The Department of Religious Studies received grant support from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religious Studies to facilitate faculty conversations about how to improve the senior capstone seminar and other advanced seminars in the Religious Studies curriculum. Religious Studies faculty will be joined by the Wabash consultant Eugene Gallagher, the Rosemary Park Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College, where he has taught since 1978. Trained as a historian of religions, Dr. Gallagher has taught and published widely in the areas of religions of Western antiquity, American religions and comparative religions. He is a past recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2001) and the Carnegie/CASE Connecticut Professor of the Year (2003), and he served as Faculty Fellow, Joy Shechtman Mankoff Center for Teaching & Learning from 2002-2010. Dr. Gallagher will join faculty on August 17th for a full day faculty retreat.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
“Saints, Missionaries, and Icelandic Christian Identity” Lecture with Dr. Margaret Cormack (4/29)
On Sunday April 29th, Professor Margaret Cormack will hold a lecture on “Saints, Missionaries, and Icelandic Christian Identity” at a conference on Missionaries, Saints, and the Chritianization of Europe in Paderborn, Germany.
“Lethal Religion: The Explosive Mix of Religion and Politics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” Guest Lecture with Dr. Charles Kimball (4/17)
Guest lecture with Dr. Charles Kimball: Lethal Religion: The Explosive Mix of Religion and Politics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
April 17th at 7:00pm at the Wells Fargo Auditorium (Beatty 115)
Religious values have inspired acts of violence: 9/11, the continuing chaos in the Middle East, and the bombing of abortion clinics in the US are all examples. These events present new challenges to peace, stability, economic vitality, personal safety and freedom. This lecture will explore the explosive mix of religion and politics today in the three Abrahamic religions.
“Christian Reconstructionism: Biblical Law in Contemporary America” Guest Lecture with Dr. Julie Ingersoll (3/29)
Guest lecture with Dr. Julie Ingersoll on Christian Reconstructionism: Biblical Law in Contemporary America
March 29th at 3:30 in Arnold Hall
Christian Reconstructionism is a fifty-year old movement seeking to “exercise dominion” in America, by building a culture based on Biblical Law. With growing influence in some surprising places, Christian Reconstructionism might just be the most important movement you’ve never heard of.
“I Don’t Think about Things I Don’t Think About: The Scopes Trial as Secular Myth” Guest Lecture with Dr. Finbarr Curtis (3/13)
Guest lecture with Dr. Finbarr Curtis on I Don’t Think about Things I Don’t Think About: The Scopes Trial as Secular Myth
March 13 at 3:30 in Tate, 202
Most conventional wisdom about the 1925 Scopes Trial, in which William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow debated whether evolution should be taught in public schools, has been shaped by the 1950s play Inherit the Wind. In retelling events from the trial to craft a story of popular support for scientific progress, however, the play acts as a kind of secular mythology of an American public sphere that harmonizes respect for science with a free marketplace of ideas.
“Improving The Study Abroad Experience Using the Latest Pedagogy in Religious Studies” Faculty Sabbatical Lecture with Dr. Elijah Siegler (2/21)
Sabattical lecture with Dr. Elijah Siegler on Improving The Study Abroad Experience Using the Latest Pedagogy in Religious Studies
February 21 at 3:30 in Addlestone Library, room 227
This talk will be of interest to all faculty and administration interested in improving the educational experience of the College’s study abroad programs, and to all faculty preparing for, or thinking about leading, a study abroad trip, and to those have come back from such a trip and asked themselves “well, what happened?”