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Reading the New York Times one evening in late September, I was pleased to see a conversation reported between Peter Wehner and Marilynne Robinson, the great novelist whose protagonist, John Ames of Gilead, has made an indelible impression on readers. As always, I was delighted to read Robinson’s reflections on religion, Calvin, and Karl Barth; predestination, aesthetics, and theology.

I was also personally pleased because two years ago, in May 2023, Robinson was a speaker at the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. At the time, the Australian historian Peter Harrison was a guest professor at the Divinity School, and to honor his scholarship, we organized a conference on science and religion.

As co-director of the Marty Center alongside Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion, I told Dean James Robinson about my plan to invite the author after reading her article on science and religion in the New York Review of Books, titled “A Theology of the Present Moment.” I also told him that I was not sure it would be a good idea to bring a novelist into the discussion. What would the other speakers, all academics, say? In other words, when I told the Dean about my idea, I was more or less ready to shelve it. Instead, the notion was met with encouragement and enthusiasm.

Pleasantly surprised and emboldened, I went for it. Marilynne Robinson was invited, she agreed to come, and the other speakers, as well as the audience, were all enthused by her presence. It was not just that my dream was realized, but that the dream became a reality in Swift Hall a few months later.

This magical quality is, quintessentially, what Swift Hall stands for to me: it gathers rays of light from the outside world, chews on them and reflects on them, and sends them back refined. There is no doubt that Swift Hall is part of the academic world, part of the University of Chicago, but it is also a negotiated space as it operates in the real world, part of a broader landscape, a bigger world.

In that sense, we are, at Swift Hall, not so much in a laboratory as we are in a garden. There are no closed walls here, no hiding from the outside, but instead an open vista onto the world. Of course, as a biblical image, the garden reminds us of Genesis, and we know all too well what could have gone well there and what did not. In a modified version, that could be true for Swift as well, yet the openness remains. The welcoming embrace, as a trial-and-error mentality, is lodged in the very image of the garden and is mainly present in the verb “to garden.” Our “gardening” brings us together in Swift Hall, and that collective care has made the Divinity School a strong community in my nearly twenty years at the University.

Of course, all that gardening happens within the rhythm of the academic year. In the quarter system, to which I am still not completely acclimated, we are busy attending to the work of scholars. But used to it or not, I have certainly come to appreciate the cycle. One of my daughters attended the University of Chicago for her undergraduate degree, and she told me that, thanks to the quarter system, she learned more here than she could anywhere else. The reason, she said, is that it exposes students to many options and, in doing so, forces them to choose carefully, while still allowing room to build on their choices. Through this wealth of choice, they learn.

As my colleagues and I currently prepare ourselves for the many courses in the quarter ahead, we are meeting highly gifted students: MDivs, master’s students, PhDs, and undergraduates, no matter what subfield they study. This brings me to another remarkable point about Swift Hall. While it attracts people from different degree programs, academic fields, and perspectives, it does so all the more powerfully because of its central location on the University’s main quad.

Unlike other universities, the University of Chicago does not separate its departments of religion or religious studies from its Divinity School, a separation that is not only quite common nationally but also internationally. As my husband, a journalist, once told me, after the church seminary decided to leave when we tried to implement a similar model in my previous post at Utrecht University, “You cannot explain this to anybody.”

The academic field of religion is already small. To make it even smaller by dividing one garden into several cordoned-off plots makes no sense. Not only does it diminish our critical mass, but it also dims the sparks of friendship and collegiality that allow the aforementioned trial-and-error method to succeed.

For instance, my current office in Swift Hall was once inhabited by Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions, and, before Bruce, Anthony Yu, Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus (1938–2015). Bruce and I have different viewpoints on many aspects of religion. I learned this over the years by knocking on his door for advice. One might easily picture us in discrete institutional settings, Bruce in a religious studies department as the historian of religion that he is, and me in a divinity school as a theologian and historian of Christianity. Yet it was to someone like Bruce that I felt closest, learned the most from, and was always most curious to hear what he would say next.

