Adam

Experience the Episode

Presented by College of Arts and Letters

Tuesday, June 10, 2025 12:00 pm

In Jewish tradition, Adam is the archetypal human being; in Christianity he is the forerunner to Christ, and in Islam he is the precursor of the Prophet Muhammad.

Minding Scripture is sponsored by the World Religion World Church program in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and is supported by McGrath Institute for Church Life, Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology, Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and ND Learning.

Meet the Faculty: Mun’im Sirry

Mun’im Sirry is interested in various aspects of Qur’anic studies. He grew up in Madura (Indonesia) and did his undergrad and graduate studies in Islamic law at the International Islamic University in Islamabad (Pakistan). He then pursued his second Mater’s at UCLA and PhD at the University of Chicago with a dissertation on “Reformist Muslim Approaches to the Polemics of the Qur’an against Other Religions.” He is currently working on key concepts in Qur’anic studies.

Meet the Faculty: Tzvi Novick

Professor Tzvi Novick completed a B.A. from Yale University with a degree in philosophy. After a very brief but instructive legal career, and an MA in Hebrew Bible from Yeshiva University, he enrolled in the PhD program in Religious Studies at Yale, from which he graduated in 2008 with a focus on early rabbinic Judaism (ca. 2nd to 6th c.). Professor Novick has taught at Notre Dame ever since, on subjects ranging from the Bible to modern Judaism and post-Holocaust literature and theology.

Meet the Faculty: Francesca Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is a professor in the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous books, including Christ the Form of Beauty (T & T Clark), God is Not a Story (OUP) and a theological commentary on I Samuel (Brazos). She is currently editing a series for Bloomsbury Academic called Illuminating Modernity.

Meet the Faculty: Gabriel Said Reynolds

Gabriel Said Reynolds is the Crowley Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at Notre Dame. He is the author of the Qur’an and the Bible and Allah: God in the Qur’an. 

Gabriel Said Reynolds did his doctoral work at Yale University in Islamic Studies. Currently he researches the Qur’ān and Muslim/Christian relations and is Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame. He is the author of The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge 2010) and The Emergence of Islam (Fortress, 2012), the translator of ʿAbd al-Jabbar’s Critique of Christian Origins (BYU 2008), and editor of The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (Routledge 2008) and New Perspectives on the Qur’ān: The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context 2 (Routledge 2011). In 2012-13 Prof. Reynolds directed, along with Mehdi Azaiez, “The Qurʾān Seminar,” a year-long collaborative project dedicated to encouraging dialogue among scholars of the Qurʾān, the acts of which appeared as The Qurʾān Seminar Commentary (De Gruyter, 2016). At Notre Dame he teaches courses on theology, Muslim/Christian Relations, and Islamic Origins.  He is also a regular contributor to Notre Dame’s World Religions World Church podcast: Minding Scripture.