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Swift Hall is a place where students in Room 403, with its impressive collection of ancient Christian bas-reliefs, are as likely as not to be discussing China’s Tian-tai tradition of Buddhist thought, Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism, American pragmatism, or Arabic poetry.

It’s a place in whose basement coffee shop one overhears conversations about the validity of transcendental arguments, the impact of religiously oriented tax incentives, the literary character of Biblical Hebrew, upcoming anatomy exams, financial derivatives, what counts as “Pentecostalist,” the ritualism of the Super Bowl halftime show, and Weberian analyses of political leaders, among other things.

It’s a place that includes the delightful little room 406, a cozy room (or it would be if the heating worked properly) suitable for a seminar of five or six students at most, but often available for ad hoc use in Sanskrit exam reviews, Syriac reading groups, doctoral qualifying exams, mock job interviews, and phone calls home.

It’s a place whose largest classroom—the venerable and now audiovisually (but still not climatically) state-of-the-art room 106— is so perfectly suitable for use in film as to make it almost criminal that it has not yet been so used. Location scouts need to be made aware.

It’s a place whose third-floor lecture hall, as acoustically challenging as it is architecturally magnificent (the carved angels athwart the vaulted ceilings!), has recently been updated with new lighting and other technology, although the judicious opening and closing of windows will nonetheless continue to figure in climate control.

It’s a place whose halls are still painted with text from Helen Mirra’s 2006 public art exhibit Instance the determination, which consists of index entries from John Dewey’s Experience and Nature and Jane Addams’s Newer Ideals of Peace painted on the walls of several publicly accessible campus buildings. In Swift, we thus find “Counsel of imperfection, the, 12,” and, my favorite, “Coexistences, observed; translated into non-observed, inferred sequences, 4.”

It’s a place whose aged elevator no longer gets stuck like it used to (there was a time when this happened once or twice a term), but still includes a button for the mysteriously nonexistent floor “2M,” rumored by some to afford access to the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitābha. (Others suspect a more nefarious itinerary.)

It’s a place that has been home to more deliverers of the Gifford Lectures (Paul Tillich, Paul Ricoeur, Martha Nussbaum, David Tracy, Jean Bethke Elshtain) than anywhere else.

It’s a place where Sufi mystics and science-fiction writers discuss artificial intelligence for standing-room-only crowds, where academic conferences are overlooked by angels, where students meet over Thai food, where scholars and chaplains are formed alongside one another, and where vast amounts of coffee are consumed.

It’s a place where it’s great to have an office near the ministry suite, and not only because that has a microwave and a candy jar.

It’s a place whose portrait galleries generally exhibit a stodginess consistent with the building’s university Gothic architecture and its leaded-glass casement windows (which I’d guess are quite expensive to repair), while nonetheless boldly vivified by a brightly colored portrait of Wendy Doniger, among other paintings and posters. Also notable in the Swift art collection is the graceful dignity of the sculpture Wind Dancer, which I have noticed over the years more than any other item in Swift Hall. 

It’s a place where the first-floor common room’s handsome fireplace has served as backdrop to always well-attended Dean’s Forums on faculty books as various as Experiments in Mystical Atheism (Brook Ziporyn), The Divine Names (Yousef Casewit), The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals (Wendy Doniger), Christianity as a Way of Life (Kevin Hector), Divine Inspiration in Byzantium (Karin Krause), and Environmental Guilt and Shame (Sarah Fredericks).

It’s a place where religion’s future leaders and staunchest critics study together, holding one another accountable in conversations in classrooms, the coffee shop, and cigarette breaks out front.

And it’s a place whose front entryway I first darkened as a PhD student in 1997, with no idea that I might, after a year on the faculty at McGill University, return in 2004 as a member of the University of Chicago Divinity School faculty. 

Swift Hall is a place I’ve called home longer than any other.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: 

• "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