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Erin Galgay Walsh, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature; Associate Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, delivered these remarks during the Divinity School's 2025 Welcome Ceremony on September 26, 2025.

First, I want to thank Dean Robinson for inviting me to share my reflections on the Aims of a Divinity School Education. I also want to thank Dean Maduff, Assistant Dean Hardy, and all the tireless staff of the Divinity School for their labors this week. And many thanks to all of you for being here today. It is an honor to participate in this annual tradition alongside my beloved colleagues and students (both returning and new) as we mark the beginning of the year, renewing our commitment to the mission of this professional school.

Each of you has come to Swift Hall bearing your own questions and aims for study. You bring distinct perspectives, life experiences, and previous training. But you also share with your classmates a commitment to pursue a professional degree that will prepare you to inquire about and discuss religion with precision, insightfulness, and nuance. It is this pursuit that will be the focus of my remarks today. 

In the weeks and months ahead, you will become well-acquainted with the slipperiness and inadequacies of the terms “religion” and “religious.”  You will, no doubt, encounter challenges to your previous habits of thought and shift your perspectives. You will grow in your knowledge of religious practices, material cultures, actors, histories, and literary corpora.

In the classrooms of Swift, we expect you to ground your positions in evidence, consider alternative interpretations, and weigh competing claims. We uphold the possibility that we can rigorously disagree without becoming disagreeable—and sometimes we fail at this. Community is not passively maintained through the weak tea of a hollow civility. Learning to stay in conversation might be one of the most critical challenges of our age, but one we are well-positioned to take up, however imperfectly we achieve it.   

You have the opportunity here to acquire philological and interpretative skills to produce informed readings of ancient literature in light of modern scholarship. It is demanding and at times exhausting but also exhilarating. Over seminar and dinner tables, mugs of coffee downstairs at Grounds of Being, and pints at Jimmy’s, you will undertake this labor, while I hope, forming friendships that will last long after you graduate from UChicago. 

Our curriculum provides you with the breadth to explore your interests while exposing you to distinct and irreducible modes of inquiry: the constructive, the historical, the social and cultural scientific, and the literary and cultural media approaches to the academic study of religion. 

Within this intellectual community, we maintain this multiplicity of approaches, sometimes complementary and at times at odds, but held together as mutually illuminative. Our student body is made up of individuals in different degree programs, each designed to pursue our common aims in their own way: the MA, the MDiv, the AMRS, the PhD, and our dual degrees. You will even find undergraduates from the college within these hallowed halls, and sometimes, upon graduation, they return for a higher degree. 

In 1931, the then Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago outlined the research endeavors of its faculty and the tract ends with a clear-eyed affirmation of their ideals, proclaiming:

“The Divinity School as a whole, operates without reference to any denominational or theological system. It has no body of doctrine to extend or to defend. Its purpose is without reservation to discover truth.”[1] A commitment to vigorous inquiry as a collective endeavor bound past generations of scholars in Swift Hall, and in ever renewed and evolving forms, it endures within these walls. 

I must confess that committing these words to paper has proven a more challenging exercise than I anticipated. What does it mean to speak about the Aims of a Divinity School Education at this moment? At the geo-political and national levels, we are living through a dangerous and uncertain period in our nation’s history. 

The chilling effects of immigration policies and threats to freedom of speech intensify the already polarized atmosphere of our politics. Research universities have found themselves increasingly in the crosshairs, and the erosion of institutions of higher learning has hastened from a slow creep to a much faster clip. Swift Hall is not an island within this university or our society; we are a part of these larger ecosystems. 

More often than I care to admit, I find myself awake at three am, anxious about the world my three-year-old daughter will inherit and what meaningful difference I can make. In these moments, I have also found myself weighing the right words to say today. Perhaps it is a fitting (if daunting) task to offer my own account of the vital work we undertake at Swift Hall, and in the process, perhaps a reflection on the habits of mind necessary for sustaining such study.

The incoming classes gathered here today are embarking on professional degrees designed to train individuals in the critical study of religion for various career paths. In a 2011 essay for Criterion, a publication of the Divinity School, my esteemed colleague, Prof. Margaret Mitchell memorably described our work preparing students to talk about religion as teaching them to “play with fire”; her words about the perils and possibilities of this endeavor seem especially prescient today: 

“Those who are trained in the science and art of fire management know that fire avoided by the neglectful or fearful, or harnessed by the malevolent can do incalculable harm. They know one should not just play with fire, but work with fire, do so in an open field, put rocks around it, teach children to do the same. They also know that fire, left unchecked or ignored, will carve its own, unregulated path; if it does go out (seemingly), it will likely go underground, to surface later in unexpected ways” (p. 5). 

