A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor

Join us on Friday, October 28th, at 3:30pm at UCSB for a discussion with Professor Mona Oraby (Howard University) about her new book, A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor. Dr. Oraby will discuss her book in conversation with Professors Lisa Sideris (UCSB) and Joseph Blankholm (UCSB).

Organized around eight terms in the study of religion, Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme’s A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (2022) combines text and image to examine the human as both catalyst of crisis and principal agent for its mitigation. This graphic nonfiction book acknowledges the significance of certain terms to the social sciences and the humanities, narrates their limitations, and shows why we need a structure and style for thinking them otherwise. Through its unique visual lexicon, the book explores religious media in postcolonial and secular contexts, performances of religious feeling, the political economy of religion, sacred presence, and human striving amid social inequality and climate change. A Universe of Terms is a visual experiment, one that invites readers to think again and anew about how the visual is integral to thought. This conversation with Mona Oraby, Lisa Sideris, and Joseph Blankholm will trace how the book came to be and engage its broader argument for thinking differently about how scholarly knowledge is communicated.

Mona Oraby is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University and Editor of The Immanent Frame, a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council dedicated to scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. She is the author of two books: Devotion to the Administrative State: Religious and Legal Pluralism in Egypt (forthcoming, Princeton University Press) and, with illustrator Emilie Flamme, A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (forthcoming, Indiana University Press).

This is event is sponsored by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at UCSB, and co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and the Humanities and Social Change Center at UCSB.

The talk with Q&A will take place at UCSB in the Humanities and Social Change Center, Robertson Gym 1000A. Free and open to the public.

More info at: https://www.cappscenter.ucsb.edu/news/event/410