Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean: How Geography Shapes Religion
October 12 & 19, 2025
Class Description
This talk explores the influence of geography on religion and highlights a largely unknown story of religious history in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the Levant, agricultural communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims jointly venerated and largely shared three important saints or holy figures for at least 800 years: Jewish Elijah, Christian St. George, and Muslim al-Khiḍr. These figures share ‘peculiar’ characteristics, such as associations with rain, greenness, fertility, and storms. Only in the Eastern Mediterranean are Elijah, St. George, and al-Khiḍr shared between religious communities, or characterized by these same agricultural attributes – attributes that also were shared by regional religious figures from earlier time periods, such as the ancient Near Eastern Storm-god Baal-Hadad, and Levantine Zeus. This book from which this talk is derived tells the story of how that came to be, and suggests that the figures share specific characteristics, over a very long period of time, because these motifs were shaped by the geography of the region. Ultimately, this talk and the book that inspires it suggests that regional geography has influenced regional religion; that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are not, historically or textually speaking, separate religious traditions (even if Jews, Christians, and Muslims are members of distinct religious communities); and that shared religious practices between members of these and other local religious communities are not unusual. Instead, shared practices arose out of a common geographical environment and an interconnected religious heritage and are a natural historical feature of religion in the Eastern Mediterranean.
About Erica Ferg
Dr. Erica Ferg teaches courses on Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Mediterranean religious history, and religious studies theories and methods. Her doctorate is in the Study of Religion, and her area of specialization is Eastern Mediterranean comparative religious history. Her research focuses on Mediterranean comparative religion, religious texts, comparative linguistics, and archaeoastronomy. Prior to academia, Erica was a Persian linguist in the United States Air Force. Erica’s first book, Geography, Religion, Gods, and Saints in the Eastern Mediterranean, was published in paperback in January 2022 by Routledge. Erica currently is at work on two book projects, titled Starry Nights: A Celestial History of Religion in the Mediterranean, and a co-authored philosophy and religious studies book, titled Benighted Enlightenment: Belief, Religious Toleration, and the Legacy of the Christian Enlightenment.