TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The role of religion in the halls of justice has received much media attention in recent weeks. A world-renowned religious scholar will address this issue in a public lecture on The University of Alabama campus.

The Department of Religious Studies in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences will welcome Dr. Jonathan Z. Smith on Tuesday, Sept., 23, at 7 p.m., in 205 Smith Hall. He will give the second annual Aaron Aronov Lecture, “God Save This Honorable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse.”

Smith is one of the world’s most insightful and influential scholars of religion in North America and is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1968.

The lecture will be devoted to the role religious discourse plays in the U.S. court system. “Although the lecture will be a chapter in his forthcoming book, it was not specifically written for our setting or with current events necessarily in mind,” said Dr. Russell McCutcheon, chair of UA’s department of religious studies. “Given recent developments in the Alabama courts, we have no doubt that the topic will be timely and of wide interest to members of the University community and local residents alike.”

Smith’s research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, 19th-century Maori cults, and the notorious events that took place in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. Smith is well known as an essayist; his works include: “Map is Not Territory;” “Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown;” and “To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual.”

The College of Arts and Sciences is the University’s largest division and largest public liberal arts college in the state, with approximately 5,500 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students. The College has received national recognition for academic excellence, with students selected for many of the nation’s top academic honors, including 13 Rhodes Scholarships, 14 Goldwater Scholarships, seven Truman Scholarships, and 15 memberships on USA Today’s Academic All-American teams.