Fire possesses both constructive and destructive potential. Speaking about religion can contribute to human flourishing, but it can also inflict incalculable harm. One of the aims of the academic study of religion is to equip you to write and speak about religion responsibly and provide you with the tools to challenge dubious claims. 

To extend Prof. Mitchell’s image further, I would also suggest that in the landscape of higher education today, we must dedicate more of our energy to keeping this flame vibrant –  not just the spark of speaking about religion, but perhaps also the light of education and humanistic inquiry that in many institutions of higher learning has wavered, dimed, or been snuffed out. This responsibility to our colleagues and the broader purpose of education is one I feel deeply. My parents sacrificed to give me the educational opportunities they lacked. Alongside the gift of an education, they also granted me the freedom to pursue my interests and explore my talents without the added pressure to choose a career prematurely. I would not be standing here today without that freedom.

While we cannot single-handedly roll back the forces that have weakened the humanities and liberal arts curricula, the Divinity School may still have a role to play, bearing witness to the fact that an education encompasses preparation for future careers but must not be limited to that end. Through education, we engage in the critical work of building and cultivating the self in community with others, discovering who we are in the process. 

I have heard my colleagues here at Swift Hall say that we are at the center - the heart - of this campus both physically and intellectually. In this space, we attend to the questions at the heart of human existence about the divine, death, suffering, and the good, to name but a few. We bring together those who pursue answers to those questions for themselves, drawing out the ethical and theological stakes. Others study the ways individuals and communities throughout the centuries and around the globe have endeavored to answer such questions.  The academic study of religion draws upon and contributes to numerous other fields of inquiry. It is a tradition that dates back to the founding of the University of Chicago, when William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, established the Divinity School as an integral part of the University.

In this account, one of the aims for a Divinity School Education is learning how to speak and inquire about religion carefully. To pursue this aim, further skills are required. Here I would like to underscore one in particular: the acquisition of linguistic training. Among the many distinctive features of a Divinity School education at the University of Chicago is our commitment to philological rigor. 

If I could add a subtitle to my talk, it would be, “Congrats, you made it this far, now don’t miss out on studying ancient languages.”

On this campus, you have the rarest of opportunities to learn– Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Ge’ez, Old Kannada – the list goes on. The quality of instruction is unparalleled and largely unavailable elsewhere. It is a treasure not to be taken for granted.

Now some may counter, why should we spend our time learning abstruse languages when Artificial Intelligence is taking over? When we have Google Translate to do this work for us? Hasn’t someone else spent the precious hours of their life translating the texts I’m interested in, so I don’t have to?

Anyone who has studied languages deeply will recognize the flaws in this way of reasoning. Learning the intricacies of syntax and moving between languages in the delicate dance of conversation or written translation sharpens your ability to express yourself - it is not merely a mechanical task of matching the words from a base text to a dictionary entry. Whether working in a modern or ancient tongue, a translator makes critical decisions, ones whose consequences may be nudging our interpretations in one direction or another, without us realizing it if we lack access to the original language. 

The process of translation is rewarding, edifying, and meaningful for the person engaged in that work. It is the process, not simply the product. Reading a text in its original language demands discipline. It forces us to slow down, to take note. It challenges us to wrestle with and tolerate ambiguity. 

To put it more bluntly, it teaches us that the words we use matter, a vital realization when speaking about religion and what we variously describe as “religious.” 

Words evoke images and shape how we see the world. They mediate our relationship to the truth. 

I will offer a couple of examples. If there is a word whose insidious creep into our daily vernacular, I protest it is the word, “impact,” or (heaven help us) “impactful(!).” It evokes the image of a meteor slamming into the earth or some violent collision.

This may seem like a rather puny anthill to die on, but I do not think this is mere pedantic quibbling on my part. The pernicious devaluing of deeply meaningful words is worth pausing to consider, as well as the unchecked growth of jargon and filler. 

When speaking about our aims as an intellectual community, attention to language remains paramount. We must be wary of buzzwords that privilege results over the process, the calculable over the incalculable, that reduce the organic messiness of vibrant cultivated human excellence to the mechanistic. 

I do not frame my work as a professor through such a violent and coarse term as “impact.”

The act of instruction takes root in relationship, in the give and take of engaged discussion on an object of study. In my classes, I share expertise and learning I have acquired. I learn from the queries of students, and I am humbled by the ever-growing knowledge of what I have yet to learn. 

To teach is to plant the seeds of an orchard one may not live to see bear fruit. We preserve and create knowledge in turn, handing it on to the next generation, hopefully bearing our fingerprints but not marred by them. 

