Jesuits and the Sciences Conference

“Jesuits and the Sciences: Putting Faith and the Sciences Together” is the title of the next institute sponsored by the National Jesuit Brothers Committee. The institute will be held June 18-23, 2011 at the Manresa Center, a facility owned and operated by St. Louis University. Speakers for the institute include:

Bill Fulco (CFN) - "Archaeology"

Bill Fulco, S.J., holds the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. He oversees LMU’s large Archaeology Center with its library, museums and labs. Previously he taught Scripture at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and oversaw the doctoral program in Ancient Near Eastern Religions at the University of California, where he also taught the PhD cycle of Comparative Semitic Linguistics and archaeology. He has also taught archaeology at USC, in Jerusalem, Cairo and Amman, Jordan.

Bill Fulco holds graduate degrees in Philosophy and Theology in addition to his PhD from Yale University in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. While at Yale as a graduate student he also taught Aramaic dialectology and Ugaritic. He has held the American Schools of Oriental Studies Annual Professorship at the American Center, Amman, and the Catholic Biblical Association Annual Professorship at the École Biblique et Archéologique, Jerusalem. Since 1974 he has overseen the Archaeological Museum at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Jerusalem.

He has written many books, articles and reviews in the fields of Near Eastern languages, the archaeology of the Near East, Biblical studies, and Classical Numismatics, the last being one of his specialties. He has a special interest in Canaanite religion in which he has lectured and published extensively, including his seminal work on the Canaanite god Reshep.

Father Fulco served as the archaeological, linguistic and theological consultant to Mel Gibson in the production of The Passion of the Christ, and did all of the film’s translations into Aramaic and Latin, as well as coaching all of the actors with their difficult lines. He is now working with Vin Diesel as a consultant for a film on Hannibal the Carthaginian. In this capacity he has translated the entire script into Punic (a late dialect of Phoenician), Greek, Latin, Berber and other languages.