The College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University announced earlier this month a not-for-credit seminar for the local community in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which will take place every Saturday in April. Two professors in the university’s department of religious studies, Maria Dakake and Randi Rashkover, will be teaching the course.
Dakake is the chair of Mason’s religious studies department and co-director of the university’s Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies and Rashkover is a faculty member in the department and director of the university’s Judaic studies program.
“One of the things that this course will do is show people how these histories, both their political histories, clerical histories, as well as their intellectual histories, are intertwined,” said Dakake in a press release announcing the class. They are joined “not only at their origin and at their roots in the Near East, but also in the general intellectual context and climate in which they evolved and developed.”
The course is part of a new project in the university’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, designed to share the insights of its faculty in deeper and more sustained ways with the local community around Mason. “We’ve done this kind of community outreach for a long time,” said Robert Matz, senior associate dean in the college, in the press release.
“Mason’s President Cabrera has rightly stressed how important sharing faculty scholarship with the community is, and we agree. We love the idea of creating mini-courses that people can take just because they want to learn, and meet and talk to others who share their passion for learning.”
