Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Q: Tell us about your background. What role did education and scholarly pursuits play within your family environment?
A: “I grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. My parents were artistic. My father was a musician; he played violin in the Metropolitan Opera, and my mother was an artist who did work in printmaking and acrylics, and enjoyed some success exhibiting her work. But they were not religious. My father greatly admired Karl Marx and my mother admired Sigmund Freud. Between those two, religion doesn’t have a chance. So, I don’t know where the religion came from, and they don’t know either, but here it is.“
Q: Where did your interest in philosophy and religion come from? Which came first: philosophy, religion, or literature?
A: “I think for me they are all connected. My first interest, in terms of reading, was philosophy. In high school, I discovered Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in the school library—a fun read. Russell is a very opinionated writer; he clearly states which philosopher he likes and dislikes, encouraging readers to find their own favorites. I developed a fondness for Spinoza, whom Russell writes about very warmly. I then went on to major in philosophy in college, but my interest soon turned towards the religious aspect. I eventually switched to religious studies and completed my PhD program at Northwestern University. “
Q: Considering your deep expertise in complex fields like philosophy and religion, how do you select and develop your course topics?
A:”NYU actually gave me a pointer on how to do that when I started. There was a training for new teachers. What I was told that I still remember was, think of a classroom as a dinner party: you’re all sitting around the table, and it turns out that you have a special knowledge of something that everyone happens to be interested in, and they turn to you to talk about it. So you’re in a situation with peers, as co-learners, but it happens that you can share knowledge with the others and they can ask questions. That’s the tenor that I was told I should try to cultivate in the classroom. I’ve always tried to have that in mind.
I don’t actually think of myself as a scholar. I think things that come more from the heart than from the head are sometimes easier to speak about and easier for other people to relate to.“
Q: After teaching here for 20 years, what have you learned from the students? Have students surprised you? If so, how?
A:”Students are wonderful, and I’m even uncomfortable using the word student as opposed to teacher. They’re my peers. They know more than me about a lot of things. They teach me all the time. One way they teach me is by the questions they ask. For example, lately someone wanted to know about the caste system in India, and to what extent did the castes in India interrelate? It made me study what the sociologists have studied, which I then shared with the students.
Sometimes there are students in the religion class who are practitioners of a religion, and they do correct me when I get something wrong. They also share impressions about living inside the religion that you wouldn’t get in a textbook.
I remember one person in particular, a Hindu woman, who happened to be pregnant with twins, who said she felt honored that these two souls, which go back infinitely in time, had chosen her to manifest themselves in this next life. That is a Hindu belief. I’m not sure I’d ever heard anybody express it from a personal perspective – these children weren’t really hers – they were souls who had chosen her as a vehicle for their next existence.
I’ve never read that in a book, and it came expressly from a student. So I’m learning from them all the time.”
Q: In Spring 2026 you will be teaching Religion and Literature: From the Bible to James Baldwin. Why do you think our students should take this class?
A:”Baldwin is a nice example of the kind of writer I like to present. He was raised in a Pentecostal tradition and came to reject it, yet he retained elements of it in his writing. That is something very interesting to look at: How do writers who emerge from religious traditions push back on them, but also maintain ideas from them?
For Baldwin, that influence appeared in the idea of love and how it expresses itself in all kinds of relationships between same-sex couples, opposite sex-couples, inside or outside of marriage. I think of religion and literature as natural partners, because to me they both involve suspending disbelief. They have a conversation over that suspension. In this class, we look at how writers who emerge from religions relate to the religions they’ve emerged from.
What we wind up doing is looking at six themes: Love, death, evil, suffering, forgiveness, and saintliness, and how they get treated in sacred texts as interpreted by theologians compared to novelists, playwrights, and poets”
Q: Why do you think it’s important for lifelong learners to study philosophy, religion, and literature?
A: I think of philosophy as a discipline that’s maybe more useful for the questions it asks than for the answers it gives. I think of the questions that Immanuel Kant puts at the end of his book, The Critique of Pure Reason. He asks, what can I know? What should I do? And what may I hope for? These questions are very open-ended. In the open-endedness of them, he invites readers to come up with their own answers to those questions. You can look at how philosophy answers them, but you can also look at how religion and literature answer them.
Between those three different venues for answering the questions, you come up with different things to say, and you can put them in conversation with each other and maybe learn from that and come up with your own answers.
Discussing these questions and having a conversation seems, particularly now, something very worthwhile.
Enroll in Religion and Literature: From the Bible to James Baldwin.
View and download the Spring 2026 Academy of Lifelong Course Catalog and browse all continuing education courses on the SPS website.