For heaven’s sake, why would we want to limit the discussion about religion when we can make it as rich and powerful as we would like it to be? Why go for the safety of a monoculture when we can have a garden, a rich field allowing for many modes of cultivation? Swift Hall’s central location on the quad reflects and reaffirms precisely that richness, as the building is approached by and draws students and faculty from multiple directions.

No doubt, the push to divide a faculty of religion has often come from Christians in the midst of other religionists. Yet, as I have argued repeatedly to prospective students in the History of Christianity, it is better to study the religion to which you belong in the company of other students, including nonbelievers, in order to develop the strongest viewpoints and defenses. In a similarly contrarian way, I have known scholars of many different religions who want to distance themselves from theology or divinity schools to avoid Christian influence.

That may be an exaggerated reaction, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a former dean of the Divinity School. He confessed that he found it strange that scholars in the Divinity School would rarely discuss their own religious backgrounds, to the point of actively avoiding association with faith-related issues. Perhaps it is because scholars of religion today want to be seen first as objective academics rather than intellectual acolytes of a particular tradition. My own explanation, however, has been that nationalism seems to play the role formerly held by religion, for I have a hard time imagining that a scholar of American history would not somehow draw on their own American background in their approach to scholarship. Why, then, do scholars of religion seek to alienate themselves from their personal connections to the field?

I am writing this for a reason, and that reason is to sketch a future for the study of religion in which there will be more communication among students of individual traditions, less hesitancy to speak about religious attachments, and more attentiveness to what I would like to call the value of transreligious knowledge, knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of individual faiths and practices.

Earlier this year, while listening to Yousef Casewit, Associate Professor of Qur’anic studies, speak at a Dean’s Forum about the Islamic medieval thinker ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, a pupil of Ibn ʿArabī, on The Divine Names, I suddenly realized that what he was doing in uncovering the thought patterns of this Islamic thinker was close to what I had been doing with one of my favorite thinkers, John the Scot Eriugena. That one was Muslim, and the other Christian, seemed to matter less than the fact that they were kindred spirits, perhaps because they were both medieval, spiritually sensitive philosophers.

It was a shock to my system, a system more accustomed to seeing resonance within a field such as the History of Christianity than within Qur’anic studies. But perhaps we can, or should, have a broader network of references. Maybe it is only conventional standards holding us back from traversing the garden to learn from others tending their seeds.

In the last decade, I have had students who want to study Arabic Christians in the Middle East, or write their dissertations on Eriugena, Alfarabi, and Abelard. These choices would not have been so easily made forty years ago. But here in Swift Hall, my colleagues and I engage in a rich tradition of unconventional choices that continue to define and redefine the fields we study. For instance, my predecessor Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity, had an interest in comparative mysticism on which I build in my research. My colleague William Schweiker, Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics, has likewise made forays into Islam and Buddhism. It is only partly a new way of gardening that I am engaging in, to use the language I introduced earlier. With the richness of horticultural insights already on site, this expansion signifies more than a mere surface extension; it allows us to reach greater depth. The result can only make Swift Hall even more fertile, an even richer place for learning and creating knowledge about religion.

Finally, I want to return to my title, “Our Better Angels.” I am inspired by the Director of Ministry Studies and Clinical Faculty for Preaching and Pastoral Care, Cynthia Lindner’s speech during the opening ceremonies of the 2025–26 academic year. She urged the Divinity School community to look up at the angels staring down from the eaves of the Lecture Hall and noted that, though they all hold books, they are not looking down into them. So, what are they looking at?

Like any citizen of Swift Hall, I have also often looked at those angels and wondered what they might stand for. I myself see them as the embodiment of “our better angels”—the ones that make us think, reflect, and especially garden in community, urging us to fulfill our tasks together more effectively than we could alone. And even in our solitary pursuits, true to their ethereal quality, these angels can peek inside our offices, lining the corridors of Swift Hall, as we undertake our research.

One of the nicest responses I received to my last book on Eriugena and Emerson (Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson, Stanford, 2020) came from the former president of the Dutch Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. When I sent him the book, he wrote back that he had not seen such a book emerge from a Dutch theology department. I smiled when I read this and nodded in agreement. The garden is Swift Hall’s, my book is solely my own, but all of our work is overseen, if not elevated, by “our better angels.” 

May they continue in their oversight for another one hundred years.