The Boniuk Center's Past Events

World Religions Class
Tuesdays from Feb. 3rd-Mar. 10, 2009
presented by
Boniuk Center Public Scholars
Andrea Jain & Heba Kahn

This series is presented to the public by  The Amazing Faiths Project.

Hinduism: The Eternal Way
of the World´s Third Largest Religion
Presented by
Dr. B. Jill Carroll,
Boniuk Center Executive Director

Houston Museum of Fine Arts
Caroline Wiess Law Building
1001 Bissonnet Street 

March 6, 2009 at 1:30 p.m.
March 7, 2009 at 4:00 p.m.

The Boniuk Center Bridge Builder Series Presents
"Hate Speech in the University"

Public Lectures on Islam
Boniuk Center Scholar Heba Khan

Recent Events at The Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance 

The Amazing Faiths Project
Cooperated by The Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance at Rice University
and Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston

Annual Tolerance Dinner Dialogue, Thursday, November 13, 2008

Join the Dialogue, Change Your Life, Transform the World

Our traveling scholars have returned to Houston and to Bishkek to continue their active lives after attending the International Summer School for Religion and Public Life in Birmingham, U.K.

Kym King and Zemfira Inagomova with ISSRPL classmates
visit a mosque in Birmingham, U.K.
more on the ISSRPL 2008

The Boniuk Center welcomes its newest Non-Profit Affiliate:


The Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church has joined the Boniuk Center as an Associate Member.  The group has been a venue for Boniuk Center events since the inception of the Center in April 2004.  We welcome them in this new relationship as the Center begins its 5th year of the study and advancement of religious tolerance.

More about  Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church
More about the Boniuk Center Affiliates Program

Bering Omega Partnership
Destination: Birmingham, UK

Bering Omega Community Services has joined with the Boniuk Center to send a participant to the International Summer School on Religion & Public Life (ISSRPL) being held in Birmingham, UK.

The Center is an official sponsor of the ISSRPL, which is held in different locations around the world, and sends two participants each year - one of the ISSRPL's choosing, and one from the Houston area.

  This year the Center is happy to send Kym King to participate in the summer school.  More about this story

Also attending the International Summer School for Religion and Public Life, is a young cultural anthropologist from Kyrgystan.  The Boniuk Center annual sponsors a scholar or activist from another country by providing a Boniuk Scholarship.  This year the recipient of that award is Zemfira Inogamova, a researcher with Aigine Research Center in Bishkek, Kyrgystan, in Central Asia. Boniuk Center Special Project Director Calvin Preece met Ms. Inogamova by chance on a flight from Bishkek to London recently when they were seated in the same row.  When they began to talk about who they were and where they were going, Ms. Inogamova indicated she was going to Birmingham, UK.  That led to the discovery that she was attending the ISSRPL on the Boniuk Award.

Zemfira Inogamova, Bishkek, Kyrgystan

The International Summer School on Religion and Public Life provides a laboratory for the practical pedagogy of tolerance and living with difference in a global society. Its goals are to produce new practices and understandings for living together in a world populated by people with very different political ideas, moral beliefs and communal loyalties. Its focus is on religion, as our religious identities are our most exclusive and our religious communities are those to which we devote our greatest loyalties. In our diverse but increasingly interconnected world, we need to find ways to live together. The school takes these very real, critical and defining differences, especially communal and religious differences between people, as the starting point of a publically shared life.

Aigine Research Center  ("aigine" means “clear”, “definitive”) was created in the spring of 2004 for a comprehensive and thorough study of the Mazar phenomenon in Kyrgyzstan. The main sponsor of this organization is The Christensen Fund (California, USA).

The mission of Aigine is to study and promulgate little known aspects of the diverse cultural and natural heritage of Kyrgyzstan, search for ways to reconcile and integrate esoteric and scientific approaches to understanding, nature and culture, tradition and innovation, history and modernity, and west and east; and to emphasize and utilize inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, inter-religious, and inter-age phenomena to promote tolerance and mutual understanding among the ethnicities, cultures, religious groups, and generations of Kyrgyzstan.

View the ISSRPL 2008 photos

2nd Holocaust Awareness and Remembrance Event

RICE UNIVERSITY
MEMORIAL CENTER
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

6:00 pm:  Art Born of the Horror Opening
Farnsworth Pavilion, Ley Student Center
7:15 pm:  Reception, Grand Hall, Opening remarks by
Consuls General of Israel and Germany

7:30 pm: "Hitler, the Allies and the Jews,"
Prof. Shlomo Aronson
Department of Political Science
Hebrew University Jerusalem
Grand Hall

NOTE:  Special Security Arrangments are in place
for the reception and the presentation by Prof. Aronson in the Grand Hall.

ART BORN OF THE HORROR:
a Holocaust Awareness and Remembrance Event
April 30 thru May 4

Two outstanding artists bring their works influenced by memories and events of the Holocaust to Rice University's Farnworth Pavilion in the Ley Student Center.

