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News RSS feed https://divinity.uchicago.edu/rss/sightings.xml This RSS feed provides News content from UChicago's Divinity School. Student Lilia Ellis on the Ethics of Assisted Suicide Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:24:31 -0500 In a new essay for The Christian Century, Ellis argues that debates over physician-assisted suicide skip past a more basic question: why people are in pain, and why their illnesses are considered incurable to begin with. Divinity School student Lilia Ellis published "The Social Failure Behind Assisted Suicide" in The Christian Century, drawing on her own experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a poorly understood chronic illness, to challenge how both sides of the physician-assisted suicide (PAS) debate frame the issue. Advocates and opponents alike tend to treat pain and incurability as fixed facts, she writes, rather than asking where they come from.Ellis traces her own illness's lack of treatment options to decades of low federal research funding, a pattern she connects to broader disparities in how illnesses affecting women and other marginalized groups get studied and believed. "It is a social failure, not a biological fact," she writes of ME's untreatability.The essay extends that argument to isolation, disability, and mental health, drawing on assisted-suicide data from Canada and the Netherlands to show how inadequate social and medical support, not just illness, often shapes who chooses PAS. Ellis calls for a Christian ethic grounded in mutual obligation, rather than individual autonomy, as the more honest response.Read the full essay in The Christian Century. <h3>In a new essay for <a href="https://www.christiancentury.org/">The Christian Century</a>, Ellis argues that debates over physician-assisted suicide skip past a more basic question: why people are in pain, and why their illnesses are considered incurable to begin with.</h3> Divinity School student Lilia Ellis published "The Social Failure Behind Assisted Suicide" in The Christian Century, drawing on her own experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a poorly understood chronic illness, to challenge how both sides of the physician-assisted suicide (PAS) debate frame the issue. Advocates and opponents alike tend to treat pain and incurability as fixed facts, she writes, rather than asking where they come from.Ellis traces her own illness's lack of treatment options to decades of low federal research funding, a pattern she connects to broader disparities in how illnesses affecting women and other marginalized groups get studied and believed. "It is a social failure, not a biological fact," she writes of ME's untreatability.The essay extends that argument to isolation, disability, and mental health, drawing on assisted-suicide data from Canada and the Netherlands to show how inadequate social and medical support, not just illness, often shapes who chooses PAS. Ellis calls for a Christian ethic grounded in mutual obligation, rather than individual autonomy, as the more honest response.<a href="https://www.christiancentury.org/features/social-failure-behind-assisted-suicide">Read the full essay in The Christian Century.</a> Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-08/2026-08-pain_0.jpg Illustration by Michael Morgenstern https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/student-lilia-ellis-ethics-assisted-suicide https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/student-lilia-ellis-ethics-assisted-suicide Pop Religion | A Theme for Generations Hereafter: Professor Carolina López-Ruiz on Nolan's Odyssey, Faith, Fate, and Cultural Exchange in the Ancient Mediterranean Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:19:32 -0500 “And tell me too why you weep and lament thus bitterly when you hear told what things befell the Argives and Ilium. These things were the doing of the gods; they spun for mortals this thread of doom to become a theme for generations hereafter.”  Homer, Odyssey 8, translated by Walter Shewring  Every era gets the Odyssey it deserves, a Washington Post headline announced last month. Ours belongs to Christopher Nolan. Nolan casts Odysseus as a tender yet fierce hero who cannot get home until he has untangled the psychological damage wrought by violence he both committed and witnessed. The film looks like the ancient world and yet departs from the text in myriad ways. “The beauty of these myths and these stories and these old texts is in the adaptations and in the ways they can be morphed into different things as time evolves,” said Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Chair of the Department of Classics. “We call them classics because there is something of universal beauty and value that has lasted for centuries.”López-Ruiz studies how religion and culture moved around the ancient Mediterranean. She talked with Criteria about what Nolan’s film does with a poem roughly 2,700 years old.  This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Before the film opened, you told UChicago News that an adaptation could modernize the gods into abstraction or keep them fully Homeric, visible and quarreling, and that you preferred the second. Nolan’s film does both. We see apparitions of Athena, but Poseidon is only a roiling sea. Does that work?The original audience of the Odyssey imagined gods as bigger, marked by extraordinary physicality. In ancient reliefs and other objects, where a person makes an offering to a divine being, the deity appears maybe two heads taller. And in the epic poems, the gods are said to be radiant. There is some kind of shine to them. Athena's eyes are glimmering.Nolan’s gods did not come across as epic enough for me. But I was looking at it through my own expectations. When it is a text you teach, you are more predisposed to be critical, and nothing is going to match. It was an adventure, for sure, but it did not quite transmit that awe-inspiring feeling. By trying to make the story feel closer to what a human on such a journey would actually experience—battered and lonely and troubled—maybe it loses a little bit of the magic. Homer’s Odysseus was also curious, arrogant, witty, and insatiable for adventure, among other things. In a story for Today,  Joel Christensen, a professor of classics at CUNY, criticized the film for reducing Zeus's law to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," saying ancient hospitality is not the golden rule. From where you sit, what is xenia actually? There is something universal about the golden rule. I am sure it appears in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and elsewhere. If there is one universal ethical rule, it is probably that, and some of it underlies the idea of xenia, of guest friendship.In Greek culture, xenia becomes a sacred law, encoded in a particular way. There is an epithet of Zeus that expresses this: Zeus Xenios, Zeus of guest friendship, or Zeus of foreigners, because xenos is “foreigner, stranger.” It is part of unwritten law, religious law. Is the "stranger who might be a god” shared beyond Greek culture? And to speak directly to your scholarship, how did Homer's epics contribute to exchange among Greek, Phoenician, and Near Eastern traditions?This is the hardest question. To say how common the motif is would require me to do some research. I could think of the Hebrew Bible episode with Abraham and Sarah and the strangers, or Emmaus in the New Testament, but there might be instances in Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature; I just could not think of a famous one. So this may be more common in Greek mythology where gods very often appear disguised as people. But I may be missing something.I love the larger question, though. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad has a very good parallel in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the story of Odysseus, the king who travels and fights monsters, loses friends, goes to the underworld (a lone female character tells him how), and ends up learning some kind of wisdom, is also the story of Gilgamesh.The more similarity there is among various cultures’ storm gods, love goddesses, and sea gods, and in how people sacrifice to them and tell stories about them, the easier it becomes to adopt more features across their mythologies. The Canaanite storm god is called the Cloud Rider. Maybe you pick up that epithet for Zeus, and they are both cloud riders. So much of what characterizes the gods in Greek epic runs from the Canaanites to Mesopotamia and, to some degree, the Hebrew Bible: the vocabulary, the episodes, the ways they express their power. The epics are repositories for adaptations from other people's motifs, and at the same time they transmit those new versions onward. The film's climax turns on Calypso telling Odysseus that to get home he must let go of control and accept Poseidon's punishment. That it will take faith and surrender. Faith is not obviously a Homeric category. What is the film reaching for? In the film, the idea that this is all a psychological process, that Odysseus has to let go of whatever is holding him back, including his grudge with the gods, and then Poseidon will take him home, is totally new. It is not in the Homeric poem. Poseidon is never helping Odysseus.But the concept of faith, of "just trust in the gods," I do not see it in Homer.The origin of the word faith is pistis, but that meant something more like “hope” and “trust.” There is trust in the poem, but it is trust in fate. The will of Zeus, or the will of the gods, is going to be accomplished no matter what you do. This overlaps a bit with the modern construction of faith, but it is a matter of knowing that the gods, and the Moirai, the goddesses also called the Fates, have laid a future out for you, and that you cannot overrule. In some cases, not even Zeus can.Poseidon's grudge against Odysseus might look petty and personal. It is not. Odysseus has a pattern of being a bit too arrogant, of challenging the gods, and of transgressing divine law, for instance when he boasts against the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son. That is not faith. That is hubris.  Nolan's Calypso is a woman on an island. In the poem, she is a goddess with something specific to offer. What does that cost?What bothered me a bit is that it is not clear she is a goddess. But she is. Maybe they are taking the standpoint of the hero, who is not sure, the same as with Athena (Odysseus knows her; other characters do not when she takes another form).Because of that choice, the audience misses the important point that she offers him immortality. He could have stayed on that island and never died. He chooses his family and Ithaca instead. All of that is lost because Nolan is trying to make the story more human in scale. So is this the Odyssey we need right now?I think the film does speak to the modern audience, and I am very happy that a lot of people are watching it and will become curious about the myths, religion, and Homer.Pop Religion is a series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.   Read More Pop Religion:Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black RageOutside of History: 'Marty Supreme' and the American Dream with Professor Sarah HammerschlagHunger and Thirst: Embodied Religion in The Testament of Ann Lee with Professor William Schultz <h3>“And tell me too why you weep and lament thus bitterly when you hear told what things befell the Argives and Ilium. These things were the doing of the gods; they spun for mortals this thread of doom to become a theme for generations hereafter.” </h3><h3> </h3><h3>Homer, Odyssey 8, translated by Walter Shewring </h3> Every era gets the Odyssey it deserves, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/17/what-even-is-the-odyssey/">a Washington Post</a> headline announced last month. Ours belongs to <a href="https://www.odysseymovie.com/">Christopher Nolan</a>. Nolan casts Odysseus as a tender yet fierce hero who cannot get home until he has untangled the psychological damage wrought by violence he both committed and witnessed. The film looks like the ancient world and yet departs from the text in myriad ways. “The beauty of these myths and these stories and these old texts is in the adaptations and in the ways they can be morphed into different things as time evolves,” said Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Chair of the Department of Classics. “We call them classics because there is something of universal beauty and value that has lasted for centuries.”López-Ruiz studies how religion and culture moved around the ancient Mediterranean. She talked with Criteria about what Nolan’s film does with a poem roughly 2,700 years old.  This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Before the film opened, you told UChicago News that an adaptation could modernize the gods into abstraction or keep them fully Homeric, visible and quarreling, and that you preferred the second. Nolan’s film does both. We see apparitions of Athena, but Poseidon is only a roiling sea. Does that work?The original audience of the Odyssey imagined gods as bigger, marked by extraordinary physicality. In ancient reliefs and other objects, where a person makes an offering to a divine being, the deity appears maybe two heads taller. And in the epic poems, the gods are said to be radiant. There is some kind of shine to them. Athena's eyes are glimmering.Nolan’s gods did not come across as epic enough for me. But I was looking at it through my own expectations. When it is a text you teach, you are more predisposed to be critical, and nothing is going to match. It was an adventure, for sure, but it did not quite transmit that awe-inspiring feeling. By trying to make the story feel closer to what a human on such a journey would actually experience—battered and lonely and troubled—maybe it loses a little bit of the magic. Homer’s Odysseus was also curious, arrogant, witty, and insatiable for adventure, among other things. <a href="https://www.today.com/popculture/movies/the-odyssey-classics-professors-review-rcna588405">In a story for Today</a>,  Joel Christensen, a professor of classics at CUNY, criticized the film for reducing Zeus's law to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," saying ancient hospitality is not the golden rule. From where you sit, what is xenia actually? There is something universal about the golden rule. I am sure it appears in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and elsewhere. If there is one universal ethical rule, it is probably that, and some of it underlies the idea of xenia, of guest friendship.In Greek culture, xenia becomes a sacred law, encoded in a particular way. There is an epithet of Zeus that expresses this: Zeus Xenios, Zeus of guest friendship, or Zeus of foreigners, because xenos is “foreigner, stranger.” It is part of unwritten law, religious law. Is the "stranger who might be a god” shared beyond Greek culture? And to speak directly to your scholarship, how did Homer's epics contribute to exchange among Greek, Phoenician, and Near Eastern traditions?This is the hardest question. To say how common the motif is would require me to do some research. I could think of the Hebrew Bible episode with Abraham and Sarah and the strangers, or Emmaus in the New Testament, but there might be instances in Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature; I just could not think of a famous one. So this may be more common in Greek mythology where gods very often appear disguised as people. But I may be missing something.I love the larger question, though. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad has a very good parallel in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the story of Odysseus, the king who travels and fights monsters, loses friends, goes to the underworld (a lone female character tells him how), and ends up learning some kind of wisdom, is also the story of Gilgamesh.The more similarity there is among various cultures’ storm gods, love goddesses, and sea gods, and in how people sacrifice to them and tell stories about them, the easier it becomes to adopt more features across their mythologies. The Canaanite storm god is called the Cloud Rider. Maybe you pick up that epithet for Zeus, and they are both cloud riders. So much of what characterizes the gods in Greek epic runs from the Canaanites to Mesopotamia and, to some degree, the Hebrew Bible: the vocabulary, the episodes, the ways they express their power. The epics are repositories for adaptations from other people's motifs, and at the same time they transmit those new versions onward. The film's climax turns on Calypso telling Odysseus that to get home he must let go of control and accept Poseidon's punishment. That it will take faith and surrender. Faith is not obviously a Homeric category. What is the film reaching for? In the film, the idea that this is all a psychological process, that Odysseus has to let go of whatever is holding him back, including his grudge with the gods, and then Poseidon will take him home, is totally new. It is not in the Homeric poem. Poseidon is never helping Odysseus.But the concept of faith, of "just trust in the gods," I do not see it in Homer.The origin of the word faith is pistis, but that meant something more like “hope” and “trust.” There is trust in the poem, but it is trust in fate. The will of Zeus, or the will of the gods, is going to be accomplished no matter what you do. This overlaps a bit with the modern construction of faith, but it is a matter of knowing that the gods, and the Moirai, the goddesses also called the Fates, have laid a future out for you, and that you cannot overrule. In some cases, not even Zeus can.Poseidon's grudge against Odysseus might look petty and personal. It is not. Odysseus has a pattern of being a bit too arrogant, of challenging the gods, and of transgressing divine law, for instance when he boasts against the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son. That is not faith. That is hubris.  Nolan's Calypso is a woman on an island. In the poem, she is a goddess with something specific to offer. What does that cost?What bothered me a bit is that it is not clear she is a goddess. But she is. Maybe they are taking the standpoint of the hero, who is not sure, the same as with Athena (Odysseus knows her; other characters do not when she takes another form).Because of that choice, the audience misses the important point that she offers him immortality. He could have stayed on that island and never died. He chooses his family and Ithaca instead. All of that is lost because Nolan is trying to make the story more human in scale. So is this the Odyssey we need right now?I think the film does speak to the modern audience, and I am very happy that a lot of people are watching it and will become curious about the myths, religion, and Homer.