News
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 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
Please play this syllabus
In ‘Gaming the Gods,’ UChicago undergrads use video games as primary texts to understand religious symbolism and ritual practice Class begins with a final cutscene. Projected on a large screen, a student guides a cloaked figure toward a beam of ligh...
May 26, 2026
Kirsten Macfarlane Receives 2026 SoFCB Best Essay Award
Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has received the 2026 Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Best Essay Award for her artic...
May 26, 2026