Anniversary
During the 2005-06 academic year, our department will mark its
fortieth anniversary. We are planning a series of lectures and
other events to mark the occasion. We invite you to participate
by following news and
announcements that will be posted here as the year proceeds, or
if you travel to Tallahassee, by attending one or more of the
special events.
History
of the Department
The
Department of Religion came into being on July 1, 1965, after
the Department of Philosophy and Religion split into two separate
departments. The FSU Department of Religion was one of the first
such departments to be created at public institutions of higher
education after the Supreme Court’s decision in Abington
v. Schempp (1963), and the Department understood part of its mission
in its first fifteen years to be a representative of the study
of religion in the public sphere. In the late 1960s, shortly after
Robert Spivey arrived as the department’s first chair, the
Danforth and Lilly Foundations awarded him and a group of educators
and social scientists grants to develop curriculum materials for
the instruction of religion in the public schools. The results
of this group’s efforts brought the department significant
national press, less than five years after it had been created.
The national
reputation of the department increased in 1970 with the appointment
of Richard L. Rubenstein, who had written the first work of American
post-Holocaust theology in 1968 (After Auschwitz). He was named
Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor in 1977. Other eminent
faculty who joined the department before 2000 include the scholar
of Catholicism Larry Cunningham (1967), the Hebrew Bible philologist
John Priest (1968), the scholar of Islam and comparative religious
ethics John Kelsay (1987), and the scholar of Hinduism Kathleen
Erndl (1993). Since 2000, the department has been especially privileged
to appoint Sumner B. Twiss in religious ethics and international
human rights (2001) and John Corrigan and Amanda Porterfield in
American religious history (2001 and 2003 respectively).
From 1972
through 1978, the department also served as the national office
for the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Since that time, the
department has continued to host guest lectures from eminent scholars,
and has endowed lecture series in memoriam of its past faculty
members John Priest (who served the department until 1996) and
Tessa Bartholomeusz (who served the department from 1993 through
2001). Departmental faculty members have continued to serve as
stewards of the department’s reputation through serving
the profession as chairs of various program units of the AAR and
through editing major journals in the field.
Since the
department was founded in the interest of combating the lack of
awareness about religion on campus, it has participated actively
in the university Liberal Studies program, multicultural studies
program, the Honors College, and the Bryan Hall living-learning
community. Both Leo Sandon and David Levenson have been named
University Distinguished Teaching Professor. The two have also
extended the audience of the department from its students to the
broader local and state community: Sandon through his weekly column
on religion in the Tallahassee Democrat and Levenson through his
summer institute training teachers how to teach the Bible in public
secondary schools.
The department
inaugurated an MA program in 1968 and a Ph.D. program in 1992.
(Before this time, it had taken part in the training of students
in the interdisciplinary Humanities Ph.D. program.) In preparation
for beginning the Ph.D. program, the department organized itself
around four subdisciplines: American Religious History, Asian
Religions, Religion/Ethics/Philosophy, and Religion of Western
Antiquity. Since the department began offering graduate degrees,
it has graduated well over a hundred MA students, and seven Ph.D.s.
All of the graduated Ph.D.s who pursued academic employment found
it upon graduation.
Through
the Years
2005-2006
A
picture of current faculty members will be taken at the departmental
"renunion" in January.
1995-1996
First
Row:
John Kelsay,
Leo Sandon, Tessa Bartholomeusz, David
Levenson
Second Row: Galen Amstutz, Walter Moore, Kathleen
Erndl, Corrine Patton
Third Row: Bill Swain, John Priest, Maureen Tilley, Marc
Ellis
Fourth Row: Bill Jones, David Lamberth, Stephen Angell
1985-1986
First
Row: Walter Moore, Charles W. Swain, Richard Rubenstein
Second Row:John Priest, Jackson Ice, David
Levenson
Third Row: Leo Sandon, Charles Muenchew,
Lawrence Cunningham, John Carey
1976-1977
First
Row:John Priest, Richard Rubenstein, John Carey, Robert
Spivey, Jackson Ice
Second Row: William Jones, Leo Sandon, Charles
Wellborn, Lawrence Cunningham
Third Row: Walter Moore, Robert Linney, J. Robin
King
Missing: David
Levenson
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