Dr. Mark A. Chancey is a Professor in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University, where he serves as chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He attended the University of Georgia, where he earned a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Religion (1990) and a M.A. in Religion (1992). He entered Duke University's Graduate Program in Religion in 1993, where he focused on New Testament studies and early Judaism. While at Duke, he participated in excavations in Israel at Sepphoris, an important ancient city three miles from Nazareth. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke in 1999 and joined the faculty of SMU in 2000. His research interests include the Gospels, the Historical Jesus, archaeology and the Bible, and the political and social history of the land of Israel during the Roman period. He is the author of two books with Cambridge University Press, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (2002), which integrates archaeological and literary evidence to demonstrate that first-century C.E. Galilee was overwhelmingly Jewish, and Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (2005), which investigates the relationship between Greco-Roman and local culture in the region. He is currently at work on a book-length overview of the archaeology of the land of Israel from Alexander the Great to Constantine. In recent years he has devoted considerable attention to the constitutional, political and academic issues raised by Bible courses in public schools, writing two studies on that subject for the Austin-based Texas Freedom Network. Chancey is the recipient of SMU's Golden Mustang Teaching Award and has been named an Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor. Contact Information: mchancey@smu.edu, 214-768-1460
Dr. G. William Barnard (B.A. Antioch University; M.A. Temple University; Ph.D. University of Chicago) is currently an Associate Professor of Religious Studies, as well as a University Distinguished Teaching Professor. His primary areas of research interests are the comparative philosophy of mysticism, religion and the social sciences, contemporary spirituality, religion and healing, and consciousness studies. He teaches a variety of courses: Magic, Myth, and Religion; Mysticism: East and West; Understanding the Self: East and West; Introduction to Primal Religions; Wholeness and Holiness: Religion and Healing Across Cultures; the Social-Scientific Study of Religion; and a graduate core seminar: History, Theory, and Method in Religious Studies. Professor Barnard is the author of Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism. He is also co-editor of Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism, and has just completed Living Consciousness: Reclaiming the Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson, soon to be published by State University of New York Press. Professor Barnard has also written many journal articles and book chapters on a variety of topics, such as pedagogy in religious studies, the nature of religious experience, and issues in the psychology of religion. He has received the SMU Mortar Board Honor Society Award for teaching excellence, the Godbey Lecture Series Authors’ Award, the Golden Mustang Outstanding Faculty Award for teaching and scholarship, and is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Professor Barnard is currently researching the Santo Daime tradition, a syncretistic religious movement in Brazil. Contact Information: bbarnard@smu.edu, 214-768-2135
Dr. Richard W. Cogley (B.A., English, Franklin and Marshall College; M.Div., Yale University; Ph.D., Religion, Princeton University) teaches an introductory course on Judaism and Christianity, and well as more advanced undergraduate courses on the history of Christianity in Europe and on religion in America. His scholarly interest is English and American Puritanism. He is the author of John Eliot's Mission to the Indians (Harvard University Press, 1999), a critical study of the New England Puritan minister better known as the "Apostle to the Indians." This book won SMU's Godbey Lecture Series Author's Award in 2000. His current project is a study of Puritan views about the settlement of ancient America. During his time as chair from 1999-2007, the department expanded from four continuing faculty lines to eight. Before coming to SMU, he held visiting appointments at North Carolina State University, Loyola Marymount University, and Reed College. Contact Information: rcogley@smu.edu, 214-768-2099
Dr. Jill DeTemple attended Bowdoin College, where she earned a B.A. in Asian Studies with a minor in Religion in 1993. After several years as an agricultural extensionist with the U.S. Peace Corps in Ecuador, she entered Harvard Divinity School and received an M.T.S. in Christianity and Culture in 1999. She entered the graduate program in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that same year, and completed her Ph.D. in 2005. Her research interests include religiously sponsored development organizations, religions of Latin America, Pentecostalism, and theory and method in the study of religion. Dr. DeTemple has received two Ford Tinker grants and a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant for research in Ecuador, and serves on the steering committee for the Religions of Latin America and the Caribbean Group of the American Academy of Religion. She has also been recognized for her teaching. She has received the HOPE teaching award at SMU and was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. She is currently at work on a book exploring faith-based development in rural Ecuador. Contact Information: detemple@smu.edu, 214-768-2102.
Dr. Johan Elverskog: Director, Asian Studies; Executive Editor for The Mongolia Society, Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. (B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1990; M.A. and Ph.D., Indiana University, 2000) is a full professor. He is also the Director of Asian Studies and the SMU-in-Suzhou Program. He teaches various courses on Asian religions and cultures: Introduction to Buddhism, the Cultural History of Tibet, Religions of China, and Introduction to Eastern Religions, among others. His research focuses on the history of Buddhism in Inner Asia. He is the author and editor of seven books, including most recently Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. Contact Information: johan@smu.edu, 214-768-4127.
