News
So you had a near-death experience. Now what?
In a new Divinity School course, students read accounts of the briefly deceased through the lens of anthropology and Islamic thought. As Elham Mireshghi walked around the International Association for Near-Death Studies conference, her anthropologist...
October 30, 2026
Mapping Metaphysical Traditions
With Templeton support, Professor Matthew Harris co-leads a project bringing together scholars to define a tradition that runs from astrology to Afrofuturism.What is metaphysical spirituality? Definitions range from occultism (secret knowledge of or ...
October 20, 2026
Professor William Schultz honored with 2026 Academic Communicators Network Excellence Award
The University of Chicago has announced the recipients of the 2026 Academic Communicators Network (ACN) Excellence Awards, which recognize scholars who excel in sharing their research and scholarship with public audiences. Representatives from Univer...
October 14, 2026
The Aims of a Divinity Education: The Life of the Mind in the Age of AI
These remarks were delivered at the Welcome Ceremony on September 25, 2026. They have been adapted for readability.Welcome to the University of Chicago Divinity School. My task today is to inform you about the aims of a divinity school education. Unf...
October 2, 2026
Why we still care about the ‘Odyssey’
Ahead of major film release, UChicago scholars discuss gods, heroes, casting and why Homer’s epic matters 3,000 years later “Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.Odysseus, the epic’s hero and compli...
July 17, 2026
Laurie Zoloth on the Ethics of the First Synthetic Cell
Scientists have built a synthetic cell from scratch for the first time, and Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor of Biomedical Ethics, was among the voices CNN turned to for perspective on what it means.The cell, nicknamed SpudCell, was assemb...
July 8, 2026
Angie Heo on Scent, Saints, and the Senses in Religious Life
Angie Heo, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, was recently quoted in the Chicago Reader in a piece examining how fragrance operates within religious experience.The article, written by Leslie Hurtado and published June ...
June 22, 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