Bioethics Calendar Of Event
Event Title: THE GENESIS OF ETHICS: HOW THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY OF THE BIBLICAL BOOK OF GENESIS LEADS US TO MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Date: 11/9/2009   Time: 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Place: Gottesman Library, Room 305 525 West 120th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Teachers College

Speaker: RABBI BURTON VISOTZKY, the Nathan and Janet Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary

Sponsor: Columbia University Seminar on Ethics, Moral Education, and Society

Contact Information: Please reply by email to Michael Schulman at mdschlmn41@yahoo.com or (212) 777-3055 by Wednesday, November 4.

Description:
Rabbi Visotzky will discuss how Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development rescued the book of Genesis for him, a rabbi troubled by the narrative’s moral implications. His presentation is based on his book The Genesis of Ethics: How the Tormented Family of Genesis Leads Us to Moral Development (Crown, 1996). Here is a link to the book on Amazon.com's web site (copy and paste it into your browser window): http://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Ethics-Burton-L-Visotzky/dp/0609801678/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254922942&sr=1-1

From Booklist
It's been called the Good Book for centuries, yet it begins with a tangled tale of betrayal, greed, hate, incest, and murder. Still, Visotzky sees goodness coming out of the Bible if readers are willing to accept it as a challenge to their own moral imagination and not simply as an inspirational story. He offends traditionalist sensibilities by the way he -- a sixties liberal and a feminist--puts modern social theorists above God in his reading of the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and20the other flawed mortals who populate the middle chapters of Genesis, on which he focuses. Yet Visotzky will also mystify those progressives who see no need to retain this ancient text in the modern canon. For he does insist on the importance of the Genesis story, even as he reinterprets it in ways alien to inherited orthodoxy. Unlike that orthodoxy, which leads to faith and piety, Visotzky's revisionism guides readers toward critical scrutiny of their own moral orientation in a contemporary world as bewildering as Abraham and Sarah's.

BURTON L. VISOTZKY is the Nathan and Janet Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Along with many significant leadership positions at JTS, Prof. Visotzky has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and a visiting faculty member at Union Theological Seminary, Princeton University, and the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow. Rabbi Visotzky also served as the Master Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, in Spring, 2007.

With Bill Moyers, Visotzky developed ten hours of television for PBS on the book of Genesis, serving as consultant and a featured on-screen participant. The series, "Genesis: A Living Conversation," premiered in October, 1996. He was also a consultant to Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks for their 1998 film, "Prince of Egypt."

Prof. Visotzky's articles and reviews have been published in America, Europe, and Israel. He is the author of nine books, approximately one hundred articles and reviews, and a novel, A Delightful Compendium of Consolation, which is set in eleventh-century North Africa.

Visotzky holds board and advisory positions on many organizations, including Fordham Law School’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics, the New Israel Fund,, the American Jewish World Service, and J-Street, and he was a national vice-chair for Rabbis for Obama..

Rabbi Visotzky is engaged in Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue internationally, in capitals such as Washington; Warsaw; Rome; Cairo; Doha, Qatar (where he was in the first group of Jews invited to interfaith dialogue by the Emir); and Madrid, Spain (where he was in the first group of Jews invited by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia).