Note from the Chair
Shelly Isenberg, Chair Department of Religion
Originally published in the January 1999 issue of CLASnotes.
The Department of Religion
just recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. It has grown over the years
from Professor Delton Scudder's one-person department to its current size
of twelve faculty members. Our faculty are highly skilled, productive
researchers and well regarded teachers. Many of our majors go on to graduate
programs in religion, as well as medicine, law, and business. They
enter into professions that welcome the breadth and depth of well trained
students in the Humanities. Our MA students go into excellent PhD
programs, train to be rabbis and ministers, and enter into other professions.
Religion is a varied, highly specialized, and broadly integrative field. Our faculty members teach religions of East and West, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and others. Yet we have always been an unusually collaborative department. Because religion touches so many dimensions of being human, it invites interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary explorations. We network not only within our department, but also with other departments and schools. Several of us are interested in mysticism and meditation, most of us do work on gender issues and work with the Center for Women's Studies, three of us are associated with the Center for Jewish Studies, two with the Center for Latin American Studies, and two with the Center for Gerontological Studies.
Five of us are deeply involved in a new collaboration initiated by the Religion Department and the Medical Center called "Health and Spirituality" which now includes faculty from many parts of the campus, medical students and community participants, many of them health care professionals. Since the relationship between healing and spirituality is a central question for all religious systems and since that area is emerging as part of the curricula of many excellent medical schools, we are considering offering it as an MA track.
This past summer the Department of Religion was approved by the Board of Regents to apply for a PhD program. It makes sense to us to concentrate on those areas in the field where we can make a unique contribution. Religions in the Americas is one of those areas; most of our faculty can contribute to it, and there is excellent academic support in the University as a whole for this specialization. We are also thinking about tracks in Gender and Religion, Jewish Studies, and Asian Religions. At the same time we are working on expanding our MA offerings. All of this will require some growth in our faculty ranks. It is a very challenging and rewarding time for our department.
Religion Staff
Religion Secretary Annie Newman
(sitting) has been with the Department for three years, and Office Manager
Julia Smith (standing), has held her current position for six years.
They are pictured in the Religion Department's Dauer Hall Library.
Credits
Writer
Shelly Isenberg
