Reza Aslan, an acclaimed scholar of world religions and a best-selling author, will present the 2016 Honnold Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 8, on the Knox College campus.

His presentation, "Rethinking Religious Conflict: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at Home and Abroad," will be in Harbach Theatre in the Ford Center for the Fine Arts. The event is free and open to the public. 

Aslan's talk will draw from his two most recent books, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age, and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities.

He is founder of AslanMedia, a social media network for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world, and co-founder and chief creative officer of BoomGen Studios, the premier entertainment brand for creative content from and about the Greater Middle East.

A professor of creative writing at the University of California-Riverside, Aslan also is the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, a No. 1 New York Times best seller. It has been translated into 28 languages.

His other books include No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which was named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade, and How to Win a Cosmic War (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age). He has served as editor of two books, Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities.

Aslan's degrees include a bachelor of arts in religious studies from Santa Clara University, a master of theological studies from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions from the University of California-Santa Barbara, and a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction.

Aslan is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

About the Honnold Lecture

The Honnold Lecture at Knox College began in 1929, when pioneering journalist Ida Tarbell spoke, and it was permanently endowed in 1936, when William Lincoln Honnold established the Honnold Fund. The purpose of the Honnold Lecture is to bring leaders in various fields to the College for public talks, informal discussions with students and faculty, and classes relating to their areas of expertise.

Past Honnold lecturers have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and author Susan Sontag.