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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 affiliation and the increasing importance of spiritual beliefs and practices in US society, and what these implied for our respective fields of research. After two hours of animated conversation, we parted ways. To my surprise, my colleague’s final question was, “So, where is the Divinity school, anyway?”

Not quite the famous setup about Carnegie Hall, I admit, but close enough: Swift Hall sits right beside the main quad, at the center of the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park Campus, just as Carnegie Hall is located prominently in the center of the historical downtown of Naperville, Illinois. 

How could anyone not know where Swift Hall is? Yet in light of my colleague’s bafflement, the question seems worth pondering, both in its personal and general implications: “How do you get to Swift Hall?”

To first turn to the personal, or rather the biographical, my own journey began from two places at once. The first was 1970s American pop culture, in the form of the TV show Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as a Chinese Shaolin monk traveling the American West in search of his father (Bruce Lee had been turned down for the role). Via a bad and—historically speaking—somewhat belated bout of the ninja craze, I was led to a small, local Zen Buddhist meditation group. To quote Master Kan, “The heart of a wise man is tranquil and still. Thus, it is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of everything. Be like still water.”

The second was the discovery of a book on Renaissance occultism in the, literally and metaphorically, shadier sections of a local bookstore. From bad editions of De occulta philosophia and Steganographia, this led to tabletop role-playing games, countless fantasy novels (Michael Moorcock alongside J.R.R. Tolkien, as my attempts to learn Sindarin miserably failed), and the works of Mircea Eliade; culminating in the realization that necromancy was not much of a workable career choice. Buddhist Studies, on the other hand, seemed to offer a commonsense alternative involving a transferable skill set. I enrolled in a degree program in comparative religion with a focus on East Asian traditions, and eventually obtained a doctorate in Buddhist Studies focusing on the esoteric lore of premodern Japanese Buddhism, a body of knowledge that includes, I am happy to note, divining from the dead. 

Having traversed a variety of institutional and intellectual configurations in the UK, Japan, and Germany, I eventually came to the U.S. and Swift Hall. Over the next three years of conversations with colleagues and students, I was surprised, and, in all honesty, a little disappointed to learn that here the circumstances of my departure and many turns of my journey were considered common place, and indeed somewhat boring. In a place haunted by sagely robbers, kabbalistic Quakers, and Byzantine preachers, neither Agrippa nor Elric of Melniboné seemed terribly out of place. My ghosts had found a home.

Let me now turn from the discovery of the homely to the general. While denominational membership indeed might decline, 88 percent of Americans believe in a higher power, 57 percent believe that spirits inhabit non-human animals, and 61 percent believe in hell, 22 percent meditate, and no fewer than 30 percent testify to having encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force; finally, a fascinating 10 percent identify as religious but not spiritual. As I look out of my office window writing this, these numbers imply that: at least one of the shirtless students playing that weird game in which they bounce a ball off the middle of a trampoline has encountered a spirit; at least two of that group of graduates in their stoles (where does that sartorial choice come from, I wonder?) walking over towards the library should worry about eternal damnation; more than twenty of all students on the quad right now, by my count, meditate; and almost all of them believe that “there is more…”

We inmates of Swift Hall, in short, might be haunted by the esoteric, at least as others see it, but our concerns are of a commonplace—a shared human concern. 

So, how do you get to Swift Hall? From strange beginnings, perhaps, but also right on the main quad. Or, as Master Kan never answered my psychologically inclined colleague, “You don’t get to Swift Hall; you are already there.”

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: 

• "On the 'Advantages of Marginality' in Swift Hall," by Sheila E. Jelen, Director of MA/AMRS Studies, Professor of Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture and History of Judaism
• "Nothing is Final," by Anand Venkatkrishnan, Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in South Asia
• "The Flight of American Christianity," by William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions
• "A Place Like No Other" by Dan Arnold, John Henry Barrows Professor of the Philosophy of Religions
• "Joy, Rest, and the Work of Ethics" By Sarah E. Fredericks, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics
• "Exploring the Worlds of the Religions" by William Schweiker, Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics
• "Choosing Swift Again and Again," by Sarah Hammerschlag, John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism
• "The Idea of the University of Chicago Divinity School," by Richard A. Rosengarten, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature 
• "Tough-Minded, Tender-Hearted" by Dwight N. Hopkins, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor
• "If Not Here, Where?" by Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies
• "Swift Hall and the Good Life" by Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande, Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies
• "Performance is What Makes Religion Matter" by Abimbola Adelakun, Associate Professor of Global Christianity
• "The Space Always Wins" by Cynthia G. Lindner, Director of Ministry Studies and Clinical Faculty for Preaching and Pastoral Care
• “Our Better Angels”: Reflections on My Years in Swift Hall by Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant MacLear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity
• "The Divinity School and the Hebrew Bible: Past, Present, and Future" by Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible