DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Teaching and Research

• Alice Bach, Ph.D.

  Research in the areas of Bible and religion is a third career for me. Previously I was a journalist, a writer of children's books, and a New Yorker, a career in itself. Since receiving a doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, I have edited and published in scholarly areas of feminist theory of religion, religion and literature, and biblical studies. My first monograph analyzed biblical narratives through a feminist lens, Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 199)7. My new book Religion, Politics, Media in the Broadband Era. (Sheffield Phoenix, 2004) encompasses most of my research interests in public policy, politics, and cultural studies: from the uses of evangelical Christianity by current political candidates to a comparison of some First Ladies with the Perfect Wife in Proverbs 31.

  With Jane Schaberg and Esther Fuchs, I edited a Festschrift for Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (Crossroad 2003), a volume that reflects the development of feminist theories in Biblical studies for the past twenty years. I have also edited other volumes, most particularly Women in the Hebrew Bible (Routledge 1998). I have been a member of the editorial boards of two scholarly journals Semeia and Biblical Interpretation. I was the founder and editor of an experimental journal, entitled Biblicon. Currently I am Book Review editor of Biblical Interpretation. Cheryl Exum and I founded the Gender and Cultural Criticism section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

  My next research project involves food, feasting, and eating to excess in the ancient Mediterranean world. Banquets, the Eucharist, and other religious rituals involving food, digestion, cooking, unusual recipes found in narratives, memoirs and essays, and theological writings are the ingredients. The fruits of this research will be a book, Swallowing God and Other Delicacies: A Study of Feasting and Excess in Antiquity, co-authored with Jennifer Glancy. One article from our work, "Bread and Butter Notes: The Morning After. " appeared in the Tenth Anniversary issue of Biblical Interpretation (Fall 2003).

  My other research interests involve the intersections of Bible and film. See Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz (Semeia 74) May 1997, and religion and popular culture, about which I write frequently.

  
  
• Timothy K. Beal, Ph.D.

  I earned my Ph.D. in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University with a certificate in Women's Studies. My interests center around biblical literature, especially in relation to cultural history and the politics of identity. I am interested in how biblical texts, themes, and even the idea of "the Bible" itself are handled in cultural terms -- how they are appropriated and transformed in the context of particular cultural beliefs, practices and institutions, and how they play into dynamics of identity and power.         I am on the editorial boards of the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and Postscripts, and I co-edit (with Tod Linafelt of Georgetown University) a book series called Afterlives of the Bible for the University of Chicago Press that publishes books exploring the cultural histories of the Bible.         I have published eight books: The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation , on the politics of gender and ethnic identity in the biblical book of Esther (Routledge, 1997); Reading Bibles, Writing Bibles: Identity and The Book (co-edited with David M. Gunn; Routledge, 1996); Esther, a commentary on the Hebrew text of Esther for the Berit Olam commentary series (Liturgical Press, 1999); God in the Fray, essays on the biblical theology of divine ambivalence in honor of Walter Brueggemann (co-edited with Tod Linafelt; Fortress Press, 1998); Religion and Its Monsters, which explores the relation between religion and the monstrous, looking at religion as horror and horror as religion (Routledge, 2002); Theory for Religious Studies, a handbook for students and scholars in the academic study of religion (co-authored with colleague William E. Deal); Mel Gibson's Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The Passion of the Christ, (co-edited with Tod Linafelt); and Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, which is something of an autobiographical, "blue highways" approach to discovering religion in America in places like Golgotha Fun Park, Paradise Gardens, and Holy Land USA (Beacon, 2005). Roadside Religion was featured in many newspapers and radio programs, and was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly's Ten Best Religion Books for 2005 and was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.         I am currently working on two books: Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008); and The End of the Word As We Know It (Harcourt, forthcoming 2009), which you can read a little more about at www.theendofthewordasweknowit.com.         I have published essays on religion and American culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I have been featured on national radio shows including NPR's All Things Considered,  the Osgood Files, and XMPR's The Bob Edwards Show.

• William E. Deal, Ph.D.
• Peter J. Haas

I did my doctoral training at Brown University in early Rabbinic literature, focusing on the earliest document of rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnha, which was compiled in the third century of the Common Era. As a graduate student I was also interested in ethics, especially religious ethics and the strategies used to justify various positions.. My earliest publications dealt with my doctoral work in Rabbinic literature, publishing a study of the Mishnaic laws of second tithe and then a translation and commentary on two Talmudic tractates (Me'ilah and Tamid). From there I moved in to studies of moral rhetoric, producing a study of the use of scientific discourse among the Nazis (published as Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic) and then a study of medieval Jewish legal rhetoric (Responsa: Literary History of a Rabbinic Genre). This work has led me into a study of the use of scientific rhetoric in science in general and also into the rhetoric of justification in the Middle East crisis; both interests leading to courses I now teach. My most recent book on human rights in Judaism was published in 2005.

 

• Judith Neulander
• Stephen Post
• Deepak Sarma

I focus on the Madhva School of Vedanta, a medieval school of Indian philosophy of religion based on a realist epistemology and ontology. My research involves detailed philological work on Madhva texts in Sanskrit, combined with studies of theoretical, ethical, and methodological issues in the study of philosophy and religion.