This message came my way via Dien Ho on Facebook, drawn to my attention by A. David Lewis: Fellowship opportunities!!! After a ton of hard work, the Center for Health Humanities for which I serve as the chair can finally announce the launch of a fellowship for Health Humanities. If you are a scholar (affiliated or unaffiliated) and want to come to Boston to do some research, check us out. We pay $1,000 for a week and the fellowship can... Read more
Applications are now being taken for the 2020 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship to support special collections research in the UO Libraries. The fellowship is sponsored by UO Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon. The intention of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship is to encourage research within collections in the area of feminist science fiction. The UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) houses the papers of authors Ursula K. Le... Read more
I enjoyed talking with A. David Lewis at ΘeoCon about comic books, graphic novels, and Canon: The Card Game. After I got back from that conference/convention, a book I put on hold at the public library: The Graphic Canon Volume 1. I think there are a variety of ways these seemingly disparate areas are intertwined, ranging from comparisons to the dynamics of canon definition and defense, to the provision of multimodal ways of interacting with texts as well as course content... Read more
I’ve blogged before about getting students to read texts as adults that they were previously exposed to as children. It often makes them acutely aware of the gulf between perceptions of what the Bible says and is they had growing up, and the reality of its contents. I’ve tended to use the stories of David and Samson to get at that point. Now, Fred Clark has done the same with Josiah. Here’s an extended excerpt. Click through to read the... Read more
I’m sure I’m not the only religion professor who is a Star Wars fan whose ears perked up when the Mandalorian said A former student of mine shared this meme with me, pointing out that the early Christians referred to their movement as “The Way”: Mike Duncan writes in the first post in a series of Star Wars emails: My favorite scene in the first Star Wars film is… the meeting chaired by Grand Moff Tarkin. Why? Well, it’s a... Read more
As I’ve been doing in past summaries of this event, let me start with recent news and other such sources that relate to this topic. First, an article in the Christian Science Monitor recently made the point: By its very nature liberal arts studies force students to dip into topics they’ve never thought about. Who might they become as adults? Their imaginations can be set free in unexpected ways, something that drilling down into a highly specialized STEM field too... Read more
The next speaker at the Interfaith/Interreligious Studies and Vocation workshop was Jacqueline Bussie, who said that her institution has an interfaith peacebuilding center with a name that does not immediately convey what they do. They developed an Interfaith Studies minor at Concordia, an ELCA school that was once predominantly Lutheran, but now is much more diverse, as their context has changed dramatically. Institutional vocation questions should also be asked, and not only individual ones: What does it mean to be a Christian institution in... Read more
I was delighted to attend the NetVUE (Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education) pre-conference workshop in San Diego last month. The Religion program at Butler University has been exploring the possibility of offering a minor in interreligious engagement ever since I read an article by Eboo Patel proposing an interfaith curriculum, and I realized that we already offered almost every class listed there (or something very close that could become what was listed with minor tweaking). In the context of... Read more
I began writing this just after seeing the movie about Mr. Rogers starring Tom Hanks (who looks like him at least in part because he’s related to him). The movie is very creatively done, framed as though it were an episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I’ve long admired how Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, put his faith into practice to help others in ways that weren’t preachy but appealing. Christianity at its best, in so many ways. The movie focuses on... Read more
The first session of AAR/SBL proper that I attended this year (after the pre-conference NetVUE workshop and Enoch Seminar symposium) was focused on the references to Nazarenes/Nazoreans in a variety of ancient sources. My own interest in this stems from the fact that Mandaean sources use the term nasurai as a way of referring to themselves. Yet they don’t esteem Jesus. How does one explain this? By the end of this session, I felt the problem even more acutely –... Read more
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