<hr><h5 style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:uchicago;font-size:1.25rem;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:500;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0px;orphans:2;text-align:left;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Pop Religion is a series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.   </h5><h5 style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-family:uchicago;font-size:1.25rem;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:500;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0px;orphans:2;text-align:left;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Read More Pop Religion:</h5><ul><li data-list-item-id="e08d88cf9e4e65fa6b5dac74e2febf57b"><h5><a href="/news/pop-religion-two-nations-one-womb-professor-abimbola-adelakun-god-destiny-sin-and-religious">Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black Rage</a></h5></li><li style="box-sizing:border-box;" data-list-item-id="ebf3e9f03077d2cd55d4acb5296d8b80e"><h5 style="box-sizing:border-box;color:inherit;font-family:inherit;font-size:1.25rem;font-weight:500;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0px;"><a style="background-color:transparent;box-sizing:border-box;color:maroon;text-decoration:none;" href="https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-outside-history-marty-supreme-and-american-dream" tabindex="-1">Outside of History: 'Marty Supreme' and the American Dream with Professor Sarah Hammerschlag</a></h5></li><li style="box-sizing:border-box;" data-list-item-id="ee0ffc3cd61fc9d84bd8eb552594d0282"><h5 style="box-sizing:border-box;color:inherit;font-family:inherit;font-size:1.25rem;font-weight:500;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0px;"><a style="background-color:transparent;box-sizing:border-box;color:maroon;text-decoration:none;" href="https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-hunger-and-thirst-embodied-religion-testament-ann-lee" tabindex="-1">Hunger and Thirst: Embodied Religion in The Testament of Ann Lee</a> with Professor William Schultz</h5></li></ul> Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-08/ct-45410_msg.jpg Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-theme-generations-hereafter-professor-carolina-lopez-ruiz-nolans-odyssey-faith https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-theme-generations-hereafter-professor-carolina-lopez-ruiz-nolans-odyssey-faith Why we still care about the ‘Odyssey’ Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:24:20 -0500 Ahead of major film release, UChicago scholars discuss gods, heroes, casting and why Homer’s epic matters 3,000 years later “Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.Odysseus, the epic’s hero and complicated man in question, is returning home from the Trojan War when he is waylaid by the gods. For 10 years, the king of Ithaca endures shipwrecks, enslavement, monsters and seduction to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.“The Odyssey is a story of how hard it is to come home,” said Emily Austin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Chicago. “This is a supremely relatable human experience.”Attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic has been retold, retranslated and readapted countless times. At UChicago, the Odyssey is a foundational text in the undergraduate Core curriculum. On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, A-list-studded take on Odysseus’s journey home will be released in theaters. Even before its release, the film, shot on massive IMAX cameras, sparked an equally outsized internet backlash on everything from the armor to the dialog to the casting choices.We spoke with UChicago’s Assoc. Prof. Emily Austin, an expert on Homer, Prof. Patrice Rankine, who studies the intersection of ancient Greco-Roman classics with contemporary issues of race, gender and politics, and the Divinity School’s Prof. Carolina López-Ruiz, a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions, to understand why we remain so invested in this ancient tale and what this version might say about our current culture. Read the full Q&A at https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-we-still-care-about-odyssey  <h3>Ahead of major film release, UChicago scholars discuss gods, heroes, casting and why Homer’s epic matters 3,000 years later</h3> “Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.Odysseus, the epic’s hero and complicated man in question, is returning home from the Trojan War when he is waylaid by the gods. For 10 years, the king of Ithaca endures shipwrecks, enslavement, monsters and seduction to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.“The Odyssey is a story of how hard it is to come home,” said Emily Austin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Chicago. “This is a supremely relatable human experience.”Attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic has been retold, retranslated and readapted countless times. At UChicago, the Odyssey is a foundational text in the undergraduate Core curriculum. On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, A-list-studded take on Odysseus’s journey home will be released in theaters. Even before its release, the film, shot on massive IMAX cameras, sparked an equally outsized internet backlash on everything from the armor to the dialog to the casting choices.<div>We spoke with UChicago’s Assoc. Prof. Emily Austin, an expert on Homer, Prof. Patrice Rankine, who studies the intersection of ancient Greco-Roman classics with contemporary issues of race, gender and politics, and the Divinity School’s Prof. Carolina López-Ruiz, a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions, to understand why we remain so invested in this ancient tale and what this version might say about our current culture. <h3>Read the full Q&A at <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-we-still-care-about-odyssey">https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-we-still-care-about-odyssey</a></h3><h3> </h3></div> Tori Lee https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-07/odyssey-still-frame.jpg https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/why-we-still-care-about-odyssey https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/why-we-still-care-about-odyssey New Journal of Religion Issue Explores Susan Taubes, Kant, and the Politics of the Zhuangzi Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:02:47 -0500 The July 2026 issue of the Journal of Religion is now available, featuring new scholarship on modern Jewish thought, philosophy of religion, and classical Chinese political thought.The issue opens with a feature article examining the work of writer and philosopher Susan Taubes, whose reflections on suffering, exile, and meaning continue to resonate across the study of religion. The essay traces Taubes's refusal of theodicy, her resistance to explaining or justifying suffering, and explores her conviction that, as she once wrote, "the world cannot be justified."Edited by Divinity School faculty Sarah Hammerschlag, Willemien Otten, and Brook Ziporyn, the issue also includes new research on Immanuel Kant's understanding of God and an exploration of the political dimensions of the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Chinese philosophy.Published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press, the Journal of Religion has been a leading venue for scholarship in religious studies and theology for more than a century. Since 1921, it has published original research spanning the history, philosophy, and critical study of religion across traditions, disciplines, and historical periods.The July issue continues that tradition, bringing together scholarship that asks enduring questions about suffering, ethics, politics, and the nature of religious thought.The complete issue is available through the University of Chicago Press. The July 2026 issue of the <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jr/2026/106/3">Journal of Religion</a> is now available, featuring new scholarship on modern Jewish thought, philosophy of religion, and classical Chinese political thought.The issue opens with a feature article examining the work of writer and philosopher <a href="https://www.nyrb.com/collections/susan-taubes">Susan Taubes</a>, whose reflections on suffering, exile, and meaning continue to resonate across the study of religion. The essay traces Taubes's refusal of theodicy, her resistance to explaining or justifying suffering, and explores her conviction that, as she once wrote, "the world cannot be justified."Edited by Divinity School faculty <a href="/directory/sarah-hammerschlag">Sarah Hammerschlag</a>, <a href="/directory/willemien-otten">Willemien Otten</a>, and <a href="/directory/brook-ziporyn">Brook Ziporyn</a>, the issue also includes new research on Immanuel Kant's understanding of God and an exploration of the political dimensions of the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Chinese philosophy.Published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press, the Journal of Religion has been a leading venue for scholarship in religious studies and theology for more than a century. Since 1921, it has published original research spanning the history, philosophy, and critical study of religion across traditions, disciplines, and historical periods.The July issue continues that tradition, bringing together scholarship that asks enduring questions about suffering, ethics, politics, and the nature of religious thought.The complete issue is available through the <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jr/2026/106/3">University of Chicago Press</a>. Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-07/img_4414.jpeg https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/new-journal-religion-issue-explores-susan-taubes-kant-and-politics-zhuangzi https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/new-journal-religion-issue-explores-susan-taubes-kant-and-politics-zhuangzi Talking to God: Joan of Arc, Political Theology, and Swift Hall Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:08:04 -0500 These remarks were delivered at Swift Hall on the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park Campus on May 1, 2026. They have been adapted here for readability.  Introduction: A View from Swift Hall Let me start by saying I am mindful that alumni are often an awkward presence at their former schools. After I finished my BA in Theatre Arts at Cornell University, I stayed on and worked for two years on the Theatre Arts department staff as Assistant Costume Designer. At that time, Cornell had a resident professional company. I had a fabulous boss: Douglas Marme, artist in residence, for whom I had worked in the costume shop for several years as a seamstress while I was a student. He was my principal teacher and advisor in the department on my final design project.Every year at about this time, during Cornell’s alumni weekend, a trickle of former students would stop by the shop. They often wanted to see a costume they had worn several decades earlier. We never knew what to say. Costume design had moved on. Theatre itself had moved on. The costumes they had worn had been repurposed for a new time. Whether they had played Hamlet or the fourth spear-carrier to Fortinbras in the final scene, those costumes would have been almost totally out of place in any current production. And, besides, Douglas was very, very frugal. Every scrap was used again with scrupulous concern about waste, but also because the new productions deserved the most we could give them. They were the collaborative work of a new generation of actors, directors, and designers.Nevertheless, at the risk of wandering in with my memories of small anachronistic triumphs, more fourth spear carrier than Hamlet, but still with a remembered glow of pride, I want to say something about why what I share today seems to me to be distinctively the product of my time as a student at the Divinity School. I have just retired from teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, a department with its own well-deserved reputation for scholarly creativity and excellence. With funding from the Luce Foundation, we also started a center, the IU Center for Religion and the Human. One day, the four of us who directed the center, Constance Furey, Cooper Harriss, Sarah Imhoff, and I, were sitting around talking about what we might distinctly bring to the center as Div School grads, notwithstanding our obvious differences in scholarly profile and temperament. Sarah said immediately that it was the co-presence at the Divinity School of theology and ministry training, alongside historical and social-scientific work. She insisted thatthe particular way in which those different projects co-existed reflected not just tolerance but genuine respect for and real conversation across the different disciplinary cultures and commitments, not just among faculty, but also among students. When I was dean of students, we had a continual flow of students moving among all the degree programs. And perhaps most distinctively, to my mind, many projects could not have been realized without the interdisciplinary, even inter-epistemological, mood of the place. Talking to God was something one’s colleagues might actually do!I think Sarah is right. There is a view from Swift Hall. Let me share my version.I came to the Divinity School as a PhD student in 1987. After tearing myself away from the theatre, my home since high school, I had gone to law school and then practiced law. I came to Swift Hall because I was seeking a better way for law to talk about religion than the version on offer in the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. And I found one! Well, I thought for a while that I had found one. For the entering cohort of MA and PhD students that year, we had a required three-quarter sequence. First, in the autumn, Larry Sullivan on the Modern Study of Religion, in the Winter Quarter, David Tracy on Religion in the Modern World, and then in spring, a writing project drawing on insights from each lecture course. Both classes were a revelation to me, intellectually capacious and generous, ranging across a modernity that began, as I recall, with Vico. They gave me visions of a Supreme Court with a broader and deeper humanistic knowledge of the religious in human history. I could say more about the eventual faltering of that vision, but I want to fast-forward now to my more recent work. In the last decade or so, my work has become more explicitly comparative and historical. One reason for this shift has been my teaching. I have taught at a small liberal arts college, a law school, and at two research universities. It became clear that helping students to understand the peculiar religious jurisprudence of the US demanded a longer and broader imagination of how law and religion had and might interrelate. I sought to give a better account of religion, but I also sought to give a better account of law, beyond the deeply compromised politics of modern secular statist law and its problematic rendering in the exceptionalism of US constitutionalism.So, to my title. I have talked a bit about Swift Hall (and will again at the end), but I have not talked about Joan of Arc, political theology, or talking to God. Let me do that now.  Joan is EverywhereJoan of Arc. Joan is everywhere. It is truly difficult to exaggerate this fact. A woman in armor with a short bob. That’s it. Nothing more is needed to invoke this remarkable woman. In the movies the great actresses played her, but there is also a lot of B-grade film about her; on the stage in classic plays by Anouilh and Shaw and Brecht, but also now in a rock opera and a Leonard Cohen song; in books by Mark Twain and Vita Sackville-West and many, many others; on campaign posters for suffragettes as well as for Marine Le Pen; in public art around the world; an icon for queer and trans causes; and, increasingly, as an avatar in video games. Countless Catholic churches are named for her. She has inspired fashion greats as different as Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier. She is a heroine to people across the political spectrum and a saint for those inside and outside the Catholic Church. Serious new academic works continue to be written about her. She seems inexhaustible.There is a sense in which this excess is liberating. If you don’t like my Joan, there are many others on offer! My own interest, my time travel venture to the fifteenth century, is motivated both by admiration, as with many of you, but also by a conviction that staying with that moment in history, in that pivotal moment between the medieval and the modern, can help us to think about the political and its relationship to religion in a new way. I have just finished a book about Joan’s political theology, a fun but risky endeavor. It may seem a long way from the US Constitution and the History of Religions. But I think I learned to do this here. As I taught the First Amendment to law students, graduate students, and undergrads, I sought to gain perspective on the distinctiveness of the American project in this area. I did that partly through comparison with cases being decided in other constitutional orders and with transnational and international legal instruments and courts. But over the years, I found that a better way to get outside, not just of the US but also away from the hegemony of the modern state (and the modern church) and their settlement, was to teach the trial of Joan of Arc. The account of her trial is one of the most complete we have from the fifteenth century. At first, I would ask my students whether she was killed by the church or the state, helping them to see the manifold versions of each engaged in her trial. But over the last decade or so, I came to see that focusing on the trial traps us in the logics of those legal orders, religious and secular, making it difficult to see Joan herself, and as I’ve come to call it, her own political theology, a vernacular political project not unlike those described by Carlo Ginzburg and Charles Long, among others. Moving from the abstract work of modern legal categories to the entangled political, legal, and religious worlds that Joan inhabited has been very fruitful.I will first give you a strong narrative about her brief life. The historical archive is voluminous, and understanding both her life and the world of fifteenth-century France remains an ongoing project. There are disagreements among historians about both who Joan was and about how to understand her world. This will necessarily be just a sketch to start our conversation this evening . . .  