The UCSIA/IJS Chair for Jewish-Christian Relations will be held by Nadav Shifman Berman, PhD in the academic year 2023-24.
Dr. Nadav Shifman Berman is currently a Research fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa. He recently completed a Kreitman postdoctoral fellowship at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he examined Jewish Thought vis-à-vis the Christian Agape. Prior to that, Nadav was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University’s Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy. His doctoral work investigated philosophical links between Pragmatism and Jewish Thought.
Tuesday 5 March 2024 at 20h
Public lecture in the Hof van Liere, Willem Elsschotzaal, Prinsstraat 13b, 2000 Antwerp, followed by a reception.
Philosophies of Love between Judaism and Christianity
Dr. Nadav S. Berman (University of Haifa), with a response by Prof. Dr. Willem Styfhals (KU Leuven)
This lecture aims to provide a basic scheme for examining philosophies of love in Judaism, vis-à-vis Christianity, and Abrahamic religions more broadly (i.e. Islam). Here we address the influential typology provided by Anders Nygren (1890-1978) in his magnum opus Agape and Eros. Nygren, a prominent theologian and Bishop of Lund, Sweden, ultimately contended that the fundamental motif of Judaism is Nomos, of Hellenism – Eros, and of Christianity – Agape or love that is universal, impartial, and disinterested. After presenting Nygren’s thesis, and reviewing critical Christian responses to it, we ask how his model may help in thinking about modern Jewish philosophies of love, and about pre-modern Jewish tradition (Biblical, Rabbinic, and Medieval), and especially its early formations.
Thursday 7 March 2024 from 13h until 15h
Reading seminar in room s.D.013, Grote Kauwenberg 18, 2000 Antwerp.
Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber on Divine and Human Love
Dr. Nadav S. Berman (University of Haifa)
After presenting the Nomos/Eros/Agape scheme, and asking how it may shed light on early Judaism, we move in this reading seminar into the modern era. Here we consider the views of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, both explicit and implicit, about Agape. We will read select sections from Rosenzweig’s book The Star of Redemption, and from Buber’s book Two Types of Faith. Discussing them, we will see how Rosenzweig and Buber were concerned, though in different ways, about strict or non-pragmatist versions of Agape. We hence ask if there could be found a Jewish-Christian (and broader Abrahamic, or even pan-religious or humanistic) common cooperative ground, and whether such pragmatist religious understanding may help humanity in searching constructively for a better future.
Free entrance. Registration required: click here.
Nadav Shifman Berman is currently a Research fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa. He recently completed a Kreitman postdoctoral fellowship at the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he examined Jewish Thought vis-à-vis the Christian Agape. Prior to that, Nadav was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University’s Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Philosophy. His doctoral work, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, investigated philosophical links between Pragmatism and Jewish Thought.
Willem Styfhals is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, where he is a member of the Centre for Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Culture. He is the author of No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Cornell UP, 2019) and Apologie van het Schrift (Grafische Cel, 2022).