Brief Love, Saul Balagura (1998)

Saul Balagura was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1943. At age seventeen he had his first solo exhibition. Throughout his life he moved in parallel universes of arts and sciences. The self-taught artist holds a M.D. from Universidad del Valle [1964], a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University [1967], and a Neurosurgery degree from Albert Einstein Medical Center [1980]. In 1994 he retired from the world of science and opened a studio, first in Tesuque, New Mexico and since 2006 in Houston, Texas. This exhibit is accompanied by his poetry for each work.

The Orphan, Avaraham Sapir (1990)

Avraham Sapir lives and works in Israel and is a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1931, he is the only member of his family who survived the death camps. His paintings are of the abstract, surrealism and realism styles, and the subjects include the Holocaust, ecology and futurism. The present exhibition includes 14 Holocaust paintings done during the 1980s. This artwork has been presented in exhibitions in Tel-Aviv and in the Yad-Vashem museum in Jerusalem, where one of his paintings is exhibited as a part of the museumÕs permanent collection.

Thursday, December 6, 2007
Community Lecture with Dr. Ian Straughn

'Transforming the Sacred: Archaeology and Monuments of Early Islamic Syria'
Archaeology of the Sacred, Series I - Islam

7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Great Hall, Christ Church Cathedral
1117 Texas Avenue
Houston, Texas, USA

Ian Straughn, Brown University, offers a glimpse of the Islamic life in Early Syria, through archaeological discoveries.

Professor Straughn's research and teaching focus is the emerging subfield of Islamic archaeology His research emphasizes the intersection of material and textual evidence, and the production of space and landscape in the early Islamic period Levant. His current project “Materializing Islam: An Archaeology of Landscape in Early Islamic Period Syria” stems from his dissertation research undertaken in the Anthropology Department at The University of Chicago. His work also looks to develop the theoretical intersections of archaeology and religion through an understanding of how materiality becomes a key vector in ritual practice and spiritual relationships.

Lecture followed by reception on Grand Hall. This event is cosponsored by the  Archaeological Institute of America-Houston Chapter, the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance.

Saturday December 8, 2007
Tour of the Daw'ah Mosque

Tour starts at 10:00 AM
Islamic Daw'ah Center
202 Main Center
Houston, TX 77002

Tour one of Houston's most beautiful mosques, converted from the former Franklin Bank building into a mosque by Hakeem Olajuwan. The mosque is located on the MetroRail line.

For more information contact the Daw'ah Center at 713-223-3311
Appropriate dress is required,  there is some parking at the mosque from the
Travis Street side.   More about the Islamic Daw'ah Center

Quaker Peace Festival
November 10, 2007

Learn more about it at Quaker Peace Festival

Join the Boniuk Center at the Quaker Peace Festival Saturday, Nov 10th, 11 am to Sundown.  We will distribute Boniuk Center Lapel Pins and our new bumper sticker.

Internationally Renowned Photojournalist  Ricki Rosen Presents
 Transformations, from Ethiopia to Israel

Ricki Rosen brings her stirring photojournalism fromTransformations, from Ethiopia to Israel  to Rice. Her presentation will include her photography documenting Ethiopian Jews who came to Israel in Operation Soloman in 1991.  Join us for this visually inspiring presentation.

Learn more about Operation Soloman at Wickipedia

Monday, November 5, 2007
Time: 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

117 Humainities Building
Rice University
6100 Main Street
Houston, Texas 77005

Co-sponsored by 

Inaugural Boniuk Center Bridge Builder Lecture Series

Bishop Carlton Pearson
" The Gospel of Inclusion "

An Audio Podcast of Bishop Carlton Pearson's
Bridge Builder Presentation is now available from our Podcast Site

More information about Bishop Pearson is available here.
Read the Houston Press article about Carlton Pearson

AL ANDALUS! THE LEGEND

8 pm ~ Saturday, August 11, 2007 ~ Barnvelder Movement/Arts Complex

"Al Andalus! The Legend" is a family-oriented dance epic that takes place in the 10th century, a time when the Moors governed the southern Iberian peninsula, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in relative harmony.  Dancepaththeater's performance will feature a cast of 21 singers and dancers.

The Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex is located at 2201 Preston, 3 blocks east of Highway 59 and Minute Maid Park.  For tickets and more information, please call at 713-522-6000 or send an email to tickets@dancepath.com. 

The Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts and the Boniuk Centerfor the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance at Rice Universityare partnering with The Station Museum of Contemporary Artto produce an art exhibition addressing the issue of war in the 21st century. 

The exhibition, curated by James Harithas, director of The Station Museum of Contemporary Art and Karin Broker, professor and chair of the Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts at Rice University, will be held in the main exhibition gallery in the Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts, Rice Media Center, October 21-November 22, 2007.

The exhibition will begin with a three-day opening celebration that will include talks by distinguished artists, a panel symposium, and film screenings.  Nominations of artists to be included in this exhibition may be submitted to the Department of Visual & Dramatic Arts, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, MS-549, Houston, Texas, 77251-1892 or by email at arts@rice.edu. Artistic medium is open.