Thomas Bender is Professor of History and the Humanities at New York University. A renowned scholar of U.S. intellectual and urban history, who has written extensively on status of the great city’s “metropolitan idea,” as well as on the role of academic intellectuals in public life, Bender has increasingly turned his attention to the imbrication of the United States in larger patterns and developments in world history. A recipient of the Guggenheim, the Rockefeller, and recently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he is the author of New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City (John Hopkins U. Press, 1987), Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (John Hopkins U. Press, 1993), The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New Press, 2002), and most recently A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (Hill and Wang, 2006).

What does the simultaneously political and theological imperative to "love thy neighbor" suggest to us in the challenging contemporary era of globalization? What philosophical and ethical trajectories can be drawn from the ancient injunction of the Book of Leviticus to the arena of the international community?

Kenneth Reinhard is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at UCLA, Kenneth Reinhard a prominent scholar of early modern English literature, psychoanalysis, Judaism and philosophy. He is the author of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Davies, 2009) and has co-authored with Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner a book entitled The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (U Chicago P, 2005). Based on this work, he is now completing a lengthier study of “neighbor love” as a core element in what he understands to be the tradition of “political theology” in the west.