Heidi M. Ravven, professor of religious studies, gave an invited paper at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting in Boston on Dec. 21. The paper, "Reviving a Jewish Medieval and Spinozist Model of Moral Agency," was delivered in the session "Re-opening The Conversation Between Jewish Philosophy and Contemporary Science," of the Modern Jewish Thought and Theology section of the AJS. 

Ravven's paper introduces her new theory of why people are moral and how to get them to be more moral based on recent discoveries in the new brain sciences. The paper is also a summary of Ravven's book, Searching for Ethics, which is scheduled to be published by The New Press in 2011.