A Politics from Below              We do not know what Joan looked like. We have no images of her taken from life and descriptions of her are inconsistent. This photograph shows a performance artist in Ukraine performing Joan in Kyiv a couple of years ago. I like this photo because it shows her affinity for, and solidarity with, ordinary soldiers, an affinity multiply attested in the historical record. They loved her. So did the other military captains, most of whom were mercenaries. She seems to have had a gift for friendship and for seeing life clearly.The image on my book cover gives you another Joan. It was made by a French surrealist in 1918. Her public career is represented in her halo while she is pictured sitting in a wooded idyll in the village of her youth.  Making a King is a book of war. No book about Joan of Arc could be anything else. Joan lived in a time of war. Of the so-called Hundred Years' War. Of forever war. Like our time. She experienced armed conflict in her home village. Like many young people today living in the midst of war, she developed an early facility for politics. Too often condescended to as an illiterate peasant or enlisted as an icon of romantic medievalism or xenophobic French nationalism, Joan was smart, informed, and deadly serious. It was a war of survival for her, and for those she called her friends; it was, one might say, a politics from below: a politics of war refracted by way of a vibrating queer genius who talked to God.Let me start by reminding you of the political situation in which she found herself.  In addition to the war between France and England, which had been ongoing since the first third of the previous century, France itself was in the midst of a protracted civil war. The area shown in pink [in the map above] was occupied by the English. The area in purple was held by the Duke of Burgundy, who was then allied with the English. The area in blue was held by Charles. Joan’s young adulthood coincided with an inflection point in the struggle over the French crown. In 1415, shortly after her birth, King Henry V of England had decisively defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt, with devastating effect on “the flower of French nobility,” as they say. Following on that loss and other struggles internal to the French throne, Charles VI of France had, by the Treaty of Troyes, disinherited his own son, agreeing that Henry’s son would, on his death, be King of both England and France. Both fathers died soon thereafter, in 1420, leaving the two sons, Charles VII and Henry VI, each proclaiming themselves King of France. In 1429, Joan entered into this struggle for the French crown. At the age of about seventeen. Spurred on by her voices, Joan persuaded royal captain Robert de Beaudricourt, who was stationed near her hometown of Domremy, to provide her with men to accompany her as she traveled to Chinon in the Loire Valley to talk to Charles VII. When she arrived in Charles’s court, she did something startling. She addressed Charles as Dauphin, rather than as King. Dauphin was the title then given to the eldest son of a French king, the heir apparent to the throne. In other words, she made clear that for her, he was not yet king. Charles’ father had died nine years earlier, and Charles had since styled himself King. Why did Joan see otherwise? And why did he tolerate it from her? Joan’s appellation can, I would argue, be understood to underline a distinction between king-making by law, on the one hand, secular law, one might say, and king-making by religion, on the other, or religious law, one might say; that is, between the Salic law of dynastic succession and what was known as the sacre, a special coronation mass. Charles had claimed the throne by right on the death of his father, but when Joan arrived in Chinon, he had not yet been consecrated king.  Joan’s subsequent insistence on a campaign to Reims for a coronation effectively pried open the tight dynastic succession practice expressed in the acclaim, “The King is dead; Long live the King,” deferring to an older model of kingship, one that recognized the role of the people in the crowning of a new king. Joan’s theology of the monarchy effectively rejected the emerging early modern aristocratic politics of king-making by law in favor of an earlier practice of election. This was arguably her most important political intervention. The Siege of OrléansBut before that could happen, the first order of business for Joan on her arrival at court (and the one for which she is best known) was the raising of the siege of Orléans. Orléans was an important French city, second only to Paris, occupying a strategic point between north and south. The city had been besieged by English forces for half a year, and the situation was becoming desperate. French forces and spirits were very low. Joan’s arrival was to change all of that. She began by sending a letter. It is worth reading. While the plans were being made, on Joan’s insistence, to move promptly to relieve the needs of the Orléannais and to raise the siege by force, Joan sent a letter to Henry VI, the child king of England, to the Duke of Bedford, his regent (and uncle), and to the other English captains, demanding surrender by the English troops besieging the city. Speaking directly to the English, she wrote: King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of the kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; John Lord Talbot; and you, Thomas Lord Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said Duke of Bedford, make satisfaction to the King of Heaven; surrender to la Pucelle . . . the keys of all the good towns that you have taken and violated in France. She has come here from God to reclaim the blood royal. She is very ready to make peace if you are willing to grant her satisfaction by abandoning France and paying for what you have held.  She then addressed the regular English soldiers themselves directly:And you too, archers, companions-at-arms, gentlemen, and others who are before the town of Orléans, go away into your own country, by God. And if you do not do this, await news of la Pucelle, who will come to see you shortly, to your very great harm.  And then back to Henry:King of England, if you do not do this, I am a commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they wish to or not. And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed. I have been sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to drive you out of all France, body for body. And if they wish to obey, I will show them mercy. And do not believe otherwise, for you will never hold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Heaven, son of St Mary; for King Charles, the true heir, will hold it, because God, the King of Heaven wishes it . . . And then directly to Bedford, Henry’s regent:You, Duke of Bedford, la Pucelle prays and requests that you do not bring destruction upon yourself. If you will grant satisfaction to her, you may still join her company, in which the French will do the fairest deed ever been done for Christianity. And respond if you wish to make peace in the city of Orléans; and if you do not do this, you will be reminded shortly to your great injuries. In this astonishing letter, Joan’s program was laid out. Joan sought recognition of Charles as the true king, and she sought peace. She demanded that the English return to England, and she demanded reparations. Hearing no surrender, she led the battle that successfully raised the siege.Raising the siege of Orléans made Joan an instant star. In Orléans and beyond. The news spread rapidly across Europe. As the great woman philosopher and feminist Christine de Pizan wrote in her poem about Joan, just two weeks after Orléans, “In 1429 the sun began to shine again.” The question was what should happen next. Most of those around the king argued that a further military campaign toward Paris or into Brittany and Normandy should be the next step, capitalizing on their success at Orléans; Joan insisted instead that the next step should be consecration of Charles at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims. Reims was deep in enemy territory. Charles’s advisors argued that going to Reims would be too expensive and too dangerous, given that the territory between Chinon and Reims was held by the enemy. In any event, they said, it was unnecessary because the Burgundians were willing to treat with him as king. Being king was a transactional matter for them. Not for Joan. She insisted that to be king, rather than dauphin, he must be ritually incorporated into the role, taking an oath of fidelity to his people, being anointed with the oil used to anoint Clovis, King of the Franks, almost a thousand years earlier, ordained into semi-clerical life, and given the gift of curing scrofula. Then he would be king. A virtuous king, as Pizan’s poem also admonishes him.Joan’s plan won out, and so they fought their way to Reims, taking back the cities that had been taken by the English. They were received by crowds when they arrived in Reims. In her poem, Christine de Pizan directly addressed Charles, insisting that he live up to Joan’s deeds: And you, Charles, King of France, seventh of that noble name . . . see your honor exalted by the Maid who has laid low your enemies beneath your standard . . . all this has been brought about by the intelligence of the Maid who, God be thanked, has played her part in this matter!  . . .I hope that you will be good and upright, and a lover of justice and that you will surpass all others, provided your deeds are not tarnished by pride, that you will be gentle and well-disposed towards your people, that you will always love God who elected you as His servant (and you have proof of this), on condition that you do your duty. The Treaty disinheriting Charles had effectively been revoked, and Charles had received legitimation of his election, confirmed by the increasing military support that he needed and began to receive after Reims from wealthy noblemen. Her SignatureWho was this young woman who had made a king? La Pucelle, as she calls herself in her letters, is sometimes translated as “the Maid.” How might we understand how her voices and her cross-dressing and her piety worked together to effectuate a political theology? Let us go back to the beginning of her public life. A young Breton nobleman, Guy de Laval, encountered Joan early in her time at Charles’ court, and wrote a letter to his grandmother describing his encounter with her:I went to see her at her lodging. She had wine brought and said to me we should soon drink wine in Paris. And there seemed something wholly divine in her manner, and to see her and hear her. She left Selles on Monday at the hour of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de Boussac, and a great many armed men with her. I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour excepting the head, a little axe in her hand. The great black charger was very restive at her door and would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said, 'to the cross which is in front of the church,' and there she mounted, the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then, turning towards the church which was close by, she said in a very womanly voice. 'You priests and people of the Church, make processions and prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road, 'Forward! Forward!' she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page; she had her little axe in her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before.   Laval reports on Joan with wonder: the imperious confidence, the beautiful armor, her whisperer’s way with the horse, and her “womanly voice.” Joan appears on his telling, singular, divine, and without the need for a resolution of the disparate gender affects. In Selles, where he encountered her, Joan was dressed in men’s clothes as she had been since she left Vaucouleurs to come to the court and as she would be until the end of her life. Jean Rotselaar, a Burgundian diplomat who was in Chinon in April 1429, also described Joan riding a warhorse: “This Pucelle every day rides on horseback, armed with a lance in battle, as all the other armed men guarding the king are accustomed to doing. And this King and his friends have placed great faith in the Pucelle.” Joan had, as I said, warm relations with her soldiers. The captains who fought with her spoke admiringly of her surprising strategic talent and of her sense of purpose. She was strong and self-disciplined and ascetic in her ways, riding long distances in her armor and eating sparingly. She was also unusually religiously observant.Joan styled herself la Pucelle, as you read in her letter to Henry, signaling that she was a vowed virgin and perhaps identifying with the Béguines, who also used the term, late medieval laywomen with a religious vocation. She also wore men’s clothes, “as all the other armed men.” Occasionally, the gender disjunction was remarked on, although only her judges at the Trial of Condemnation seem to have condemned her clothes as evil.French historian Olivier Bouzy argues that the reason for the acceptance was that for Joan la Pucelle, more than simply an identification with a woman’s chaste religious vocation, symbolized a singular prophetic office. For Bouzy, it was a part of Joan’s genius to see that wearing men’s clothes allowed her to inhabit a space that she could not otherwise occupy, given her sex and her social class. He insists that “the richness of her clothes . . . are not proof of a taste for luxury that Jeanne developed during her career,” as some have suggested, “but should rather be understood as of a quality proper to a messenger from God—like the rich clothes in which the statues of saints were often dressed.” Bouzy suggests moreover that the beautiful men’s clothes do not just confirm her military office granted by the king, but they are suitable for one sent by God. The clothes were, as Bouzy suggests, her signature. From her first sentences in her trial two years later in Rouen, we encounter a young woman who is very clear about herself and her boundaries, one we can recognize from the letters and from accounts of her during her public career. She initially refused to take the oath demanded of her, saying that she did not yet know the charges against her. “I don’t know what you wish to ask of me. Perhaps you might ask me things I can’t tell you.” When pressed, she said she would answer some questions but not others; in particular, she said, she would not reveal the revelations she received from God. She did not want to discuss the details of her voices with her judges, as she did not do so with her military companions, who trusted in the visible results of her integrity and effectiveness. In court, she finally gave a brief account of her first encounter with the voices. (The daily minutes of the trial were reported in the third person, summarizing the interrogation. Occasionally, questions and answers are directly reported, but often there is a condensing of the interrogation.) The record states that,She declared that when she was thirteen, she heard a voice from God helping her to behave, and at first, she feared greatly. And the voice came around noon in the summer, in her father’s garden; and she had not fasted the previous day. She heard a voice on her right, toward the church, and she seldom hears it without light. This light comes from the same side where she hears the voice; but all around in that place there is a great light. When she came to France, she often heard the voice. …it seemed a worthy voice and she believed that the voice was sent by God…. she knew it was the voice of an angel. This is the testimony illustrated on the cover of my book, a retrospective account, at the end of her life.Joan’s public confidence seems to have come, in part, from the voices that she continued to hear, and eventually to see. The single voice of her childhood morphed into a trio of French saints, Catherine, Margaret, and Michael. She reported that they instructed her in her faith, urged her to go to France, supported her in times of trouble, and brought her comfort, although she also said she did not always know what they wanted from her. Her voices seem to have constituted a private space of support and counsel for her—even a kind of lay separation of religion and politics—one that did not pass through a clerical elite. Her judges said that she was required to submit the authenticity of her voices to them, to the men of the church. She said that she was a faithful daughter of the church, but that she could and would decide whether they were the voices of God or of the devil. (Twenty-five years after her burning, another trial was convened to review the legality of the first trial, which affirmed Joan’s theology on this point. The Church does not have the authority to judge occult matters.)Joan’s judges in the first trial seem to have been confused by her, especially by her clothes. What was it she wanted? Mapping JoanWhile there is much more to say about her voices, her gender presentation, and her skills as a military leader, I want to step back for a moment to consider the geographic imaginary in which she moved and how we should map Joan. Joan has become a poster child for contemporary French ultra-nationalism, an ideology that largely took shape in the nineteenth century. Was it indeed that France for which she died? I argue that making a king was, for her, a political theological project in service not of nationalism but of peace and the restoration of community—a community seeking reparations. Joan was not French. And France, as we know it, did not exist in 1429. And the France of which she spoke was not territorially bounded then as it is today. As she said repeatedly, she traveled to France from Lorraine to lend her assistance.Why does that matter?There is a vast literature on the history of French national sentiment, attempting to locate the key moments in the coalescence of a place called France across a long timeline, punctuated with references to Caesar’s Gaul, Clovis, Charlemagne, the Capetian kings, as well as the growing