The Rumi Forum presented “Searching for Oneness: Mysticism and Symbolism in the Abrahamic Traditions” with Dr. Ori Soltes, Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Art History, Georgetown University.
On February 25, 2009, during the Rumi Forum Luncheon Series, Dr. Ori Soltes spoke about his most recent books, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Well (2002) and Mysticism in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Traditions: Searching for Oneness. In his speech Soltes said that what prompted both of these books -although written slightly different times one after the other in a sense one follows the other- is, first of all, both of them deal with the fundemantal problem that religion offers us which is how to understand what divinity is, how to make contact with it, how to benefit from that contact if God is assumed and believed by all three traditons to have created us and therefore to have the power to help us, to harm us, to hinder us, to bless us, to curse us, all three traditions have in common with each other. Pointing out that the mystic traditions of all Abrahamic religions have an important place in the perception of religion and divinity in personal religious life. Soltes compared the three religious traditions with each other to show similarities among them.
Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Art History at Georgetown University and former Director and Chief Curator at the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum. He has lectured on a wide range of subjects in the areas of religion, philosophy, literature, history and art history in 23 other universities and museums across the United States, including extensive lecture series’ for the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and has also taught or lectured in France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Spain and various parts of the former Soviet Union.
Dr. Soltes has curated over 80 exhibitions in the United States and overseas, including two exhibits that focused on the interweave of Muslim and Jewish Culture in Morocco and in Tunisia, respectively. He has traveled extensively in the region and has led tours in Northwest Africa and throughout the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe. He is comfortable in over a dozen languages.
He is the host of a series on Ebru TV called “World Affairs” and is the author of over 150 books, articles, and catalogue essays on a range of topics from linguistics and literature to philosophy, theology and art history.
Moderator:
Clare Wilde, is a Visiting Instructor in the Theology Department at Georgetown University. She received her AB in Religious Studies from Princeton, and a Licentiate in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam. Her dissertation, under the directorship of Fr. Sidney Griffith at the Catholic University of America, is on early Christian Arabic approaches to the Qur’an. She has published on the intellectual exchanges between Muslims and Syriac- and Arabic-speaking Christians in the first Islamic centuries.