The GSC is organized and run by students and scholars from around the country. Below you'll find information about the members of our Advisory Board and Organizing Committee.

Paul Murray
Advisory Board, Chair
murray@bard.edu

Paul Murray is the Catholic Chaplain andVisiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Bard College. He received his B.A. from Bard College; S.T.B., Pontifical Gregorian University; M.A., Ph.D., Catholic University of America. Paul is the founder and executive director of Among Friends, Inc., which provides transitional housing, counseling, and job-search support to persons in crisis (1992–97). Pastoral ministry, Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. (1975–98). Paul's publications include: "A Cultural Reading of Literature on the Catholic Church in the South," Culture of Bible Belt Catholics; "The ‘International Outlook’," Place of the Person in Social Life; and articles, interviews, and book reviews in Anthropos; Technology and Disability; National Catholic Reporter; Charities, U.S.A.; Washington Blade; others. Bard College (1997— ).

Paul Murray's Books on Amazon

Gabriel Blau
Founder, Advisory Board
gabriel@godandsexuality.org

Gabriel Blau is the founder of "The God & Sexuality Conference". He has spoken in the US and Israel to camp groups, yeshiva students, colleges and graduate schools and at open lectures. Both the general and gay Israeli media have covered his work as an activist. He is the author of “Two Truths: Living as a Religious Gay Jew” in Lawrence Schimmel’s book Found Tribe, (Sherman Asher Publishing, 2002.) Gabriel received his BA in Theology from Bard College. He is currently editing the upcoming book Homosexuality and the World Religions: Traditional Views and Modern Responses.

Gabriel Blau's Books on Amazon

Daniel Boyarin
Advisory Board

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, as well as being a member of the core faculty of the designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality and the Organized Research Unit on sexual culture. His publications include Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993); A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (California, 1994), and Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999). His current book Border Lines: Hybrids, Heretics, and the Partition of Judaeo-Christianity will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004.

Daniel Boyarin's Books on Amazon

Jeffrey J. Kripal
Advisory Board
jjkripal@rice.edu

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the Lynette S. Autry Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Asian Studies at Rice University. He received his B.A. from Conception Seminary College in 1985 and his Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 1993. Since then, he has also held positions as the Vira I. Heinz Associate Professor of Religion at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and as the Visiting Associate Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. His special areas of interest include colonial and modern Hinduism, the erotics and ethics of mystical traditions, and the psychology of religion. His publications include Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995), which won the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize, and Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001). He has also co-edited volumes with G. William Barnard on the ethical critique of mystical traditions, Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism (Seven Bridges, 2002), with T.G. Vaidyanathan of Bangalore, India, on the dialogue between psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (Oxford, 1999), and with Rachel Fell McDermott on a popular Hindu goddess, Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West (California, 2003). He is presently researching a book on the history of the Esalen Institute, the counter-cultural center in Big Sur, California (founded in 1962).

Jeffrey Kripal's Books on Amazon

Serinity Young
Advisory Board
serinity@godandsexuality.org

Serinity Young is a Research Associate in the Dept. of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990 in Comparative Religion and has taught at Southern Methodist University, the University of Pennsylvania and Hunter College. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright and being a fellow at the Center for Writers and Scholars of the New York Public Library, and has done fieldwork in India, Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Russia. She edited The Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion and An Anthology of Sacred Texts By and About Women, and authored Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice and the forthcoming Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Ritual & Iconography (Routledge).

Serinity Young's Books on Amazon

Natan Margalit
Advisory Board
natan@godandsexuality.org

Rabbi Natan Margalit, Ph.D., is Jewish Chaplain and Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Bard College. He received ordination from the Jerusalem Seminary in 1990. Althought his ordination is Orthodox, his rabbinate is non-denominational and Renewal. He has a B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies. He has written on gender and Jewish texts, as well as literary and anthropological approaches to these texts. His interests in clude Jewish mysticism, Hassidic spirituality, Judaism and ecology, and Judasim and feminism. He has lived for 12 years in Israel and contrasts this with his formative years in Hawaii, in that both locales are meeting places of East and West: one conflicted and fiery, one serene and oceanic.

Mollie Meikle
Advisory Board
mollie@godandsexuality.org

Mollie Meikle wasthe assistant director and registrar of the God and Sexuality Conference for three years (2001-2003). She reveived her BA in Creative Writing from Bard College in 2003. She currently serves as a member of Advisory Board.

Dylan Flynn
Organizing Committee
dylan@godandsexuality.org

Dylan is a second year student at Bard College. His intended major is Music and Physics. He is an active member of the Queer Alliance, as well as a DJ and active member of the organizing committee.

Diego Arispe-Bazan
Organizing Committee - Logisticon
diego@godandsexuality.org

Diego is a third year international student at Bard College. He is an intended Literature and creative writing major. Diego spent a year studying at the Catholic University in Lima, Peru. AS a member of the Organizing Committee, Diego coordinates much of the logistics of the annual conference.

K.C. Serota
Senior Advisor, Organizing Committee
kcserota@godandsexuality.org

K.C. Serota was the director of the God and Sexuality Conference in 2002 and 2003. Completing his BA at Bard College, KC now serves on the organizing committee as an advisor. He has studied at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and participated in the International Human Rights Exchange in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a Religion Studies and Human Rights major in his Senior year at Bard College.

Emily Barth-Lanzara
Organizing Committee
emily@godandsexuality.org

Emily Barth-Lanzara is a senior at Bard College. She is a double major in the creative writing and religion programs. She is currently planning a novel for her senior thesis. Emily manages the PR of the conference.