Talk Focuses on Neighbor, Religious Divides

Ken Reinhard, associate professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, discusses the ethics and theology of the neighbor in a world fraught with religious divisions in a lecture “The Infinite Neighbor: Philosophy, Religion and Mathematics” on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 3:30 p.m. in Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge. The Erasmus Society lecture is free and open to the public.

Reinhard received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the history of critical and aesthetic theory, contemporary critical theory, and Jewish studies. He has co-authored several books, including “The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology,” “After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis” and is writing a book about the ethics of the neighbor in religion, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

He directed the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies from 2000-2004 and received a $2.5 million National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant for the development of a new program at the center in Jewish civilization. He received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to run an interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar about “The Ethics of the Neighbor” in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and secular modernity. In 2004, he founded the University of California Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory and coordinated the seminar “Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Event” last summer. He received a grant from the NEH in 2006 to complete his book, “The Political Theology of the Neighbor.”