Dr. Serge Frolov (M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern History, Leningrad University; M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion, Claremont Graduate University) is associate professor of Religious Studies and Nate and Ann Levine Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and ancient Near East, as well as several survey courses. His current areas of research are biblical hermeneutics and theology, history and religions of the ancient Near East, and Jewish history and thought. Before joining SMU in 2002, he worked at the National Library of Russia and for the Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian, and also taught at the Open University of Israel. He has published a monograph and more than two hundred articles in English and Russian; he has also won the Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar Award, the Junior Scholar Award from the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies and the Golden Mustang Outstanding Faculty Award. Contact Information: sfrolov@smu.edu, 214-768-4478
Dr. John C. Lamoreaux received a B.A. in Philosophy from Michigan State University (1988), a M.A. in Comparative Religion from Northwestern University (1992), and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Duke University (1999). His research focuses on early Islam and Christian minorities living under Islam. His publications include: Theodore Abu Qurrah (Brigham Young University Press, 2005); The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (State University of New York Press, 2002); The Life of Timothy of Kakhushta (Éditions Brepols, 2001); The Life of Stephen of Mar Sabas (Éditions Peeters, 1999); and John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus (Clarendon Press, 1998), with Paul Rorem. Prof. Lamoreaux has been teaching at S.M.U. since 1999, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He teaches courses on Islam, the religions of the West, Religion and Science, Christian theology, and theory and method in the study of religion. He lives in Dallas with his wife Lori and their four children. His other interests include bicycling, amateur radio (N8ELR), and competitive shooting (black powder and muzzle loading). Contact Information: jclam@smu.edu, 214-768-1529
Dr. Steven E. Lindquist (B.A., The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1994; M.A., The University of Chicago, 1998; Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 2005) is a specialist in S. Asian religious traditions with particular interests in Indian religious, literary, and material history. His writing focuses on Sanskrit religious literature, and he has published articles on topics such as Indian numismatics and literary and religious aspects of the Upanishads. Some of the classes that he teaches include Introduction to Eastern Religions, Introduction to Hinduism, and advanced courses in Hindu traditions from ancient to modern. Among other projects, he is currently working on a monograph that traces the “literary life” of the ancient Indian ritualist and sage, Yajnavalkya, through roughly one thousand years of literary history. The work explores the use and refashioning of various stories surrounding this figure and his rising importance within the broader Hindu tradition. Dr. Lindquist is also editing a volume on South Asian religions. He has been a recipient of several awards, including the Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant and the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship. He has lived in India over five years conducting research, reading Sanskrit and Hindi, and consulting with local scholars. He previously taught at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Contact Information: slindqui@smu.edu, 214-768-2105
Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Religious Studies
Dr. Charles E. Curran, S.T.D., Academia Alfonsiana, Rome, Italy, 1961; S.T.D., Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italk, 1961; S.T.L., Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy, 1959; B.A., St. Bernard's College, Rochester, NY, 1955. Dr. Curran is a university professor who teaches courses in and maintains research in fundamental moral theology, social ethics, the role of the Church as a moral and political actor in society, and Catholic moral theology. Contact Information: Elizabeth Scurlock University Chair of Human Values, Campus Box 317 , SMU, Dallas 75275-0317/ ccurran@smu.edu / 214-768-4073
Dr. Robin W. Lovin, (B.A. Northwestern University; B.D., Ph.D. Harvard University) is Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics. He joined the SMU faculty in 1994 and served as Dean of the Perkins School of Theology from 1994 until 2002. Before coming to SMU, he held teaching positions at Emory University and the University of Chicago, and he was Dean of the Theological School at Drew University. He is an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church and is active in local and national church events. His research interests include social ethics, religion and law, and comparative religious ethics. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Studies in Christian Ethics, and the Journal of Law and Religion, and he is an editor-at-large for the Christian Century. His own writings include several studies of twentieth century Christian social ethics: Christian Faith and Public Choices: The Social Ethics of Barth, Brunner, and Bonhoeffer (1984), Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (1994), and Christian Realism and the New Realities (2008). He has also written on religion and law and comparative religious ethics, and he edited Cosmogony and Ethical Order with Frank E. Reynolds. Christian Ethics: An Essential Guide (2000) provides a general introduction to Christian ethics, and Reinhold Niebuhr (2007) is a brief survey of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important Protestant theologians. Contact Information: Cary M. Maguire University Chair of Ethics, Campus Box 317, SMU, Dallas, 75275-0317/ rlovin@smu.edu / 214-768-4134
Dr. Joseph B. Tyson, is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University. He received his Ph. D. degree from Union Theological Seminary in 1959 and taught at SMU from 1958-1998. During this time he served as department chair 1965-75 and again from 1986-93. His major research has been in New Testament studies, the history of early Christianity, and Jewish-Christian relations. He has published numerous articles and several books, many of them on Luke-Acts. His most recent book is Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining Struggle (2006). In addition to his membership in the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations, he has been an active participant in the Society of Biblical Literature, the international Society for New Testament Studies, and the Acts Seminar, sponsored by the Westar Institute. Contact Information: Campus Box 202, SMU, Dallas, 75275-0202/ jtyson@smu.edu