absolutist monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to mention the Revolution and the ups and downs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, France seems to stand in for the inescapability of the modern state tout court. Yet the territorial borders of “France” fluctuate across this entire period. Joan has been posthumously installed in this teleological lineage. Does she belong there?Most maps that accompany accounts of Joan’s career place her on the “hexagon”—the familiar six-sided shape that has been fixed in our imagination and promoted to French schoolchildren. Joan is repeatedly used to naturalize France’s territorial sovereignty. Joan is made to appear as having died so that France would endure and prosper. And yet it is not at all clear that that was her project. Looking not back from modern France to find its origins, but starting with Joan, how might we map Joan? Maps proved a particular challenge when I was writing my book. I wanted to include maps to help orient my readers, but I couldn’t find any that matched the Joan I was encountering in the record. I ended by working with an artist to create maps for the book. We also spoke with an historian of fifteenth-century French maps.Historians of early modern Europe argue that our modern cartographic view of national territory was a seventeenth-century invention, made possible by advances in the technologies of measurement as well as by economic change and political consolidation. Fifteenth-century persons, they say, would have been attached to a local ruler or to a prince or a king, not a territorial nation. Some considered themselves loyal first to a town. I had an interesting correspondence and conversation with Camille Serchuk, an art historian who studies medieval and early modern French maps. When I asked her what maps Joan might have seen, she said that it was unlikely that she—or even Charles, for that matter—had ever seen a map of France. At least no such maps have survived. There are French maps from the fifteenth century, but they are almost all local or regional. Maps of the world also circulated in that period. But not national maps. It is not that there was no sense of France as a place. Joan herself, after all, speaks of going to France. There was no cartographic sense of national borders as we understand them today. Historians Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet note that academic ideas today about territory are often dominated by state-centric models (after Max Weber). They argue rather that in the fifteenth century, “communities were united only by allegiances and personal obligations rather than abstract individual equality or citizenship in a geographically circumscribed territory . . .space was organised around many centres.”Certainly, there is much evidence in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France of such a politics of personal allegiance. Indeed, Joan showed herself to be savvy about the shifting and overlapping local and personal nature of such allegiances. That was her world. She was a master of personal encounters well before she left Domremy, understanding well the relational hierarchy of power and the political value of personal allegiance. In her letter to the Duke of Burgundy on the eve of the coronation, commanding his presence, it is clear that she considers him as having betrayed his personal loyalty to Charles as king of France, and that reminding him of such an obligation might induce him to rally to the King’s cause.To illustrate points from our correspondence and Zoom conversations about fifteenth-century maps, Camille Serchuk sent me the catalog for a 2019 exhibition of medieval and Renaissance French maps at the National Archives Museum in Paris. That exhibit and the accompanying catalog contain a wealth of beautiful hand-painted local maps created for various local purposes, often juridical, including all of the extant maps of French places at the time of Joan’s short life. The introduction to the catalog underlines the purposes of these maps, and the reasons for their emergence for the first time in the fourteenth century, including bureaucratization, more frequent recourse to litigation, and a growing reliance on written records, as well as increasing literacy: “The documents presented here,” they said, “reflect a new type of map produced at the end of the Middle Ages, representing places and territories at a local and regional scale.” The world of Joan.Several of the maps from the Paris exhibit catalog can be used to illustrate this emerging juridification. The maps in the exhibit, as the curators insist, have a practical legal purpose. Here are three from the mid-fifteenth century. As the introduction to the catalog explained, a new cadre of map artists emerged in the fourteenth century to serve these new bureaucratic and juridical needs, the painted maps themselves serving as formal legal documents. These are maps by legal artists, not maps by scientists, engineers, or nationalist propagandists. They represent a local legal imaginary, not cartographic measurement.               This first map was drawn to resolve a lawsuit concerning rights of pasturage in a place constituted by the overlapping rights of the county of Burgundy, the duchy of Burgundy, and the county of Champagne. The map, which records the markers between the two villages and their rights, is cleverly drawn to be equally available from the perspective of two sides of a table, without privileging a point of view, as if drawn by someone standing in the center of the space. It materializes a horizontal legal process oriented to the purposes of arbitration.  Another map records an administrative procedure to create a new parish. As the authors of the catalog explain:Commissioned by a court of justice to constitute a usable legal document and to serve as support for the demonstration of the parties, it proposes an inventory which results from a compromise: the accuracy of the landscape is submitted to the eyes of twelve witnesses who must. The truth of space is therefore not based on measurement, but on consensus. “The truth of space is therefore not based on measurement, but on consensus.” And finally, a map to document the need for mill repairs.These maps give us Joan’s world. Returning cities to allegiance with the king seems to have been one of Joan’s goals. Centralizing all power in the crown was perhaps not. Making a king, for her, did not eliminate the local power and legal authority of towns and other local jurisdictions, which is reflected in these local maps, and which she knew from her own life. We can see this more horizontal political sensibility in the many letters that Joan wrote to the peoples of towns, including Reims.            These are the maps that Claire Bergen made for the book, one showing the larger political context, including Scotland, whose soldiers fought with Charles, Spain, where his wife was from, and Italy, whose diplomats were a constant presence at court. The second is of Domremy and the places Joan could and did walk to. The third is the area of her final campaigns. There is no map of the hexagon.After the coronation at Reims, Joan fought with her army in and around Paris, with mixed results and not always with the full support of the king, who was simultaneously engaged in negotiations with the duke of Burgundy. In May of the following year, she was captured on the battlefield near Paris by soldiers aligned with Burgundy. He sold her to the English for ten thousand pounds. They took her to Rouen to be tried.I would argue that one thing that enabled Joan to be effective and that caused her to be so beloved in her public life was what we might call a queer affect—a chivalrous female masculinity—what Bouzy calls her signature; an affect that was maddening to her judges. They accused her of refusing to submit to their authority, of setting herself up as a worker of miracles with access to magical powers, able to raise the dead and heal the sick. They accused her of having participated in pagan rituals as a child and of having an erotic relationship with her voices. They accused her of war crimes. All of their accusations she parried with startling directness. Asked whether St Michael was naked, she said, “Do you think God can’t find him clothes?” Asked whether it wasn’t a sin to try to escape, as she had on several occasions, she said, “God helps those who help themselves.” Asked whether she believed herself to be in a state of grace, she answered that if she was not, she prayed God would help her to attain it. She insistently asked to be granted access to the sacraments. It is as if she is teaching them their religion, as she had taught the king his politics!But they eventually broke her down. On May 24, 1431, after three months of questioning by more than a hundred judges, mostly theologians and priests from the University of Paris, after being shown the instruments of torture, she suddenly gave in, signing a statement of abjuration and agreeing to resume wearing women’s clothes. She was immediately sentenced to life in prison “with the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction.” Several days later, she was found in her cell in men’s clothes. She explained that she had recanted only for fear of the flames. She said that she felt that she had betrayed her voices. This time she was excommunicated as a relapsed heretic and turned over to the political authorities who burned her at the stake. It is tempting to speak of Joan as a martyr. I think we need to resist defining her by her death. That was their doing. She lived brilliantly. And to a remarkable extent, on her own terms, on behalf of her own people. She changed history. Not with her sword, which she probably never used. But by her gallant fight for the common good, her standard at her side. After she died, Charles did succeed in chasing the English out. He made peace with Burgundy and became a very good king. In many ways, Joan had won. She had done what she promised in her letter to Henry.While Joan was alone at the end, she was not alone in her political efforts. That is important to remember. She brought together existing ideas and ways of being in the world, religious and political, ideas that were often marginal, to be sure, but were present nevertheless. She crossed borders in her travels, in her theology, her politics, and her self-presentation. She was tireless in her efforts, inspiring those around her with her virtue and her bravery. They, in turn, respected her, cared for her, and protected her until she was captured and became a prisoner of war. When Joan called Charles “Dauphin,” she was declaring that he was not yet King and would not be king until he was consecrated. For her, the succession was not just a matter of law. Charles had to be recognized by God and assume his obligations to his people in a specific religious ceremony, in a specific church: the place, the physical objects, the banner, the noblemen to be present, and the particular words. All were necessary. This was something the English (and maybe even Charles himself, and his councilors) failed to understand fully until her arrival. “God helps those who help themselves.” This French proverb (“Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera,” literally, “Help yourself, and the heavens will help you”), expressing the paradox of human agency and of the relationship between God and human, was Joan’s response to her judges when they accused her of wrongfully trying to escape from prison. Being God’s chosen daughter was not a passive or solitary activity for Joan. Indeed, Joan seems to have occupied that sweet spot where religious work is done, described by Paul Johnson in his recent book, Automatic Religion, as agent ambiguity, bridging the individual and the collective. “[A]gency,” Johnson says, “is always hybrid, built of interactions between humans, nearhumans, and nonhuman things.” Joan brought together people of various kinds, angels and saints, and objects (banners, swords, clothing) into a horizontal collective dedicated to self-governance: those who help themselves, with God’s help.Johnson asks, “whether and to what degree religion is a uniquely human event, or rather a way of perceiving agency that can be shared with other kinds of beings.” I argue that Joan’s capacity to act in a situation of extreme complexity displays her brilliance in negotiating the ambiguities of agency. Her clothes, her virginity, her secrecy, her companions, and her talking to God; together they created the hybrid that was la Pucelle. And, together, they account for her continuing charismatic forcefield. But they also reveal the alternative legalities that were available to her and her colleagues. Conclusion: A Politics Outside the State In my book, I name Joan’s project as a political theology. That is a contested term today. I join with others, including Carlota McAlister, Valentina Napolitano, and Vincent Lloyd, who seek to put these words to a new purpose: to denominate a politics outside the state. I place Joan in the company of the peasant activists of Carlo Ginzburg’s work and of the Black religion described by Charles Long and others. These religious and legal orders are much closer to the ground than those of the Church and the state, as usually understood today. Together, they resist the aristocratic cronyism that violently determines their lives. Not that they all agreed or that these alternative legalities are monolithic. Widening the lens of religious, political, and legal inquiry offers a wealth of imaginative possibility.    This is an image of a young woman taken in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. I think of her as a latter-day Joan.On my retirement from IU, my colleagues held an event at which I was tried for heresy. The indictment charged me with not believing in religious freedom, with not staying in my lane, and with corrupting youth. I like to think I learned how to do that here.Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is the 2026 University of Chicago Divinity School Alum of the Year. Learn more about her career and work in this Q&A published in May, 2026 <h5>These remarks were delivered at Swift Hall on the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park Campus on May 1, 2026. They have been adapted here for readability. </h5> <h4>Introduction: A View from Swift Hall </h4>Let me start by saying I am mindful that alumni are often an awkward presence at their former schools. After I finished my BA in Theatre Arts at Cornell University, I stayed on and worked for two years on the Theatre Arts department staff as Assistant Costume Designer. At that time, Cornell had a resident professional company. I had a fabulous boss: Douglas Marme, artist in residence, for whom I had worked in the costume shop for several years as a seamstress while I was a student. He was my principal teacher and advisor in the department on my final design project.Every year at about this time, during Cornell’s alumni weekend, a trickle of former students would stop by the shop. They often wanted to see a costume they had worn several decades earlier. We never knew what to say. Costume design had moved on. Theatre itself had moved on. The costumes they had worn had been repurposed for a new time. Whether they had played Hamlet or the fourth spear-carrier to Fortinbras in the final scene, those costumes would have been almost totally out of place in any current production. And, besides, Douglas was very, very frugal. Every scrap was used again with scrupulous concern about waste, but also because the new productions deserved the most we could give them. They were the collaborative work of a new generation of actors, directors, and designers.Nevertheless, at the risk of wandering in with my memories of small anachronistic triumphs, more fourth spear carrier than Hamlet, but still with a remembered glow of pride, I want to say something about why what I share today seems to me to be distinctively the product of my time as a student at the Divinity School. I have just retired from teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, a department with its own well-deserved reputation for scholarly creativity and excellence. With funding from the Luce Foundation, we also started a center, the IU Center for Religion and the Human. One day, the four of us who directed the center, Constance Furey, Cooper Harriss, Sarah Imhoff, and I, were sitting around talking about what we might distinctly bring to the center as Div School grads, notwithstanding our obvious differences in scholarly profile and temperament. Sarah said immediately that it was the co-presence at the Divinity School of theology and ministry training, alongside historical and social-scientific work. She insisted thatthe particular way in which those different projects co-existed reflected not just tolerance but genuine respect for and real conversation across the different disciplinary cultures and commitments, not just among faculty, but also among students. When I was dean of students, we had a continual flow of students moving among all the degree programs. And perhaps most distinctively, to my mind, many projects could not have been realized without the interdisciplinary, even inter-epistemological, mood of the place. Talking to God was something one’s colleagues might actually do!I think Sarah is right. There is a view from Swift Hall. Let me share my version.I came to the Divinity School as a PhD student in 1987. After tearing myself away from the theatre, my home since high school, I had gone to law school and then practiced law. I came to Swift Hall because I was seeking a better way for law to talk about religion than the version on offer in the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. And I found one! Well, I thought for a while that I had found one. For the entering cohort of MA and PhD students that year, we had a required three-quarter sequence. First, in the autumn, Larry Sullivan on the Modern Study of Religion, in the Winter Quarter, David Tracy on Religion in the Modern World, and then in spring, a writing project drawing on insights from each lecture course. Both classes were a revelation to me, intellectually capacious and generous, ranging across a modernity that began, as I recall, with Vico. They gave me visions of a Supreme Court with a broader and deeper humanistic knowledge of the religious in human history. I could say more about the eventual faltering of that vision, but I want to fast-forward now to my more recent work. In the last decade or so, my work has become more explicitly comparative and historical. One reason for this shift has been my teaching. I have taught at a small liberal arts college, a law school, and at two research universities. It became clear that helping students to understand the peculiar religious jurisprudence of the US demanded a longer and broader imagination of how law and religion had and might interrelate. I sought to give a better account of religion, but I also sought to give a better account of law, beyond the deeply compromised politics of modern secular statist law and its problematic rendering in the exceptionalism of US constitutionalism.So, to my title. I have talked a bit about Swift Hall (and will again at the end), but I have not talked about Joan of Arc, political theology, or talking to God. Let me do that now.  <h4>Joan is Everywhere</h4>Joan of Arc. Joan is everywhere. It is truly difficult to exaggerate this fact. A woman in armor with a short bob. That’s it. Nothing more is needed to invoke this remarkable woman. In the movies the great actresses played her, but there is also a lot of B-grade film about her; on the stage in classic plays by Anouilh and Shaw and Brecht, but also now in a rock opera and a Leonard Cohen song; in books by Mark Twain and Vita Sackville-West and many, many others; on campaign posters for suffragettes as well as for Marine Le Pen; in public art around the world; an icon for queer and trans causes; and, increasingly, as an avatar in video games. Countless Catholic churches are named for her. She has inspired fashion greats as different as Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier. She is a heroine to people across the political spectrum and a saint for those inside and outside the Catholic Church. Serious new academic works continue to be written about her. She seems inexhaustible.There is a sense in which this excess is liberating. If you don’t like my Joan, there are many others on offer! My own interest, my time travel venture to the fifteenth century, is motivated both by admiration, as with many of you, but also by a conviction that staying with that moment in history, in that pivotal moment between the medieval and the modern, can help us to think about the political and its relationship to religion in a new way.<drupal-entity alt="Cover of "Making A King" by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3f9a977e-07a1-4cf6-b680-8653e0f6ba83" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>I have just finished a book about Joan’s political theology, a fun but risky endeavor. It may seem a long way from the US Constitution and the History of Religions. But I think I learned to do this here. As I taught the First Amendment to law students, graduate students, and undergrads, I sought to gain perspective on the distinctiveness of the American project in this area. I did that partly through comparison with cases being decided in other constitutional orders and with transnational and international legal instruments and courts. But over the years, I found that a better way to get outside, not just of the US but also away from the hegemony of the modern state (and the modern church) and their settlement, was to teach the trial of Joan of Arc. The account of her trial is one of the most complete we have from the fifteenth century. At first, I would ask my students whether she was killed by the church or the state, helping them to see the manifold versions of each engaged in her trial. But over the last decade or so, I came to see that focusing on the trial traps us in the logics of those legal orders, religious and secular, making it difficult to see Joan herself, and as I’ve come to call it, her own political theology, a vernacular political project not unlike those described by Carlo Ginzburg and Charles Long, among others. Moving from the abstract work of modern legal categories to the entangled political, legal, and religious worlds that Joan inhabited has been very fruitful.I will first give you a strong narrative about her brief life. The historical archive is voluminous, and understanding both her life and the world of fifteenth-century France remains an ongoing project. There are disagreements among historians about both who Joan was and about how to understand her world. This will necessarily be just a sketch to start our conversation this evening . . .  <h4>A Politics from Below</h4><drupal-entity alt="Ukraine Biennale, Kyiv. Photograph by Sasha Kovalenko. New York Times, November 3, 2023 " title="Ukraine Biennale, Kyiv. Photograph by Sasha Kovalenko. New York Times, November 3, 2023 " data-caption="Ukraine Biennale, Kyiv. Photograph by Sasha Kovalenko. New York Times, November 3, 2023" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="560971f9-b578-418b-9533-7cd63b396a8e" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>             We do not know what Joan looked like. We have no images of her taken from life and descriptions of her are inconsistent. This photograph shows a performance artist in Ukraine performing Joan in Kyiv a couple of years ago. I like this photo because it shows her affinity for, and solidarity with, ordinary soldiers, an affinity multiply attested in the historical record. They loved her. So did the other military captains, most of whom were mercenaries. She seems to have had a gift for friendship and for seeing life clearly.The image on my book cover gives you another Joan. It was made by a French surrealist in 1918. Her public career is represented in her halo while she is pictured sitting in a wooded idyll in the village of her youth.  Making a King is a book of war. No book about Joan of Arc could be anything else. Joan lived in a time of war. Of the so-called Hundred Years' War. Of forever war. Like our time. She experienced armed conflict in her home village. Like many young people today living in the midst of war, she developed an early facility for politics. Too often condescended to as an illiterate peasant or enlisted as an icon of romantic medievalism or xenophobic French nationalism, Joan was smart, informed, and deadly serious. It was a war of survival for her, and for those she called her friends; it was, one might say, a politics from below: a politics of war refracted by way of a vibrating queer genius who talked to God.Let me start by reminding you of the political situation in which she found herself. <drupal-entity alt="Map of France in the early 1400s" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="cf7d0f42-be54-4213-9e95-12c1b0777e56" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>In addition to the war between France and England, which had been ongoing since the first third of the previous century, France itself was in the midst of a protracted civil war. The area shown in pink [in the map above] was occupied by the English. The area in purple was held by the Duke of Burgundy, who was then allied with the English. The area in blue was held by Charles. Joan’s young adulthood coincided with an inflection point in the struggle over the French crown. In 1415, shortly after her birth, King Henry V of England had decisively defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt, with devastating effect on “the flower of French nobility,” as they say. Following on that loss and other struggles internal to the French throne, Charles VI of France had, by the Treaty of Troyes, disinherited his own son, agreeing that Henry’s son would, on his death, be King of both England and France. Both fathers died soon thereafter, in 1420, leaving the two sons, Charles VII and Henry VI, each proclaiming themselves King of France. In 1429, Joan entered into this struggle for the French crown. At the age of about seventeen. Spurred on by her voices, Joan persuaded royal captain Robert de Beaudricourt, who was stationed near her hometown of Domremy, to provide her with men to accompany her as she traveled to Chinon in the Loire Valley to talk to Charles VII. When she arrived in Charles’s court, she did something startling. She addressed Charles as Dauphin, rather than as King. Dauphin was the title then given to the eldest son of a French king, the heir apparent to the throne. In other words, she made clear that for her, he was not yet king. Charles’ father had died nine years earlier, and Charles had since styled himself King. Why did Joan see otherwise? And why did he tolerate it from her? Joan’s appellation can, I would argue, be understood to underline a distinction between king-making by law, on the one hand, secular law, one might say, and king-making by religion, on the other, or religious law, one might say; that is, between the Salic law of dynastic succession and what was known as the sacre, a special coronation mass. Charles had claimed the throne by right on the death of his father, but when Joan arrived in Chinon, he had not yet been consecrated king.  Joan’s subsequent insistence on a campaign to Reims for a coronation effectively pried open the tight dynastic succession practice expressed in the acclaim, “The King is dead; Long live the King,” deferring to an older model of kingship, one that recognized the role of the people in the crowning of a new king. Joan’s theology of the monarchy effectively rejected the emerging early modern aristocratic politics of king-making by law in favor of an earlier practice of election. This was arguably her most important political intervention. <h4>The Siege of Orléans</h4>But before that could happen, the first order of business for Joan on her arrival at court (and the one for which she is best known) was the raising of the siege of Orléans. Orléans was an important French city, second only to Paris, occupying a strategic point between north and south. The city had been besieged by English forces for half a year, and the situation was becoming desperate. French forces and spirits were very low. Joan’s arrival was to change all of that. She began by sending a letter. It is worth reading. While the plans were being made, on Joan’s insistence, to move promptly to relieve the needs of the Orléannais and to raise the siege by force, Joan sent a letter to Henry VI, the child king of England, to the Duke of Bedford, his regent (and uncle), and to the other English captains, demanding surrender by the English troops besieging the city. Speaking directly to the English, she wrote: King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of the kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; John Lord Talbot; and you, Thomas Lord Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said Duke of Bedford, make satisfaction to the King of Heaven; surrender to la Pucelle . . . the keys of all the good towns that you have taken and violated in France. She has come here from God to reclaim the blood royal. She is very ready to make peace if you are willing to grant her satisfaction by abandoning France and paying for what you have held.  She then addressed the regular English soldiers themselves directly:And you too, archers, companions-at-arms, gentlemen, and others who are before the town of Orléans, go away into your own country, by God. And if you do not do this, await news of la Pucelle, who will come to see you shortly, to your very great harm.  And then back to Henry:King of England, if you do not do this, I am a commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they wish to or not. And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed. I have been sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to drive you out of all France, body for body. And if they wish to obey, I will show them mercy. And do not believe otherwise, for you will never hold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Heaven, son of St Mary; for King Charles, the true heir, will hold it, because God, the King of Heaven wishes it . . . And then directly to Bedford, Henry’s regent:You, Duke of Bedford, la Pucelle prays and requests that you do not bring destruction upon yourself. If you will grant satisfaction to her, you may still join her company, in which the French will do the fairest deed ever been done for Christianity. And respond if you wish to make peace in the city of Orléans; and if you do not do this, you will be reminded shortly to your great injuries. In this astonishing letter, Joan’s program was laid out. Joan sought recognition of Charles as the true king, and she sought peace. She demanded that the English return to England, and she demanded reparations. Hearing no surrender, she led the battle that successfully raised the siege.Raising the siege of Orléans made Joan an instant star. In Orléans and beyond. The news spread rapidly across Europe. As the great woman philosopher and feminist Christine de Pizan wrote in her poem about Joan, just two weeks after Orléans, “In 1429 the sun began to shine again.” The question was what should happen next. Most of those around the king argued that a further military campaign toward Paris or into Brittany and Normandy should be the next step, capitalizing on their success at Orléans; Joan insisted instead that the next step should be consecration of Charles at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims. Reims was deep in enemy territory. Charles’s advisors argued that going to Reims would be too expensive and too dangerous, given that the territory between Chinon and Reims was held by the enemy. In any event, they said, it was unnecessary because the Burgundians were willing to treat with him as king. Being king was a transactional matter for them. Not for Joan. She insisted that to be king, rather than dauphin, he must be ritually incorporated into the role, taking an oath of fidelity to his people, being anointed with the oil used to anoint Clovis, King of the Franks, almost a thousand years earlier, ordained into semi-clerical life, and given the gift of curing scrofula. Then he would be king. A virtuous king, as Pizan’s poem also admonishes him.Joan’s plan won out, and so they fought their way to Reims, taking back the cities that had been taken by the English. They were received by crowds when they arrived in Reims. In her poem, Christine de Pizan directly addressed Charles, insisting that he live up to Joan’s deeds: And you, Charles, King of France, seventh of that noble name . . . see your honor exalted by the Maid who has laid low your enemies beneath your standard . . . all this has been brought about by the intelligence of the Maid who, God be thanked, has played her part in this matter!  . . .I hope that you will be good and upright, and a lover of justice and that you will surpass all others, provided your deeds are not tarnished by pride, that you will be gentle and well-disposed towards your people, that you will always love God who elected you as His servant (and you have proof of this), on condition that you do your duty. The Treaty disinheriting Charles had effectively been revoked, and Charles had received legitimation of his election, confirmed by the increasing military support that he needed and began to receive after Reims from wealthy noblemen. <h4>Her Signature</h4>Who was this young woman who had made a king? La Pucelle, as she calls herself in her letters, is sometimes translated as “the Maid.” How might we understand how her voices and her cross-dressing and her piety worked together to effectuate a political theology? Let us go back to the beginning of her public life. A young Breton nobleman, Guy de Laval, encountered Joan early in her time at Charles’ court, and wrote a letter to his grandmother describing his encounter with her:I went to see her at her lodging. She had wine brought and said to me we should soon drink wine in Paris. And there seemed something wholly divine in her manner, and to see her and hear her. She left Selles on Monday at the hour of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de Boussac, and a great many armed men with her. I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour excepting the head, a little axe in her hand. The great black charger was very restive at her door and would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said, 'to the cross which is in front of the church,' and there she mounted, the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then, turning towards the church which was close by, she said in a very womanly voice. 