Smadar Bakovic, a senior English major at Bates College, will discuss Arab perspectives on the historic mistrust between Arabs and Jews, at 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 9, at Temple Shalom Synagogue-Center, 74 Bradman St., Auburn. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

An Israeli army veteran from Neve Illan, Bakovic knows the Middle East conflicts well. She believes mutual understanding is key to a resolution the region’s problems.

Supported by a Phillips Student Fellowship that funds cross-cultural projects undertaken by Bates students, Bakovic first visited the Israeli Arab coastal village of Arara in 2001, using video and film to chronicle stories of locals with video and film in an effort to understand non-Jewish cultures of Israel.

“I went into places where Jews do not go and talked with hardworking people,” Bakovic says – villagers who told her, “not a lot of people want to hear what we have to say.”

Bakovic conducted further interviews during summer 2002 and returned to Bates last fall to produce a book-length manuscript about her research, under the direction of Israeli scholar Mishael Caspi, visiting professor of religion.

For more information about the presentation, call the synagogue at 207-786-4201. Refreshments will be served.

A month after suicide-terror attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. killed almost 6,000 people, fear still locks the voices of the eminent Middle East clergy of Islam, says Mishael Caspi, an Israeli Islamic and Judaic scholar and visiting professor of religion at Bates College.

“While Islam strongly links religion and politics, Islamic law very strongly prohibits suicide,” says Caspi. “Some will say that Islam is to lead the world, but it is to do so by persuasion. The Prophet accepted Christianity and Judaism as monotheistic traditions and called them ‘people of the Book’.

“There has been no Muslim sage who has condemned in a strong , unequivocal way that this act is not the way of Islam,” says Caspi. “Why do we not hear this from the imam of the al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem, from the authorities on Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo? Why do we not hear from the imams in Mecca and Medina?”

“Privately, they condemn the extreme actions of so-called fundamentalists. Publicly, they don’t speak out because they and their families live under the threat of extremists.”

Other topics that Caspi could discuss:

· How the internal divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims expresses itself politically.

· His assessment that successors to Yasser Arafat will quickly surface at his death, and there will be a negotiated peace creating a Palestinian state within six months of Yasser Arafat’s death – or a civil war among Palestinian factions. Arafat, he says, can no longer be the broker for peace because Israelis will never again trust him.

A native of a small Israeli village near Hadera, Caspi grew up as a Yemenite/Kurdish Jew speaking Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic. His journey of 62 years has led him away from his seaside village to an accomplished international career as both a poet and scholar of Islamic and Hebrew biblical literature.

With a B.A. from Hebrew University, an M.A. in psychology from Santa Clara University and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught for 25 years at the University of California at Santa Cruz with intervening residencies at Oxford, St. Johns’s and Hebrew and Haifa universities. With deep roots in both the traditions of Islam and Judaism, Caspi’s connection to both Islamic and Jewish cultures serves as the cornerstone for his philosophy of mutual respect in the political arena.

Education, Religion and Social Values: Issues and Priorities for the 21st Century is sponsored by the Bates College Department of Philosophy and Religion and the Dimmer-Bergstrom Fund as the fourth in a series of Bates College Symposia on Religion and Contemporary Issues.

“We are faced with common questions: how to prepare a new generation for an age in which religious traditions and peoples, once existing in their own worlds of splendid isolation from each other, are being drawn into ever closer relations,” said Mishael Caspi, symposium organizer and visiting professor of religion at Bates. The conference includes a series of discussions with representatives of a wide variety of religious traditions.

The symposium will begin Jan. 22 at 2:30 p.m. with registration and opening remarks, followed by the 4:45 p.m. address, Millennium of Religious Aspiration, given by Gildas Hamel, a lecturer in French at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hamel specializes in French history, Celtic languages and cultures as well as the social history of early Judaism and Christianity.

The Jan. 23 schedule of presentations includes:

• 1:30 p.m. – Bishop Joseph Gerry
• 2:10 p.m. – The Rev. Canon Cox
• 2:50 p.m. – David Kolb, professor of religion and philosophy at Bates College
• 4 p.m. – The Rev. Donald J. Rudalevige
• 4:40 p.m. – Peter Terry
• 5:20 p.m. – Anton Vrane

The Jan. 24 schedule of presentations includes:

• 2 p.m. – Rabbi Douglas Weber, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center of Lewiston-Auburn, and associate chaplain, Bates College
• 2:40 p.m. – Stacy Smith, assistant professor of education, Bates College
• 3:20 p.m. – Donna Hailson
• 5:30 p.m. – Howard Lupovitch
• 6:10 p.m. – Mohammed Falesh

The public is invited to attend, and pre-registration is recommended. A registration fee of $5 will be charged for all conference sessions. Bates College issues a certificate of attendance and course description to participants who complete the program. The symposium is approved for two continuing education credits for recertification as specified by the Maine State Department of Education.

Whose God? A Symposium on Tolerance and Interfaith Relations is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Bates College and the Dimmer- Bergstrom Fund as the third in a series of Bates College Symposia in Religion and Contemporary Issues.

“In a world ravaged by religiously motivated violence, the conference will explore the potential for tolerance and genuine mutual respect among individuals of differing religious persuasions,” symposium organizer Mishael Caspi, visiting professor of religion at Bates, said. The conference includes a series of discussions with representatives of a wide variety of religious traditions. A concluding workshop for teachers will focus on resources and ideas for dealing with issues of religious tolerance in schools.

The symposium will begin at 2:45 p.m. Oct. 24 with introductory remarks followed by the keynote address, Unheard Music: A Contemplative Approach to Interreligious Dialogue, given by Kenneth P. Kramer, professor of religion at San Jose State University.

