Sickness and Healing

Experience the Episode

Presented by College of Arts and Letters

This episode of Minding Scripture reflects on sickness, healing, and isolation in the Bible and in the Qur’an, with conversation around the global Coronavirus pandemic. What sources of hope do we find in the Abrahamic traditions for a time of sickness and quarantine? How might these three traditions interpret the pandemic and the quarantine religiously?

Interested in going even deeper on this topic? Join Professor Said Reynolds for his new online course Sacred Texts in Dialogue, offered through the Coursera platform, to explore the common points, and stark differences, between the Bible and the Qur’an. The course consists of six modules and assumes no previous knowledge of the two books. For more information, click here.

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: 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: 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.