'You priests and people of the Church, make processions and prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road, 'Forward! Forward!' she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page; she had her little axe in her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before. <drupal-entity alt="Joan on horseback in military garb. Adrien Harmand, Jeanne D’Arc: Ses Costumes, Son Armure." title="Joan on horseback in military garb. Adrien Harmand, Jeanne D’Arc: Ses Costumes, Son Armure." data-caption="Joan on horseback in military garb. Adrien Harmand, Jeanne D’Arc: Ses Costumes, Son Armure." data-align="center" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="20d34762-4084-42d9-9188-b736f362aee7" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity> Laval reports on Joan with wonder: the imperious confidence, the beautiful armor, her whisperer’s way with the horse, and her “womanly voice.” Joan appears on his telling, singular, divine, and without the need for a resolution of the disparate gender affects. In Selles, where he encountered her, Joan was dressed in men’s clothes as she had been since she left Vaucouleurs to come to the court and as she would be until the end of her life. Jean Rotselaar, a Burgundian diplomat who was in Chinon in April 1429, also described Joan riding a warhorse: “This Pucelle every day rides on horseback, armed with a lance in battle, as all the other armed men guarding the king are accustomed to doing. And this King and his friends have placed great faith in the Pucelle.” Joan had, as I said, warm relations with her soldiers. The captains who fought with her spoke admiringly of her surprising strategic talent and of her sense of purpose. She was strong and self-disciplined and ascetic in her ways, riding long distances in her armor and eating sparingly. She was also unusually religiously observant.Joan styled herself la Pucelle, as you read in her letter to Henry, signaling that she was a vowed virgin and perhaps identifying with the Béguines, who also used the term, late medieval laywomen with a religious vocation. She also wore men’s clothes, “as all the other armed men.” Occasionally, the gender disjunction was remarked on, although only her judges at the Trial of Condemnation seem to have condemned her clothes as evil.French historian Olivier Bouzy argues that the reason for the acceptance was that for Joan la Pucelle, more than simply an identification with a woman’s chaste religious vocation, symbolized a singular prophetic office. For Bouzy, it was a part of Joan’s genius to see that wearing men’s clothes allowed her to inhabit a space that she could not otherwise occupy, given her sex and her social class. He insists that “the richness of her clothes . . . are not proof of a taste for luxury that Jeanne developed during her career,” as some have suggested, “but should rather be understood as of a quality proper to a messenger from God—like the rich clothes in which the statues of saints were often dressed.” Bouzy suggests moreover that the beautiful men’s clothes do not just confirm her military office granted by the king, but they are suitable for one sent by God. The clothes were, as Bouzy suggests, her signature. From her first sentences in her trial two years later in Rouen, we encounter a young woman who is very clear about herself and her boundaries, one we can recognize from the letters and from accounts of her during her public career. She initially refused to take the oath demanded of her, saying that she did not yet know the charges against her. “I don’t know what you wish to ask of me. Perhaps you might ask me things I can’t tell you.” When pressed, she said she would answer some questions but not others; in particular, she said, she would not reveal the revelations she received from God. She did not want to discuss the details of her voices with her judges, as she did not do so with her military companions, who trusted in the visible results of her integrity and effectiveness. In court, she finally gave a brief account of her first encounter with the voices. (The daily minutes of the trial were reported in the third person, summarizing the interrogation. Occasionally, questions and answers are directly reported, but often there is a condensing of the interrogation.) The record states that,She declared that when she was thirteen, she heard a voice from God helping her to behave, and at first, she feared greatly. And the voice came around noon in the summer, in her father’s garden; and she had not fasted the previous day. She heard a voice on her right, toward the church, and she seldom hears it without light. This light comes from the same side where she hears the voice; but all around in that place there is a great light. When she came to France, she often heard the voice. …it seemed a worthy voice and she believed that the voice was sent by God…. she knew it was the voice of an angel. This is the testimony illustrated on the cover of my book, a retrospective account, at the end of her life.Joan’s public confidence seems to have come, in part, from the voices that she continued to hear, and eventually to see. The single voice of her childhood morphed into a trio of French saints, Catherine, Margaret, and Michael. She reported that they instructed her in her faith, urged her to go to France, supported her in times of trouble, and brought her comfort, although she also said she did not always know what they wanted from her. Her voices seem to have constituted a private space of support and counsel for her—even a kind of lay separation of religion and politics—one that did not pass through a clerical elite. Her judges said that she was required to submit the authenticity of her voices to them, to the men of the church. She said that she was a faithful daughter of the church, but that she could and would decide whether they were the voices of God or of the devil. (Twenty-five years after her burning, another trial was convened to review the legality of the first trial, which affirmed Joan’s theology on this point. The Church does not have the authority to judge occult matters.)Joan’s judges in the first trial seem to have been confused by her, especially by her clothes. What was it she wanted? <h4>Mapping Joan</h4>While there is much more to say about her voices, her gender presentation, and her skills as a military leader, I want to step back for a moment to consider the geographic imaginary in which she moved and how we should map Joan. Joan has become a poster child for contemporary French ultra-nationalism, an ideology that largely took shape in the nineteenth century. Was it indeed that France for which she died? I argue that making a king was, for her, a political theological project in service not of nationalism but of peace and the restoration of community—a community seeking reparations. Joan was not French. And France, as we know it, did not exist in 1429. And the France of which she spoke was not territorially bounded then as it is today. As she said repeatedly, she traveled to France from Lorraine to lend her assistance.Why does that matter?There is a vast literature on the history of French national sentiment, attempting to locate the key moments in the coalescence of a place called France across a long timeline, punctuated with references to Caesar’s Gaul, Clovis, Charlemagne, the Capetian kings, as well as the growing absolutist monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to mention the Revolution and the ups and downs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, France seems to stand in for the inescapability of the modern state tout court. Yet the territorial borders of “France” fluctuate across this entire period. Joan has been posthumously installed in this teleological lineage. Does she belong there?Most maps that accompany accounts of Joan’s career place her on the “hexagon”—the familiar six-sided shape that has been fixed in our imagination and promoted to French schoolchildren. Joan is repeatedly used to naturalize France’s territorial sovereignty. Joan is made to appear as having died so that France would endure and prosper. And yet it is not at all clear that that was her project. Looking not back from modern France to find its origins, but starting with Joan, how might we map Joan? Maps proved a particular challenge when I was writing my book. I wanted to include maps to help orient my readers, but I couldn’t find any that matched the Joan I was encountering in the record. I ended by working with an artist to create maps for the book. We also spoke with an historian of fifteenth-century French maps.Historians of early modern Europe argue that our modern cartographic view of national territory was a seventeenth-century invention, made possible by advances in the technologies of measurement as well as by economic change and political consolidation. Fifteenth-century persons, they say, would have been attached to a local ruler or to a prince or a king, not a territorial nation. Some considered themselves loyal first to a town. I had an interesting correspondence and conversation with Camille Serchuk, an art historian who studies medieval and early modern French maps. When I asked her what maps Joan might have seen, she said that it was unlikely that she—or even Charles, for that matter—had ever seen a map of France. At least no such maps have survived. There are French maps from the fifteenth century, but they are almost all local or regional. Maps of the world also circulated in that period. But not national maps. It is not that there was no sense of France as a place. Joan herself, after all, speaks of going to France. There was no cartographic sense of national borders as we understand them today. Historians Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet note that academic ideas today about territory are often dominated by state-centric models (after Max Weber). They argue rather that in the fifteenth century, “communities were united only by allegiances and personal obligations rather than abstract individual equality or citizenship in a geographically circumscribed territory . . .space was organised around many centres.”Certainly, there is much evidence in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France of such a politics of personal allegiance. Indeed, Joan showed herself to be savvy about the shifting and overlapping local and personal nature of such allegiances. That was her world. She was a master of personal encounters well before she left Domremy, understanding well the relational hierarchy of power and the political value of personal allegiance. In her letter to the Duke of Burgundy on the eve of the coronation, commanding his presence, it is clear that she considers him as having betrayed his personal loyalty to Charles as king of France, and that reminding him of such an obligation might induce him to rally to the King’s cause.To illustrate points from our correspondence and Zoom conversations about fifteenth-century maps, Camille Serchuk sent me the catalog for a 2019 exhibition of medieval and Renaissance French maps at the National Archives Museum in Paris. That exhibit and the accompanying catalog contain a wealth of beautiful hand-painted local maps created for various local purposes, often juridical, including all of the extant maps of French places at the time of Joan’s short life. The introduction to the catalog underlines the purposes of these maps, and the reasons for their emergence for the first time in the fourteenth century, including bureaucratization, more frequent recourse to litigation, and a growing reliance on written records, as well as increasing literacy: “The documents presented here,” they said, “reflect a new type of map produced at the end of the Middle Ages, representing places and territories at a local and regional scale.” The world of Joan.Several of the maps from the Paris exhibit catalog can be used to illustrate this emerging juridification. The maps in the exhibit, as the curators insist, have a practical legal purpose. Here are three from the mid-fifteenth century. As the introduction to the catalog explained, a new cadre of map artists emerged in the fourteenth century to serve these new bureaucratic and juridical needs, the painted maps themselves serving as formal legal documents. These are maps by legal artists, not maps by scientists, engineers, or nationalist propagandists. They represent a local legal imaginary, not cartographic measurement.<drupal-entity alt="Figure de Heuilley et Talmay (Côte-d’Or), troisième quart du xve siècle " title="Figure de Heuilley et Talmay (Côte-d’Or), troisième quart du xve siècle " data-caption="Figure de Heuilley et Talmay (Côte-d’Or), troisième quart du xve siècle" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3cbf6972-ff7e-48cb-8fb9-592d19b366b4" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>              This first map was drawn to resolve a lawsuit concerning rights of pasturage in a place constituted by the overlapping rights of the county of Burgundy, the duchy of Burgundy, and the county of Champagne. The map, which records the markers between the two villages and their rights, is cleverly drawn to be equally available from the perspective of two sides of a table, without privileging a point of view, as if drawn by someone standing in the center of the space. It materializes a horizontal legal process oriented to the purposes of arbitration. <drupal-entity alt="Figure accordée de Saint-Aignan et Castelferrus (Tarn-et-Garonne), par Jean Lemesque, 1525 " title="Figure accordée de Saint-Aignan et Castelferrus (Tarn-et-Garonne), par Jean Lemesque, 1525 " data-caption="Figure accordée de Saint-Aignan et Castelferrus (Tarn-et-Garonne), par Jean Lemesque, 1525" data-align="center" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="07465d6d-7640-4086-aa5d-28c3c685d071" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>Another map records an administrative procedure to create a new parish. As the authors of the catalog explain:Commissioned by a court of justice to constitute a usable legal document and to serve as support for the demonstration of the parties, it proposes an inventory which results from a compromise: the accuracy of the landscape is submitted to the eyes of twelve witnesses who must. The truth of space is therefore not based on measurement, but on consensus. “The truth of space is therefore not based on measurement, but on consensus.” And finally, a map to document the need for mill repairs.These maps give us Joan’s world. Returning cities to allegiance with the king seems to have been one of Joan’s goals. Centralizing all power in the crown was perhaps not. Making a king, for her, did not eliminate the local power and legal authority of towns and other local jurisdictions, which is reflected in these local maps, and which she knew from her own life. We can see this more horizontal political sensibility in the many letters that Joan wrote to the peoples of towns, including Reims. <drupal-entity alt="Political Landscape of the 100 Years War in 1429 (For the Modern Reader)" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="7a997c59-b912-477c-816f-dcbe64d46e34" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"carousel_item_364x294","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity><drupal-entity alt="Political Landscape of the 100 Years War in 1429 (For the Modern Reader)" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3b9b29a8-f49a-45b2-b549-6b6b1c50f5b6" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"carousel_item_364x294","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity><drupal-entity alt="Political Landscape of the 100 Years War in 1429 (For the Modern Reader)" data-align="left" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="6e323eb8-c166-452b-87c9-068d96527c7e" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"carousel_item_364x294","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity>        These are the maps that Claire Bergen made for the book, one showing the larger political context, including Scotland, whose soldiers fought with Charles, Spain, where his wife was from, and Italy, whose diplomats were a constant presence at court. The second is of Domremy and the places Joan could and did walk to. The third is the area of her final campaigns. There is no map of the hexagon.After the coronation at Reims, Joan fought with her army in and around Paris, with mixed results and not always with the full support of the king, who was simultaneously engaged in negotiations with the duke of Burgundy. In May of the following year, she was captured on the battlefield near Paris by soldiers aligned with Burgundy. He sold her to the English for ten thousand pounds. They took her to Rouen to be tried.I would argue that one thing that enabled Joan to be effective and that caused her to be so beloved in her public life was what we might call a queer affect—a chivalrous female masculinity—what Bouzy calls her signature; an affect that was maddening to her judges. They accused her of refusing to submit to their authority, of setting herself up as a worker of miracles with access to magical powers, able to raise the dead and heal the sick. They accused her of having participated in pagan rituals as a child and of having an erotic relationship with her voices. They accused her of war crimes. All of their accusations she parried with startling directness. Asked whether St Michael was naked, she said, “Do you think God can’t find him clothes?” Asked whether it wasn’t a sin to try to escape, as she had on several occasions, she said, “God helps those who help themselves.” Asked whether she believed herself to be in a state of grace, she answered that if she was not, she prayed God would help her to attain it. She insistently asked to be granted access to the sacraments. It is as if she is teaching them their religion, as she had taught the king his politics!But they eventually broke her down. On May 24, 1431, after three months of questioning by more than a hundred judges, mostly theologians and priests from the University of Paris, after being shown the instruments of torture, she suddenly gave in, signing a statement of abjuration and agreeing to resume wearing women’s clothes. She was immediately sentenced to life in prison “with the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction.” Several days later, she was found in her cell in men’s clothes. She explained that she had recanted only for fear of the flames. She said that she felt that she had betrayed her voices. This time she was excommunicated as a relapsed heretic and turned over to the political authorities who burned her at the stake. It is tempting to speak of Joan as a martyr. I think we need to resist defining her by her death. That was their doing. She lived brilliantly. And to a remarkable extent, on her own terms, on behalf of her own people. She changed history. Not with her sword, which she probably never used. But by her gallant fight for the common good, her standard at her side. After she died, Charles did succeed in chasing the English out. He made peace with Burgundy and became a very good king. In many ways, Joan had won. She had done what she promised in her letter to Henry.While Joan was alone at the end, she was not alone in her political efforts. That is important to remember. She brought together existing ideas and ways of being in the world, religious and political, ideas that were often marginal, to be sure, but were present nevertheless. She crossed borders in her travels, in her theology, her politics, and her self-presentation. She was tireless in her efforts, inspiring those around her with her virtue and her bravery. They, in turn, respected her, cared for her, and protected her until she was captured and became a prisoner of war. <o:p></o:p>When Joan called Charles “Dauphin,” she was declaring that he was not yet King and would not be king until he was consecrated. For her, the succession was not just a matter of law. Charles had to be recognized by God and assume his obligations to his people in a specific religious ceremony, in a specific church: the place, the physical objects, the banner, the noblemen to be present, and the particular words. All were necessary. This was something the English (and maybe even Charles himself, and his councilors) failed to understand fully until her arrival. “God helps those who help themselves.” This French proverb (“Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera,” literally, “Help yourself, and the heavens will help you”), expressing the paradox of human agency and of the relationship between God and human, was Joan’s response to her judges when they accused her of wrongfully trying to escape from prison. Being God’s chosen daughter was not a passive or solitary activity for Joan. Indeed, Joan seems to have occupied that sweet spot where religious work is done, described by Paul Johnson in his recent book, Automatic Religion, as agent ambiguity, bridging the individual and the collective. “[A]gency,” Johnson says, “is always hybrid, built of interactions between humans, nearhumans, and nonhuman things.” Joan brought together people of various kinds, angels and saints, and objects (banners, swords, clothing) into a horizontal collective dedicated to self-governance: those who help themselves, with God’s help.Johnson asks, “whether and to what degree religion is a uniquely human event, or rather a way of perceiving agency that can be shared with other kinds of beings.” I argue that Joan’s capacity to act in a situation of extreme complexity displays her brilliance in negotiating the ambiguities of agency. Her clothes, her virginity, her secrecy, her companions, and her talking to God; together they created the hybrid that was la Pucelle. And, together, they account for her continuing charismatic forcefield. But they also reveal the alternative legalities that were available to her and her colleagues. <h4>Conclusion: A Politics Outside the State </h4>In my book, I name Joan’s project as a political theology. That is a contested term today. I join with others, including Carlota McAlister, Valentina Napolitano, and Vincent Lloyd, who seek to put these words to a new purpose: to denominate a politics outside the state. I place Joan in the company of the peasant activists of Carlo Ginzburg’s work and of the Black religion described by Charles Long and others. These religious and legal orders are much closer to the ground than those of the Church and the state, as usually understood today. Together, they resist the aristocratic cronyism that violently determines their lives. Not that they all agreed or that these alternative legalities are monolithic. Widening the lens of religious, political, and legal inquiry offers a wealth of imaginative possibility.  <drupal-entity alt="Protest in Tahrir Square" data-caption="Photo of a protest in Tahrir Square in 2011." data-align="center" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="5ccbc607-c350-44a3-94e5-aa7e37c7bcc4" data-embed-button="file_browser" data-entity-embed-display="image:image" data-entity-embed-display-settings="{"image_style":"large","image_link":"","image_loading":{"attribute":"lazy"}}"> </drupal-entity> This is an image of a young woman taken in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. I think of her as a latter-day Joan.On my retirement from IU, my colleagues held an event at which I was tried for heresy. The indictment charged me with not believing in religious freedom, with not staying in my lane, and with corrupting youth. I like to think I learned how to do that here.<hr><a href="https://www.amacad.org/person/winnifred-fallers-sullivan">Winnifred Fallers Sullivan</a> is the 2026 University of Chicago Divinity School Alum of the Year. Learn more about her career and work in <a href="/news/talking-god-talking-about-religion">this Q&A</a> published in May, 2026 Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, JD'TK, PhD'TK, Provost Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, Indiana University https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-07/screenshot_2026-07-12_at_10.49.24_pm.png St. Leonard’s Church, Apethorpe, UK, by Christopher Whall, 1920 https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/talking-god-joan-arc-political-theology-and-swift-hall https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/talking-god-joan-arc-political-theology-and-swift-hall Laurie Zoloth on the Ethics of the First Synthetic Cell Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:08:34 -0500 Scientists have built a synthetic cell from scratch for the first time, and Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor of Biomedical Ethics, was among the voices CNN turned to for perspective on what it means.The cell, nicknamed SpudCell, was assembled from nonliving molecular components by a team led by synthetic biologist Kate Adamala at the University of Minnesota, working with Drew Endy of Stanford. Unlike earlier synthetic biology milestones, SpudCell can take in nutrients, grow, and divide, though only under carefully controlled lab conditions. Endy noted that the cell has no capacity to reproduce on its own outside that setting.Rather than patent the technology, the team has founded a nonprofit, Biotic, to govern how SpudCell is shared and used, with free access for academic and nonprofit researchers and licensing fees for commercial applications. Zoloth pointed to that structure as a partial answer to the ethical questions any new biotechnology raises."We will have to see how it endures in its first, idealistic form," she told CNN. "I hope it does."The governance questions Zoloth raises—who benefits, who decides, who sets the guardrails—sit at the center of her broader scholarship in biomedical ethics, work that regularly brings the Divinity School into conversation with fast-moving developments in science and technology.Read the full CNN report on the synthetic cell. Scientists have built a synthetic cell from scratch for the first time, and <a href="/directory/laurie-zoloth">Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor of Biomedical Ethics</a>, was among the voices CNN turned to for perspective on what it means.<a href="https://biotic.org/research/spudcell/">The cell, nicknamed SpudCell, was assembled from nonliving molecular components by a team led by synthetic biologist Kate Adamala at the University of Minnesota, working with Drew Endy of Stanford</a>. Unlike earlier synthetic biology milestones, SpudCell can take in nutrients, grow, and divide, though only under carefully controlled lab conditions. Endy noted that the cell has no capacity to reproduce on its own outside that setting.Rather than patent the technology, the team has founded a nonprofit, <a href="https://biotic.org/">Biotic</a>, to govern how SpudCell is shared and used, with free access for academic and nonprofit researchers and licensing fees for commercial applications. Zoloth pointed to that structure as a partial answer to the ethical questions any new biotechnology raises."We will have to see how it endures in its first, idealistic form," she told CNN. "I hope it does."The governance questions Zoloth raises—who benefits, who decides, who sets the guardrails—sit at the center of her broader scholarship in biomedical ethics, work that regularly brings the Divinity School into conversation with fast-moving developments in science and technology.<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/science/synthetic-cell-research">Read the full CNN report on the synthetic cell.</a> Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-07/translation-and-metabolism-credit-orion-venero-adamala-lab.png SpudCell resembles a natural cell but is not identical to cells found in nature. Orion Venero/Adamala Lab https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/laurie-zoloth-ethics-first-synthetic-cell https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/laurie-zoloth-ethics-first-synthetic-cell Angie Heo on Scent, Saints, and the Senses in Religious Life Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:17:46 -0500 Angie Heo, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, was recently quoted in the Chicago Reader in a piece examining how fragrance operates within religious experience.The article, written by Leslie Hurtado and published June 19, 2026, covers a May lecture at the Church of the Ascension, an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish in Chicago's Gold Coast, where fragrance influencer Audrey Robinovitz traced scent through scripture for an audience of parishioners, perfume enthusiasts, and others drawn to the intersection of fragrance and faith.Heo contributed a scholarly context drawn from her research on Coptic Orthodoxy and cultures of saint veneration in Egypt. She described how smell functions not only as a symbol but as a form of material contact with the sacred: when worshippers approach a saint's relic or carry home oil from a shrine, they bring with them, in Heo's framing, part of the saint's bodily presence. "You can think about oils and incense as portable vehicles of the saints' blessings," she told the Reader.Heo also spoke to a broader pattern she observes in contemporary religious life. After years of digitally mediated community, she sees a turn toward embodied, sensory experience. "Young people are looking for something slower, more concrete, more structured," she said. "You can go to a virtual church, but you're not going to get the incense."Read the full article in the Chicago Reader. <a href="/directory/angie-heo">Angie Heo, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion</a>, was recently quoted in the Chicago Reader in a piece examining how fragrance operates within religious experience.The article, written by Leslie Hurtado and published June 19, 2026, covers a May lecture at the <a href="https://ascensionchicago.org/">Church of the Ascension</a>, an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish in Chicago's Gold Coast, where fragrance influencer <a href="https://eatyourlipstick.substack.com/">Audrey Robinovitz</a> traced scent through scripture for an audience of parishioners, perfume enthusiasts, and others drawn to the intersection of fragrance and faith.Heo contributed a scholarly context drawn from her research on Coptic Orthodoxy and cultures of saint veneration in Egypt. She described how smell functions not only as a symbol but as a form of material contact with the sacred: when worshippers approach a saint's relic or carry home oil from a shrine, they bring with them, in Heo's framing, part of the saint's bodily presence. "You can think about oils and incense as portable vehicles of the saints' blessings," she told the Reader.Heo also spoke to a broader pattern she observes in contemporary religious life. After years of digitally mediated community, she sees a turn toward embodied, sensory experience. "Young people are looking for something slower, more concrete, more structured," she said. "You can go to a virtual church, but you're not going to get the incense."<a class="underline underline-offset-2 decoration-1 decoration-current/40 hover:decoration-current focus:decoration-current" href="https://chicagoreader.com/city-life/ascension-chicago-audrey-robtinovitz-frangrance/">Read the full article in the Chicago Reader.</a> Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/scent_of_ressurection.jpeg Collage by Shira Friedman-Parks https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/angie-heo-scent-saints-and-senses-religious-life https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/angie-heo-scent-saints-and-senses-religious-life Anna Zeisel , MDiv'26, On Chaplaincy, Prayer, and The Future of Religious Leadership Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:34:46 -0500 Anna Zeisel came to the University of Chicago Divinity School by a route she hadn't planned. Drawn to work as a death doula, accompanying people through the final chapter of their lives, she learned that chaplaincy training was open to her as a non-Christian student. She was enrolled at a seminary when she discovered the Divinity School, and since she was already living in Chicago, the decision was easy. "I heard that the University of Chicago has a nice divinity school," she recalled, "and that's how I ended up here."She completed her first hospital chaplaincy internship while earning her master's and came away certain of her direction. Her thesis, "On Longing, Absence, and the Uses of Traditional Prayer in Contemporary Jewish Life," is now finished, and next year she will be a clinical pastoral education resident at Rush University Medical Center, working toward board certification.The School also changed how she understands herself. Among classmates from a wide range of traditions, many of them actively renegotiating their beliefs, Zeisel found herself identifying more deeply with her own Jewish background."I feel so lucky to look around and know that I'm going to know the future of religious leadership in this country," she said. "I trust them, and I think they're amazing people."Read more about the Class of 2026 and their journeys to Convocation in the full University of Chicago News story. Anna Zeisel came to the University of Chicago Divinity School by a route she hadn't planned. Drawn to work as a death doula, accompanying people through the final chapter of their lives, she learned that chaplaincy training was open to her as a non-Christian student. She was enrolled at a seminary when she discovered the Divinity School, and since she was already living in Chicago, the decision was easy. "I heard that the University of Chicago has a nice divinity school," she recalled, "and that's how I ended up here."She completed her first hospital chaplaincy internship while earning her master's and came away certain of her direction. Her thesis, "On Longing, Absence, and the Uses of Traditional Prayer in Contemporary Jewish Life," is now finished, and next year she will be a clinical pastoral education resident at Rush University Medical Center, working toward board certification.The School also changed how she understands herself. Among classmates from a wide range of traditions, many of them actively renegotiating their beliefs, Zeisel found herself identifying more deeply with her own Jewish background."I feel so lucky to look around and know that I'm going to know the future of religious leadership in this country," she said. "I trust them, and I think they're amazing people."Read more about the Class of 2026 and their journeys to Convocation in the <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/class-2026-looks-back-journeys-convocation">full University of Chicago News story</a>. Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/uchicago-divinityschool-graduation-2026-charissajohnsonphotography-28.jpg Anna Zeisel, MDiv'26 receives the Buechner Writing Prize at the 2026 hooding and pinning ceremony https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/anna-zeisel-mdiv26-chaplaincy-prayer-and-future-religious-leadership https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/anna-zeisel-mdiv26-chaplaincy-prayer-and-future-religious-leadership Jeffrey Stackert's Summer Reading Picks Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:51:02 -0500 The Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible recommends a novel set in a research lab and a murder mystery with roots in Swift Hall, in UChicago News's annual list from this year's teaching award winners. UChicago News asked this year's recipients of the University's teaching awards for summer reading recommendations. Among them was Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a 2026 recipient of the PhD Teaching and Mentoring Award, who offered two recommendations.The first is Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition, set in a cancer research lab where the pressure to succeed amid grant shortages turns a promising result into a source of both elation and suspicion. A reader of academic novels, Stackert pointed to Goodman's portrait of the people who work behind the scenes of scientific discovery.His second pick carries a closer connection to home. Bruce Lincoln's Secrets, Lies, and Consequences reads, in Stackert's description, with the intrigue of an Agatha Christie novel and the weight of serious history. Lincoln, the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, takes up the troubled past of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and his ties to the 1991 assassination of Ioan Culianu in Swift Hall, the Divinity School's home. To write the book, Lincoln taught himself Romanian.Read Stackert's recommendations, along with selections from other University of Chicago teaching award winners, at UChicago News: news.uchicago.edu/story/what-read-during-summer-2026 <h4>The Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible recommends a novel set in a research lab and a murder mystery with roots in Swift Hall, in UChicago News's annual list from this year's teaching award winners.</h4> UChicago News asked this year's recipients of the University's teaching awards for summer reading recommendations. Among them was <a href="/directory/jeffrey-stackert">Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible</a> at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a <a href="/news/exacting-and-invested-jeffrey-stackert-honored-phd-teaching-and-mentoring">2026 recipient of the PhD Teaching and Mentoring Award</a>, who offered two recommendations.The first is Allegra Goodman's novel <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/intuition-allegra-goodman/453a51fbcc2408c4">Intuition</a>, set in a cancer research lab where the pressure to succeed amid grant shortages turns a promising result into a source of both elation and suspicion. A reader of academic novels, Stackert pointed to Goodman's portrait of the people who work behind the scenes of scientific discovery.His second pick carries a closer connection to home. Bruce Lincoln's <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/secrets-lies-and-consequences-a-great-scholar-s-hidden-past-and-his-prot-g-s-unsolved-murder-bruce-lincoln/86f30499cf01c22a?ean=9780197689103&next=t">Secrets, Lies, and Consequences</a> reads, in Stackert's description, with the intrigue of an Agatha Christie novel and the weight of serious history. <a href="/directory/bruce-lincoln">Lincoln</a>, the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, takes up the troubled past of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and his ties to the 1991 assassination of Ioan Culianu in Swift Hall, the Divinity School's home. To write the book, Lincoln taught himself Romanian.Read Stackert's recommendations, along with selections from other University of Chicago teaching award winners, at UChicago News: <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/what-read-during-summer-2026">news.uchicago.edu/story/what-read-during-summer-2026</a> Erin Keane Scott https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/uchicago-divinityschool-graduation-2026-charissajohnsonphotography-21.jpg https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/jeffrey-stackerts-summer-reading-picks https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/jeffrey-stackerts-summer-reading-picks Pop Religion | Two Nations in One Womb: Professor Abimbola Adelakun on Is God Is, Destiny, Sin, and the Religious Imagination of Black Rage Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:04:37 -0500 It would be easy to read Aleshea Harris's Is God Is as a revenge thriller: twin sisters set out to kill the father who burned them as children. But the film, Harris’s feature directorial debut, plays more like a parable, folding inherited trauma and Black rage into the language of destiny, sin, and sacrifice.