Adam Darlage

Adam Darlage is a Ph.D. student in History of Christianity in the Divinity School.

Adam grew up in West Chester, Ohio, right outside of Cincinnati. He earned his B.A. from Xavier University in Cincinnati in 1998, with a major in Theology and minors in Philosophy and Greek. He earned his M.A. from the Divinity School in 2002.

The University of Chicago Divinity School has a distinctive feel about it. I would describe it as energetic, intimate, and community-oriented, both in the context of our academic pursuits and in our more personal relationships. When I came here three years ago, I must admit that I expected to deal with distant, stuffy professors and antisocial graduate students who had no idea how to lead a balanced life. The reality, I discovered, was much different. Today, I am proud to call many of the faculty, staff, and students here my colleagues and friends; they are people who are both very serious about their work and concerned with living well. I find the classes and the other academic activities here very exciting, and there’s always something interesting going on, be it a class on Martin Luther or an Ethics Club meeting. There are many opportunities for student involvement in the life of Swift Hall; becoming part of the community is often simply a matter of following your interests.

I study in the History of Christianity area under the Committee on Historical Studies. Broadly speaking, this means that when I graduate I will be able to teach the History of the Christian experience from the early Church to the present day. I believe the faculty in this committee—Biblical Studies, History of Judaism, and History of Christianity—are among the finest at the University of Chicago, and I consider myself very fortunate to work with the scholars in the History of Christianity area under this committee. And I learn as much or more from my fellow History of Christianity students, whom I consider some of my closest friends and mentors.

I am particularly interested in the “Radical Reformation” of the sixteenth century and its heirs, that is, with Anabaptist groups such as the Hutterites, the Mennonites, and the Swiss Brethren. My current focus is the Hutterite ideal of “Community of Goods” taken from Acts 2 and 4, and how that ideal gets worked out in the actual experience of these Anabaptist peasants and craftsmen in the context of the counter-reforming Holy Roman Empire of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. My questions recall Marc Bloch’s basic claim in Apologie pour l’Histoire, ou Métier d’ Historien—that the historian’s craft is the endeavor to make sense of human beings in time. I therefore employ a variety of tools to engage my questions in the hope of making the most sense of the evidence left by these Anabaptist groups and their enemies. I find that the History of Christianity area of study suits my purposes well, because in order to make sense of what sixteenth century Anabaptists, Protestants, or Catholics did in early modern Europe, I need to understand their theology or spirituality alongside whatever other important clues they left behind.

I work with faculty across the Divinity School and the University, and across various methodological stances: theological, Marxist, historical anthropological, and social. I am interested in a diversity of emphases, not delimitation to one, specific way of looking at the evidence. The importance of this variety is that I am learning to interpret my sources from many different points of view in order to answer my questions—and, of course, I hope to contribute to scholarship on the subject with new insights based on this foundation. The interdisciplinary nature of the Divinity School and the University of Chicago is a crucial point of attraction for a scholar like me.