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The bluster of early May in Hyde Park didn’t dim the joy Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes, AB’77, AM’79, DMN’82, felt upon returning to Chicago to receive a 2025 University of Chicago Alumni Award for Professional Achievement.

“Here, I learned the value of being as clear and precise and honest as possible when talking, writing, thinking, feeling, doing,” Townes said in her remarks at the May 1 ceremony. “And it is because of this skill, which began here in Cobb Hall, that I want to thank the Alumni Association for this award—and the University for the education I received here that has made it so.”

Many firsts have marked Townes’ decades-spanning career as a theologian and social ethicist: She was the first Black woman to serve as associate dean for academic affairs at Yale Divinity School; in 2005, she became the first Black woman elected to the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion; and in 2022, she was named the first Black woman to serve as president of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Her pathbreaking work in Womanist Ethics includes Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Scholars Press, 1993), and Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) among others. Townes is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion and Black Studies at Boston University. Prior to this role, she served as Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School and as University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society.

Criteria sat down with Townes ahead of the Alumni Awards ceremony to reflect on her time at UChicago, the relevance of studying religion in 2025, and the public role of scholars.

Criteria: How was your experience at the University of Chicago? What did you gain from your education here?

Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes: It wasn’t always pleasant. On my first day of the MDiv program, Al Pitcher sat next to me and said, “I feel so sorry for you—you’re going to be lonely here.”

I thought it was interesting. I had been an undergrad here and had been in and out of the Divinity School plenty. The building wasn’t intimidating, and I was finally getting to do what I really wanted to do: study religion. What he meant was, I’m pretty sure, that there were no other students of color. If there were, I didn’t see them—so there was no immediate cohort to latch onto.

The next year, Robert Franklin came, and we increased our numbers by 100 percent. That was great!

The first year was a little lonely. But what Chicago does—when it does it well—is encourage you to learn how to think and how to analyze a diversity of viewpoints. Somewhere in there, you find yourself. You come to understand what you believe, and why. And you learn how to say it.

It really is a company of scholars in the best sense of the word.

Criteria: In 2025, why is it important to continue the study of religion?

Townes: Religion helps people understand who they are.

Learning how that happens for different people, in different religions—not from soundbites or sensationalized media portrayals, but by truly studying why someone believes what they believe and how they express it—can make society more humane. And we certainly need more of that right now.

Criteria: Where do you think scholars of religion, theologians, philosophers, anthropologists—should be inserting themselves in public conversations?

Townes: If we have the opportunity to share our knowledge beyond the classroom, beyond the university, we should be doing it. We’ve spent a lot of time and money amassing this knowledge. I think we have a mandate not just to share what we think the public should know—but what they need to know.

Ignorance spreads so much faster than knowledge, especially if no one speaks up to say: “That’s not quite how it works,” or “That’s not what they believe—here’s the history.” What we do when we study religion—looking at how it informs culture, and how culture evolves or doesn’t—is important for the public to understand.

A little education goes a long way.