The Office of Sustainability works with campus and community partners to enhance a culture of sustainability using a data-driven, yet relationship-based approach that strives to connect students, faculty and staff into a cohesive University-wide network. Their philosophy: to achieve balance between environmental, social and economic sustainability in all decisions. Wednesday Lunch is a Divinity School tradition started many decades ago. At noon on Wednesdays when the quarter is in session a...

For early-career and established faculty alike, a course in "World Religions" or the like can present a substantial pedagogical challenge. Often an inherited course rotating between faculty members, "World Religions" risks becoming a professor's nightmare: it presents to students an opportunity for global exposure to religious ideas, practices, and problems, seeming to be an all-in-one package; yet for the teacher, such a demand for coverage can seem to necessitate either a superhuman level...

Studying Religion in Iran: Between University and Seminary Iran is well-known for its centuries-old centers of Islamic scholarship where students from all over the world learn jurisprudence, sciences of hadith transmission, Qur'anic exegesis, theology, and philosophy. It is less commonly known that academic scholarship on religion has also been burgeoning outside the direct sphere of the hawzah (seminary) system. Join us for a conversation with visiting scholars from the University of...

The quarterly Dean's Craft of Teaching Seminar is the flagship seminar of the Craft of Teaching program, centered on issues of course design and institutional context. Abstract: The humanities, scholars and educators continue to sense, are increasingly associated on college campuses with pre-professional requirements, a warm-up act to the real task of preparing students for a range of existing and tightly specified careers. The data suggest that the curricular presence of the humanities...

Marty Center Senior Fellow Symposium 2015-2016 by Nancy Frankenberry "Believing Scientists in America: Trials and Tribulations of Theistic Evolution." Nancy Frankenberry is John Phillips Professor in Religion Emerita at Dartmouth College where she taught courses in philosophy of religion; women and gender studies and religion; and science and religion. Her research and writing have attempted to span all three areas. She is the author or editor/co-editor of five books, as well as over sixty...

David Travis (AB'71), Author, Curator, and former Chair of the Department of Photography of the The Art Institute of Chicago, speaking. A specialist in the modernist period, he has organized a number of significant shows and contributed scholarly essays to their catalogs, including Starting With Atget: Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection (1977), Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs 1900-1930 (1979), André Kertész: Of Paris and New York (1985), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow:...

Quarterly Deans Forum with Kevin Hector, Associate Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions. Professor Hector's recent book, “The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness” (Oxford University Press, 2015), explores the idea of 'mineness,' in the sense of being able to identify with one's life or experience it as self-expressive, by tracing the development of this idea in modern theology. Professors Michael Fishbane and Angie Heo offer...

This multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars who will share their research and engage in conversation about the role of religion in addressing rising income inequality—an issue that impacts millions of people. During the 1960s and 1970s, 9-10% of total income went to the top one-percent of Americans. By 2007, this share had risen to 23.5%. Even before 2008 and the so-called Great Recession, the wages of the average worker in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, had been...

"Building the Religion Major in the Era of the 'Death of the Humanities'" This seminar will discuss the challenges of attracting students to the Religion Major in the contemporary climate. As students are inundated with talk of career preparation and are told over and over again that humanities majors only get jobs at coffee shops, departments worry about declining enrollments, consolidation, and justifying their programs to administrators, trustees, and even their faculty colleagues. Prof....

Professor Peter Gregory, the Jill Ker Conway of Professor Emeritus of Religion and East Asian Studies of Smith College, will present a public lecture on "Bridging the Gap: Zongmi’s Strategies for Reconciling Textual Study and Meditative Practice." Abstract: There is a long-standing and deep-rooted tension between what could be characterized as meditative practice and textual study that runs through the Buddhist tradition. It emerges with the early com¬munities, is manifested in different...

