News
Divinity School Faculty Launch Resource on Emotion and Climate Resilience
What does it mean to live well in the face of climate change? At first glance, the question can seem beside the point. When confronted with evidence of a warming planet and its consequences for ecosystems and communities, turning inward toward one's ...
June 3, 2026
The Flight of American Christianity
Martin Gardner's The Flight of Peter Fromm and the Making of Modern American Religion Quick: Name the most accomplished fictional scholar to teach at Swift Hall. The easy answer is Franz Bibfeldt, that spoof of academic faddishness and triviality. Bu...
June 3, 2026
"How do you get to Swift Hall?"
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 aff...
June 3, 2026
On the “Advantages of Marginality” in Swift Hall
Sheila Jelen on Dvora Baron, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Finding a Home in Swift Hall. In Reading Jewish Women, Iris Parush claims that the marginalization of Jewish women from the educational hierarchies in traditional East European Jewish society...
June 2, 2026
Nothing is Final
On South Asian religion, postcolonial critique, and the future of the field It is difficult to imagine the future of a field whose past is littered with skeletons. This is a question for all forms of knowledge that emerge in American universities, wh...
June 1, 2026
Please play this syllabus
In ‘Gaming the Gods,’ UChicago undergrads use video games as primary texts to understand religious symbolism and ritual practice Class begins with a final cutscene. Projected on a large screen, a student guides a cloaked figure toward a beam of ligh...
May 26, 2026
Kirsten Macfarlane Receives 2026 SoFCB Best Essay Award
Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has received the 2026 Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Best Essay Award for her artic...
May 26, 2026
A Place Like No Other
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 Ar...
May 20, 2026
If This, Then What: Russell Johnson Wins Swogger Award for Classroom Teaching
Mohamed Abdelhafez, Rashauna Johnson, Russell Johnson and Mark Osadjan all have been honored with the Glenn and Claire Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Teaching, which recognizes outstanding teachers with College appointments who introduce stude...
May 18, 2026
Exacting and Invested: Jeffrey Stackert Honored for PhD Teaching and Mentoring
Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School and in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and in the College, approaches teaching with a principle that might seem counterintuitive: rigor is a form o...
May 18, 2026