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Department ofReligious Studies

Akiba Lerner

Akiba J. Lerner

Associate Professor, Religious Studies Department

Curriculum Vitae (CV)


Akiba Lerner received his B.A. from The University of California at Berkeley, and his Masters and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2007. He taught at Stanford from 2007-2009 and joined the Santa Clara faculty in 2009. His research focuses on modern Jewish thought, theologies of hope, Jewish social ethics, political philosophy, American pragmatism and contemporary liberal thought. His current scholarship focuses on Jewish thought, film, and the dialectics of humanist and authoritarian themes within religion.

 

Selected Publications:

Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama, Fordham University Press, September, 2015    

“Redemptive Transgressions: The Dialectical Evolution of Hope and Freedom in the West” in Theories of Hope: Exploring Alternative Affective Dimensions of Human Experience, editor Rochelle Green (Lexington Books, 2018)

“Otherness And The Future Of Democratic Solidarity: Buber, Kaplan, Levinas And Rorty’s Social Hope” in Thinking Jewish Culture In America, editor Ken Koltun-Fromm (Lexington Books, 2014)

Courses
  • Ways of Understanding Religion ROSC.9
  • Ecstatic Experience, Film, and Religion ROSC.16
  • Judaism and Film ROSC.67 
  • Hope and Prophetic Politics TESP.88 
  • Judaism and Political Philosophy TESP.130
  • Jewish Philosophy: Between Athens and Jerusalem ROSC.174