And in turn, those of you who are now students will carry on this sacred task, planting and reaping, tending and extending the deposit of human knowledge. This is an art. 

It gives me immense pleasure to discover some unrealized bud of an idea one of my teachers planted, years later maturing in my own mind. Articulating my daily labor through such imagery evokes in me a sense of responsibility and connection. It distinguishes what deserves to be preserved from what may be pruned. Attention to one’s language, its aesthetic and expressive qualities, generates further discoveries. I could never convey my vocation as a researcher and teacher through such a shallow vessel as the word “impact.” 

My second, more serious example, I draw from my research into the literature and biblical interpretation of late antique Christians. At the outset of my graduate studies, I learned Syriac and began translating the poetry penned by authors such as Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Serugh, and Narsai of Nisibis. 

I became entranced with their use of language, the playfulness of their biblical storytelling, and the constellations of imagery found within their writings. Editing their works from manuscripts and translating from printed editions always yield new discoveries and paths to pursue. 

In their verse homilies and hymns, word play, juxtapositions of sounds, repetition, and more enhance the rhetorical power of their poetry, but such qualities are challenging to fully capture in English. There is the pull of the Syriac text, the commitment to faithful rendering, and at times the temptation to loosen the bonds just a little to lend the English a bit of the source’s flavor. While in published translations, I must commit to and defend translation decisions, often using footnotes to render transparent the painful choices and provide readers with alternatives, I enjoy the opportunity in live translation with students to toggle between textual variants and variable renderings. 

Translating Narsai’s intricate expositions of Christological doctrine is not for the faint of heart. Knowing that the readership of these translations may be more interested in his doctrinal formulations for history of Christian thought rather than for appreciating his literary genius, I carefully mark the key terms within this theological vocabulary and his adoption of Greek loanwords. 

What I have also found in the course of translating Syriac poetry is that some terms in translation inevitably give pause to the reader, but that is a feature, not a bug. One significant term which inevitably I re-translate multiple times before settling would be the word remzā - the divine sign, alternatively translated as “hint” or “nod” or even “wink.” To give you a taste of what this sounds like, I’ll offer a couple of lines from Narsai;

The creator saw that the evil one disturbed the peace of humanity, 

and he sent his Hint to return people to the peace of his name. 

He sent his Hint through a bodily messenger, 

to convey through him the word of peace to humanity.”[2]

The remzā becomes within these works an actor, a reminder of divine presence. It is linked to the second person of the Trinity but never simply reducible to it. For Narsai, invocation of the remzā points to the steady action of the divine, arranging and driving the actions narrated in biblical literature and playing out in human history. For me, this term is an example of where the bridge between the original text and the translation must be seen and understood to be fully appreciated. 

In addition to discussing what I perceive to be key aims for the form of education fostered in the Divinity School, I wanted to say a word or two about the conditions necessary for pursuing a life of inquiry. How do we carve out the necessary quiet for deep thought? 

Here I will turn to that poet and prophet from Kentucky, Wendell Berry. Out of step with the times, Berry remains in tune with the rhythms for sustaining human labor. As you begin graduate school, his directives for writing a poem are applicable to the ascetic discipline of academic work. Berry directs us: 

Make a place to sit down. 

Sit down. Be quiet.   

You must depend upon 

affection, reading, knowledge,   

skill—more of each   

than you have—inspiration, 

work, growing older, patience,   

for patience joins time 

to eternity. Any readers 

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.[3]

The habits Berry outlines, seemingly simple, cultivate the habits of mind and body necessary for attention. One must withdraw to some degree from the business of life to clear such space. This takes time. At the outset of this talk, I addressed the palpable anxiety of our day. Cultivating a life of study has always been difficult, but it is especially so today. We are inundated with news and endless sources of distraction. When I met with some of you earlier this week, I found myself saying time and again, “this is a marathon, not a sprint.” Take heart and stay the course. 

I have risked speaking about our shared aims while paying heed to worries that creep at the boundaries of my vision. I will conclude on a decidedly different note with a passage from a speech Robert F. Kennedy delivered in 1966 at the University of Capetown marking their annual “Day of Reaffirmation of Academic and Human Freedom: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

I have found myself returning to these lines often in recent weeks. Nearly sixty years have passed, but his words are timeless and memorable. They still possess the power to inspire us and shake us free from the deadly trap of spiritual inertia. Looking at you all today, I see not the ripple, but the spark of hope. And I’m reminded that our mascot here at UChicago is none other than the Phoenix. From this day on, may you burn with a profound sense of purpose and desire to serve. May your time in Swift Hall be transformative. And may your words and deeds send forth new waves of hope to heal this wounded world. Thank you.