Matthew John Peterson (Ph.D. Candidate) is a 2023 awardee for The Divinity School Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Mr. Peterson is a Martin Marty Center Junior Fellow and also a 2023-2024 Provost Dissertation Completion Fellow in the Divinity School. 

What's next for you?

Once I complete my dissertation, "Mythical Night: Religion and the Unconscious of History," I will be a Postdoctoral Scholar-Teaching Fellow in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. I am currently preparing an article on the phenomenology of religion in contemporary France, and I'm beginning to draft a paper for the AAR Annual Meeting about religion and philosophical method in newly published work from the young Michel Foucault. 

Why study religion?

The study of religion thinks critically about what we find (or construct) at the limits of reason, language, and experience, and in this sense I take it to be the most human of the humanities. It demands a vigilant self-reflexivity with respect to our concepts and norms which, even in the ostensibly secular realms of politics, economics, science, and technology, are often of religious provenance. To better understand where our modern world came from and where it might be going, we need fluency in the concepts and history of religious thought and practice. 

What's something unique or special about studying at the Divinity School?

I especially appreciated the intellectual freedom and opportunities for professionalization I was given during my time at The Divinity School. I had complete freedom to design my course of study and was supported in staging conversations between texts that might at first appear idiosyncratic. In terms of professionalizing experiences, I had the opportunity to co-organize a city-wide conference, present my work in Europe, and advise undergraduate theses, all of which will serve me well as I begin my next chapter. Finally, Grounds of Being is the beating heart of Swift, and I will miss my time, first as an employee and later as a customer, at the coffee shop.