“That itself started to tell me that these are not two people,” said Abimbola Adelakun, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and the Tandean Rustandy Scholar, of the sisters' near-telepathic bond. “This is one person. The story breaks them into two.”Adelakun’s work spans global Christianity, Pentecostalism, and the performance of religion. Criteria spoke with her about twins in myth, sin as a collective burden, and why righteous anger occupies such a central place in the film's political and theological imagination.This is an edited Q&A that contains spoilers for the film Is God Is. The film repeatedly returns to questions of inheritance, destiny, and obligation. How do the twins' relationship and their mission illuminate the film's understanding of trauma, family, and social order? At first, Racine and Anaia seem inseparable, bound by love, protection, and a near-telepathic sense of each other’s thoughts. That closeness is why I began to see them as one person split into two. There are so many Greek and Yoruba myths attached to twins.In Greek mythology, where one twin can be human and the other divine, they are used to represent duality, opposition, or even balance. In the Bible, too, there is a passage where God tells Rebekah that two nations are in her womb, Jacob and Esau, and they emerge in constant tension. The film plays with that duality. Racine is willful, forceful, and calculating; Anaia is more uncertain and emotional. Once their mother shows them her scarred body and tells them what happened, the daughters cannot walk away. They must make the suffering they have endured mean something, and so they become people on a moral mission. In many African stories, that is the logic of destiny: you have been called to do this, and to refuse would foreclose a whole world of possibilities. They reach a threshold where they either discover their destiny or they betray it. In their case, they keep asking: Why should we do this? What will we become if we do? That is the anxiety that precedes such a life-changing mission. Through social practices of religion, we see how these twins are committed to a web of relationships and obligations that overlay the morality of their mission. It is not only their relationship with each other or with their mother. They are quite entangled in family ties and obligations.If you look at the pair as two people going through psychological duality, they are trying to define evil from the perspective of people who have suffered so much. They are wrestling with what is good and what is bad. One sister says, "We will be killers." The other says their father was a killer, their mother became a killer, and these are the people from whom they come. What else are we but a people marked by the fated circumstances of our birth? The film is saturated with religious imagery, particularly through its treatment of God, the devil, sin, and sacrifice. How do you understand these theological themes, especially through the figures of Mother and Father? I struggled with the ending for two days. Early on, one sister wants to push the father off a building, and Racine asks, "What if he pulls us along with him?" By the end, it is not just the physical pull that happens. It is also the evil in him that drags Racine down. In the last scene, the father pulling her into the fire reads to me like the devil rising from Hades to drag her down into hell with him. That scene was quite striking in its allusion to Christian imagery. The devil is sin, and sin will drag you down to hell if you are in dalliance with it.The mother in the story is God; the film tells us so. She is the creator because she gives birth. The father is the devil, and the two are in contention, with their human children left to set the world right. That is the story of creation according to Christianity. Except that the “man,” the creation of God that the devil has always sought to destroy, are two children, not one. Both of them represent two halves of a whole. Racine carries destructive energy, the kind that gets things done but cannot build. Anaia, on the other hand, carries creative energy. If one has to die so the other can go on creating, then the survivor becomes more intimate with God. That is also where sacrificial logic comes into this story. According to Rene Girard, societies project their aggression around a consensual victim, a scapegoat, who must be sacrificed. Something or someone has to be cut off so balance can be restored. In trying to destroy the devil, you take on some of his essence, so renewal becomes necessary. For Anaia, the renewal can only come if her sister and her tendency to escalate are no longer there.The film also asks a provocative question. If women create life, why has God not been a woman? It flips the familiar Christian image: instead of woman as temptation or evil, the woman becomes God and the man becomes the devil. The film also complicates conventional ideas of sin by presenting violence, trauma, and revenge as interconnected. What does Is God Is suggest about sin, accountability, and collective responsibility? This story changes much of what we think we know about good and bad, with sin at the center. Sin here is not only what someone has done as a personal moral failure, but also what was done to others who bear the consequences on their bodies. The film makes the effect of sin tangible. The twins’ scars and the mother’s failing body are living records of sin, still felt, still demanding to be recompensed.The original sin in this story is the father's attempt to destroy his family. He tried to murder his wife and children and walked away, protected by a frail, human legal system. In Christian terms, the mother's desire for revenge is sin, asking her daughters to carry it out is a sin, and their violence is a sin. But each emerges in response to a first sin that was never paid for.In premodern societies, sin is rarely individual. When one person does wrong, it stains the entire community, and repair has to be collective. Modern life, shaped by Christianity, makes us individually accountable instead. The film asks what happens when one person’s wrongdoing touches everyone and there is no mechanism for collective repair. The father's sin spreads through the entire family network, and by the end nearly everyone is dead. Unrecompensed sin destroys all. Anaia, carrying a child, is the only one left standing, the one who can begin a cycle of renewal. Critics, creators, and actors have described Is God Is as a specifically Black story. How do Black rage, religion, and historical trauma intersect within the film? The story itself is a powerful notation on Black history and culture, especially through Racine. Her anger is never anger for its own sake. It begins as protection for her sister and deepens when she confronts her mother's suffering. The film gives a Black woman space to be angry in a way that departs from how Black women's anger is usually shown, as hysterical or meaningless. This is someone with a reason for her rage, and that rage drives the plot. It is destructive but also creative, with intuition, initiative, and clarity.Set against Black history in America, the film reminds us that people are not enraged for no reason. There is historical trauma carried on the body, written on the burn scars of both mother and daughters and passed down. The film balances that rage: one sister pushes toward action while the other asks questions, together holding the tension between destruction and preservation. The religious framework intensifies all of this. Religion is a language many people already understand, and it lets the film turn vengeance into a moral mission and suffering into a theological question. Harris draws on Christianity as well as on indigenous traditions through twins, creation, destiny, and divine power, so the story works on several levels at once: Black family history, trauma, religion, and justice. It allows a Black woman to express righteous rage and asks what happens when that rage becomes morally meaningful. That, for me, is what makes it a major political project.Pop Religion is a series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.   Read More Pop Religion:Outside of History: 'Marty Supreme' and the American Dream with Professor Sarah HammerschlagHunger and Thirst: Embodied Religion in The Testament of Ann Lee with Professor William Schultz It would be easy to read Aleshea Harris's <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/is_god_is">Is God Is</a> as a revenge thriller: twin sisters set out to kill the father who burned them as children. But the film, Harris’s feature directorial debut, plays more like a parable, folding inherited trauma and Black rage into the language of destiny, sin, and sacrifice.“That itself started to tell me that these are not two people,” said <a href="/directory/abimbola-adelakun">Abimbola Adelakun, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and the Tandean Rustandy Scholar</a>, of the sisters' near-telepathic bond. “This is one person. The story breaks them into two.”Adelakun’s work spans global Christianity, Pentecostalism, and the performance of religion. Criteria spoke with her about twins in myth, sin as a collective burden, and why righteous anger occupies such a central place in the film's political and theological imagination.This is an edited Q&A that contains spoilers for the film Is God Is. <h4>The film repeatedly returns to questions of inheritance, destiny, and obligation. How do the twins' relationship and their mission illuminate the film's understanding of trauma, family, and social order?</h4> At first, Racine and Anaia seem inseparable, bound by love, protection, and a near-telepathic sense of each other’s thoughts. That closeness is why I began to see them as one person split into two. There are so many Greek and Yoruba myths attached to twins.In Greek mythology, where one twin can be human and the other divine, they are used to represent duality, opposition, or even balance. In the Bible, too, there is a passage where God tells Rebekah that two nations are in her womb, Jacob and Esau, and they emerge in constant tension. The film plays with that duality. Racine is willful, forceful, and calculating; Anaia is more uncertain and emotional. Once their mother shows them her scarred body and tells them what happened, the daughters cannot walk away. They must make the suffering they have endured mean something, and so they become people on a moral mission. In many African stories, that is the logic of destiny: you have been called to do this, and to refuse would foreclose a whole world of possibilities. They reach a threshold where they either discover their destiny or they betray it. In their case, they keep asking: Why should we do this? What will we become if we do? That is the anxiety that precedes such a life-changing mission. Through social practices of religion, we see how these twins are committed to a web of relationships and obligations that overlay the morality of their mission. It is not only their relationship with each other or with their mother. They are quite entangled in family ties and obligations.If you look at the pair as two people going through psychological duality, they are trying to define evil from the perspective of people who have suffered so much. They are wrestling with what is good and what is bad. One sister says, "We will be killers." The other says their father was a killer, their mother became a killer, and these are the people from whom they come. What else are we but a people marked by the fated circumstances of our birth? <h4>The film is saturated with religious imagery, particularly through its treatment of God, the devil, sin, and sacrifice. How do you understand these theological themes, especially through the figures of Mother and Father?</h4> I struggled with the ending for two days. Early on, one sister wants to push the father off a building, and Racine asks, "What if he pulls us along with him?" By the end, it is not just the physical pull that happens. It is also the evil in him that drags Racine down. In the last scene, the father pulling her into the fire reads to me like the devil rising from Hades to drag her down into hell with him. That scene was quite striking in its allusion to Christian imagery. The devil is sin, and sin will drag you down to hell if you are in dalliance with it.The mother in the story is God; the film tells us so. She is the creator because she gives birth. The father is the devil, and the two are in contention, with their human children left to set the world right. That is the story of creation according to Christianity. Except that the “man,” the creation of God that the devil has always sought to destroy, are two children, not one. Both of them represent two halves of a whole. Racine carries destructive energy, the kind that gets things done but cannot build. Anaia, on the other hand, carries creative energy. If one has to die so the other can go on creating, then the survivor becomes more intimate with God. That is also where sacrificial logic comes into this story. According to Rene Girard, societies project their aggression around a consensual victim, a scapegoat, who must be sacrificed. Something or someone has to be cut off so balance can be restored. In trying to destroy the devil, you take on some of his essence, so renewal becomes necessary. For Anaia, the renewal can only come if her sister and her tendency to escalate are no longer there.The film also asks a provocative question. If women create life, why has God not been a woman? It flips the familiar Christian image: instead of woman as temptation or evil, the woman becomes God and the man becomes the devil. <h4>The film also complicates conventional ideas of sin by presenting violence, trauma, and revenge as interconnected. What does Is God Is suggest about sin, accountability, and collective responsibility?</h4> This story changes much of what we think we know about good and bad, with sin at the center. Sin here is not only what someone has done as a personal moral failure, but also what was done to others who bear the consequences on their bodies. The film makes the effect of sin tangible. The twins’ scars and the mother’s failing body are living records of sin, still felt, still demanding to be recompensed.The original sin in this story is the father's attempt to destroy his family. He tried to murder his wife and children and walked away, protected by a frail, human legal system. In Christian terms, the mother's desire for revenge is sin, asking her daughters to carry it out is a sin, and their violence is a sin. But each emerges in response to a first sin that was never paid for.In premodern societies, sin is rarely individual. When one person does wrong, it stains the entire community, and repair has to be collective. Modern life, shaped by Christianity, makes us individually accountable instead. The film asks what happens when one person’s wrongdoing touches everyone and there is no mechanism for collective repair. The father's sin spreads through the entire family network, and by the end nearly everyone is dead. Unrecompensed sin destroys all. Anaia, carrying a child, is the only one left standing, the one who can begin a cycle of renewal. <h4>Critics, creators, and actors have described Is God Is as a specifically Black story. How do Black rage, religion, and historical trauma intersect within the film?</h4> The story itself is a powerful notation on Black history and culture, especially through Racine. Her anger is never anger for its own sake. It begins as protection for her sister and deepens when she confronts her mother's suffering. The film gives a Black woman space to be angry in a way that departs from how Black women's anger is usually shown, as hysterical or meaningless. This is someone with a reason for her rage, and that rage drives the plot. It is destructive but also creative, with intuition, initiative, and clarity.Set against Black history in America, the film reminds us that people are not enraged for no reason. There is historical trauma carried on the body, written on the burn scars of both mother and daughters and passed down. The film balances that rage: one sister pushes toward action while the other asks questions, together holding the tension between destruction and preservation. The religious framework intensifies all of this. Religion is a language many people already understand, and it lets the film turn vengeance into a moral mission and suffering into a theological question. Harris draws on Christianity as well as on indigenous traditions through twins, creation, destiny, and divine power, so the story works on several levels at once: Black family history, trauma, religion, and justice. It allows a Black woman to express righteous rage and asks what happens when that rage becomes morally meaningful. That, for me, is what makes it a major political project.<hr><h5>Pop Religion is a series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.   </h5><h5>Read More Pop Religion:</h5><ul><li data-list-item-id="e2c767b8e703ef84ec100353f8b96907f"><h5><a href="https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-outside-history-marty-supreme-and-american-dream">Outside of History: 'Marty Supreme' and the American Dream with Professor Sarah Hammerschlag</a></h5></li><li style="box-sizing:border-box;" data-list-item-id="ee0ffc3cd61fc9d84bd8eb552594d0282"><h5 style="box-sizing:border-box;color:inherit;font-family:inherit;font-size:1.25rem;font-weight:500;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0px;"><a style="background-color:transparent;box-sizing:border-box;color:maroon;text-decoration:none;" href="https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-hunger-and-thirst-embodied-religion-testament-ann-lee" tabindex="-1">Hunger and Thirst: Embodied Religion in The Testament of Ann Lee</a> with Professor William Schultz</h5></li></ul> Leo Walker https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/is-the-is-god-is-movie-worth-watching.jpg Photo credit: Patti Perret © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-two-nations-one-womb-professor-abimbola-adelakun-god-destiny-sin-and-religious https://divinity.uchicago.edu/news/pop-religion-two-nations-one-womb-professor-abimbola-adelakun-god-destiny-sin-and-religious