden-Sydney College, where she teaches courses in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the history of biblical interpretation. Her research focuses on the history of biblical interpretation, and specifically on the choices that readers make when they are confronted by ethical, practical, or hermeneutic difficulties in the biblical canon.

Nauman Faizi ('16) is Assistant Professor of Religion at LUMS University in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research interests include philosophy of religion, philosophical and scriptural hermeneutics, semiotics, and questions surrounding religion and modernity. His current research is focused on philosophic analyses of texts and thinkers wrestling with questions at the interface of religion, secularity, and modernity, with particular focus on how modern religious thinkers thematize relationships between scriptural texts and modern scientific and philosophic discourse. His current teaching work is focused on theories and methods in religious studies and topics within philosophy of religion.

Mark Randall James ('16) is co-editor of the Journal of Textual Reasoning and an independent scholar of scriptural interpretation and philosophy. He is the author of Learning the Language of Scripture: Origen, Wisdom, and Exegesis (2021, Brill), which develops a new theory of Origen’s hermeneutic method, and the co-editor of Signs of Salvation: A Festschrift for Peter Ochs (2021, Wipf & Stock).

Peter Ochs is Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, and through his decades of remarkable work, has become an influential scholar in philosophy of religion and in Jewish philosophy and theology.