News
Anna Zeisel , MDiv'26, On Chaplaincy, Prayer, and The Future of Religious Leadership
Anna Zeisel came to the University of Chicago Divinity School by a route she hadn't planned. Drawn to work as a death doula, accompanying people through the final chapter of their lives, she learned that chaplaincy training was open to her as a non-C...
June 16, 2026
Jeffrey Stackert's Summer Reading Picks
The Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible recommends a novel set in a research lab and a murder mystery with roots in Swift Hall, in UChicago News's annual list from this year's teaching award winners. UChicago News asked this year's recipien...
June 16, 2026
Pop Religion | Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black Rage
It would be easy to read Aleshea Harris's Is God Is as a revenge thriller: twin sisters set out to kill the father who burned them as children. But the film, Harris’s feature directorial debut, plays more like a parable, folding inherited trauma and ...
June 12, 2026
"Craft in the Fullest Sense"
Angie Heo, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, delivered the following address at the University of Chicago Divinity School’s 2026 Convocation Hooding and Pinning Ceremony, revisiting her 2023 Admitted Students' Day add...
June 10, 2026
Divinity School Honors 2026 Student Prize Winners
Awards were presented June 5 at the Hooding and Pinning Ceremony in Rockefeller Chapel. The Divinity School recognized students across degree programs with annual prizes and fellowships. The awards were presented during the Hooding and Pinning Cere...
June 10, 2026
Divinity School Faculty Launch Resource on Emotion and Climate Resilience
What does it mean to live well in the face of climate change? At first glance, the question can seem beside the point. When confronted with evidence of a warming planet and its consequences for ecosystems and communities, turning inward toward one's ...
June 3, 2026
The Flight of American Christianity
Martin Gardner's The Flight of Peter Fromm and the Making of Modern American Religion Quick: Name the most accomplished fictional scholar to teach at Swift Hall. The easy answer is Franz Bibfeldt, that spoof of academic faddishness and triviality. Bu...
June 3, 2026
"How do you get to Swift Hall?"
On ninja crazes, necromancy, and the surprisingly common roads that lead to Swift Hall. A few months ago, I was having coffee with a senior colleague from the psychology department. Our topic of conversation was the changing patterns of religious aff...
June 3, 2026
On the “Advantages of Marginality” in Swift Hall
Sheila Jelen on Dvora Baron, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Finding a Home in Swift Hall. In Reading Jewish Women, Iris Parush claims that the marginalization of Jewish women from the educational hierarchies in traditional East European Jewish society...
June 2, 2026
Nothing is Final
On South Asian religion, postcolonial critique, and the future of the field It is difficult to imagine the future of a field whose past is littered with skeletons. This is a question for all forms of knowledge that emerge in American universities, wh...
June 1, 2026