The author of three books published by Paulist Press, Kramer received his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Temple University, his bachelor of divinity in systematic theology from the Andover Newton Theological School, his master’s degree in religion and divinity from the Yale Divinity School and his doctoral degree in religion and culture from Temple University.

The Oct. 25 schedule of presentations includes:

• 9 a.m. – Eli Reich, Ph.D candidate, The University of Chicago, on One Voice, Many Voices: ‘The Voice of the Lord is Powerful.”
• 10:30 a.m. – The Rev. Donna Hailson, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, on One God: The Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer.
• 11:30 a.m. – Shams Inati, professor of Arab and Islamic studies, Villanova University, on a topic to be announced.
• 2:30 p.m. – The Rev. George Papademetriou, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, on Issues Regarding Tolerance in Interfaith Relations: An Orthodox Perspective.
• 3:15 p.m. – Deborah Friedrich, Ph.D candidate, The University of Chicago, on Tress of Blessing: Traces of Goddess Symbolism in Pre-exile Israelite Religion.
• 4 p.m. – Robert Sherman, professor of systematic theology, Bangor Theological Seminary, on a topic to be announced.
• 5 p.m. – Kidder Smith, professor of Asian studies, Bowdoin College, and Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, professor of religion, Colby College, on Buddhist Atheism and the Origin of Religion.

The Oct. 26 schedule of presentations includes:

• 9 a.m. – Frank Carner, professor of English, University of Southern Maine, on God as Literary Strategy: The Hale-Bopp Problem.
• 10 a.m. – Brian Aull, Baha’i Community of Cambridge, on Can Religion Bring Us Together?

A workshop for teachers will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center.

The public is invited to attend, and pre-registration is recommended. A registration fee of $5 will be charged to cover the cost of all conference sessions. For those interested in attending all conference sessions, meals, and coffee breaks, as well as earning two continuing education credits, a $30 admission fee will be charged.

For more information, call the Bates College Office of Special Projects at 207-786-6070.

The public is invited to attend free of charge.

The symposium will explore the Bible from the multiple perspectives of literature, religion and history. Conference organizers Robert Allison and Mishael Caspi, Bates professors of religion, approached colleagues in most of Maine’s institutions of higher education where religion and literature are taught.

“We do have a problem nationwide, though, where biblical scholars tend to discuss their findings with each other, but the public, at large, remains absent. We haven’t had a chance to explain what we’re doing,” Allison said.

By sharing their work with the public, the assembled Maine academicians hope to demonstrate, Allison said, “a sense of our obligation as scholars to the community around us to share some of our work, and to give the public a chance to question us.”

The conference will commence at 3:30 p.m. Nov. 1 in the Benjamin Mays Center with greetings from Donald W. Harward, president of Bates, and Martha Crunkleton, dean of the faculty, followed at 4 p.m. by the keynote address, Wine, Women and Song: Female Musicianship and the Vineyard Festivals of Ancient Israel, delivered by Susan Ackerman, associate professor of religion at Dartmouth.

A specialist in ancient Near Eastern history and religion with particular focus on the relationships between Israelite religion and the religion of Israel’s neighbors, Ackerman is the author of Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (1992) and the forthcoming Warrior, Dancer, Seductress and Queen: Women in Judges and in Biblical Israel. She received her Ph.D from Harvard.

Following Ackerman’s lecture, Caspi, visiting professor of philosophy and religion at Bates, will discuss The Narrative of Genesis 22 in Three Editions, in the Be ays Center at 5:15 p.m.

Sessions for the second and third days of the conference, Saturday, Nov. 2 and Sunday, Nov.4, will be held in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives.

The Nov. 2 schedule of presentations, beginning at 9 a.m., includes:

9:15 a.m. – Frank K. Carner, professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, on Justice, Poetic Justice and the Resolution of Biblical Plots.

10:15 a.m. – Thomas R.W. Longstaff, Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies at Colby, on Sepphoris: The Ornament of the Galilee.

11:15 a.m. – Ann Johnston, professor of theological and religious studies at Bangor Theological Seminary, on The Isaiah Apocalypse: Vision of the Triumph of God.

2 p.m. – William Sayres, professor of literature at the University of Southern Maine, on Providence and Gratitude in ‘Persuasion’.

3 p.m. – Robert Allison, associate professor of religion at Bates and chair of Classical and Medieval Studies, on Images of light and Imagery of Ingestion: The Mysticism of the Gospel of Thomas.

4 p.m. – Burke O. Long, professor of religion at Bowdoin, on Scenery of Eternity: W.F. Albright and Ideas of ‘Holy Land’.

7 p.m. – A screening of Cecil B. DeMille’s film classic Samson and Delilah will be held in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, followed by commentary and discussion led by Irena Makarushka, associate professor of religion and department chair at Bowdoin.

The conference’s closing sessions, beginning at 9 a.m. Nov. 3 include:

9:15 a.m. – John R. Wilson, professor of literature at the University of Maine, Orono, on Change the ‘The’ to ‘A’.

10.15 a.m. – Becky Kasper, professor of American religious history at St. Joseph’s College, on Old Testament History and the Problems of Biblical Theology.

To encourage dialogue, each scholarly presentation will be followed by questions from the audience. Conference programs have been distributed to area churches, synagogues and high schools.

Bates intends to host two additional symposia of Maine-area scholars in 1997, including Maine Remembers the Holocaust, in the spring, and God With the People, God and the People: An Interfaith Symposium, in the fall.