John Cottingham delivers a public lecture, entitled "Transcending science: humane models of religious understanding." John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, University of London, and Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford and former editor of Ratio: the International Journal of Analytic Philosophy (1993-2013). Prof. Cottingham is a world-renowned Descartes scholar who has has published extensively...

Peter Iver Kaufman, (MA 1973, PhD 1975, History of Christianity), is the Divinity School’s 2016 Alumnus of the Year, will deliver the lecture. His lecture is entitled “Giorgio Agamben, Meet Augustine (With an Extended Introduction to Augustine’s Statesmen)” Kaufman is George Matthews and Virginia Brinkley Modlin Professor of Leadership Studies in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, a position he has held since 2008. Previously he taught at the University...

Trina Janiec Jones (Wofford College) had her dissertation colloquium in Swift Hall on September 12th, 2001. The events of the previous day not only impacted her colloquium, but eventually, also took her teaching career and scholarly interests in directions she never imagined while sitting in Regenstein working her way through Sanskrit declensions. Trained in Buddhist philosophy at the Divinity School, she soon found that every job for which she interviewed required that she create a course on...

The University of Chicago Divinity School's Diploma, Hooding, and Awards Ceremony at the 527th Convocation was held at Bond Chapel.

This multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars who will share their research and engage in conversation about the role of religion in addressing rising income inequality—an issue that impacts millions of people. During the 1960s and 1970s, 9-10% of total income went to the top one-percent of Americans. By 2007, this share had risen to 23.5%. Even before 2008 and the so-called Great Recession, the wages of the average worker in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, had been...

This multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars who will share their research and engage in conversation about the role of religion in addressing rising income inequality—an issue that impacts millions of people. During the 1960s and 1970s, 9-10% of total income went to the top one-percent of Americans. By 2007, this share had risen to 23.5%. Even before 2008 and the so-called Great Recession, the wages of the average worker in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, had been...

This multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars who will share their research and engage in conversation about the role of religion in addressing rising income inequality—an issue that impacts millions of people. During the 1960s and 1970s, 9-10% of total income went to the top one-percent of Americans. By 2007, this share had risen to 23.5%. Even before 2008 and the so-called Great Recession, the wages of the average worker in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, had been...

This multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars who will share their research and engage in conversation about the role of religion in addressing rising income inequality—an issue that impacts millions of people. During the 1960s and 1970s, 9-10% of total income went to the top one-percent of Americans. By 2007, this share had risen to 23.5%. Even before 2008 and the so-called Great Recession, the wages of the average worker in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, had been...

Alain de Libéra is Professor of the History of Medieval Philosophy at the Collège de France, where his inaugural lecture was entitled Where Is Medieval Philosophy Headed? (Où va la philosophie médiévale? Leçon inaugurale prononcée le jeudi 13 février 2014). Prior to his election in 2012, he held the chair of the History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Geneva. Among his earlier notable distinctions is his election in 1985 as research director of the Ve section (Sciences...

The Craft of Teaching and the Theology and Religious Ethics Workshop. This workshop is intended to cultivate sensitivity and strategy in relation to the commitments of students and teachers, which come together in an inevitable but variable mixture specific to each classroom setting. Teaching effectively to and not only about diversity is a challenge that we will embrace. There will not be one solution but rather a palette of possibilities with which teachers may choose to proceed in light of...

Philosophy of Religions Workshops presents Jonardon Ganeri on “Why Philosophy Must Go Global” Jonardon Ganeri is Professor of Philosophy, NYU Abu Dhabi and Global Network Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU. Abstract: The world of academic philosophy is now entering a new age, one defined neither by colonial need for recognition nor by postcolonial wish to integrate. The indicators of this new era include heightened appreciation of the value of world philosophies, the...

Today’s lunch is this quarters’s Dean's Forum, which invites a faculty member to discuss one of his or her recent works, with formal response from several Divinity School colleagues. Today's forum features Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015) by Ryan Coyne, Assistant Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology. Daniel A. Arnold, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Jean-Luc Marion,...