Keep in touch with the Department of Religious Studies and with your fellow graduates. Let us know what you are doing these days and where life has taken you. We’ll be happy to post and share your news.

Alum News

Silas Allard (B.A. ’04) is currently in his first year at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, GA. He will also begin a Master of Theological Studies at Emory's Candler School of Theology in Fall of 2008. He is continuing his work to promote human rights through various endeavors at Emory Law and in the Atlanta community. In 2007, he bicycled with a close friend across two-thirds of the United States. The remaining one-third, be forewarned, he is coming for you. (posted February 2008)

Tony Baker (’03, magna cum laude with a B.A. in Religious Studies with honors, and a B.A. in Philosophy with honors) has just moved to Brooklyn, New York in January of 2008 to assume a new outreach position with the Bowery Residents' Committee, NYC's largest non-profit for the homeless. This comes after a 1-year stint with Second Nature Wilderness Program in Utah where he counseled vulnerable teens in areas of substance abuse, anger issues, depression, anxiety, social issues, and sexual abuse. Prior to this, Tony served 2 years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Tanzania from 2003 to 2005. Working in the field of Community-Based Natural Resource Management, he and the members of the village in which he lived developed projects such as tree nurseries, vegetable garden co-ops, demonstration farm plots, dairy cow and goat projects in partnership with Heifer Project International, and HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. Tony hopes to continue on to graduate school in order to study Sustainable International Development. He can be reached at tonybaker000 [at] gmail.com. (posted March 2008)

Jeff Bell (B.A. ‘00) is currently working part-time on his Ph.D. in Christian Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago. Jeff was recently named chair of the English department at Lake Forest Academy, a prep school on Chicago's North Shore. In November 2006 he married Kim Van Voorhees, also an English teacher at Lake Forest; they have a daughter, Charlotte Jane, born in April 2007. Jeff is also working in Catholic health care with Fr. William Grogan, the ethicist for Provena Health Care. (posted February 2008)

Monica Cawvey (BA ’94 Honors in English and Religious Studies, MA from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago) is now Vice President for Development at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She says that the Department of Religious Studies prepared her well for her successful career in development in two ways: (posted February 2008)

“I know how profoundly religion affects cultural and personal world views, and that proved to be the best background possible for understanding people, no matter what their beliefs or cultures. I got as close to a classical education as possible. I learned about art, music, literature, ritual and philosophy as well as the different religious beliefs and practices. So I can talk to a wide variety of people about a wide variety of subjects. Secondly, it is hard for some people to talk about money; it’s a sensitive subject. It is so central to the lives of people when they are wealthy. Religious studies is about what is essential to peoples’ core being, their world. Money defines how wealthy people live in a way it doesn’t for the rest of us. It is a substantial reality in itself that imposes responsibilities and entails rituals. Both religion and money define the worlds one lives in and how one conducts oneself. Seeing that connection has been fundamental to my work. I can talk to people about money and ask for it without seeming to make assumptions. I can talk about this personal topic without being personal just as a religious studies person can talk about faith and practice without being personal because religious studies is academic and allows for a respectful distance. That rolls over into a respectful distance regarding money. It makes me an informed observer and a good listener so that I can catch the signals that people are unwittingly sending about themselves. Listening is the most important part of development. Giving is a kind of meaning. People give to things that matter to them and that they want to share. For example, Religious Studies is about a quest for meaning and values. The Constitution Center is about the meaning and value of freedom, that people are willing to die to defend that freedom. People want everyone to value civic responsibility. The Constitution is citizen developed, citizen written and citizen lived. It is kept alive by citizens. Every day I use the research skills I learned in Religious Studies. I have to write about everything at the Constitution Center, every exhibit, the people who work here, people who visit, and all of that requires research, going through files, looking up historical points, looking through old newspapers. I research people I intend to talk to about money — most of them are public figures, and I want to be well prepared when I meet them. Research is about picking up clues, following threads. I learned from the writing-intensive program, too. The best way to learn to write is to have to write well in different disciplines.”

Marcia Chatelain (B.A. ’01), Truman Scholar, was also a member of Mortar Board, the national honor society, the Mystical Seven honor society and a McNair Scholarship. Recently, she wrote: (posted February 2008)

“After graduating from MU in 2001, I felt like the world was my oyster. I was equipped with an education from two of MU's best programs, the Journalism Magazine Sequence and Religious Studies. I immediately moved to Washington, D.C., where I worked as the Resident Harry S. Truman Scholar at the Truman Scholarship Foundation. I directed the Foundation's leadership programs, represented Truman scholars at various organizations--including a meeting with the Foundation's President Madeline K. Albright--and organized a summer internship program for recent college graduates. After a busy year in D.C., I started a Ph.D. program in American Civilization at Brown University. Every step of the way, I used my Religious Studies training in conducting original research, writing papers and contributing to my seminars. Each summer of graduate school, I joyfully returned to Columbia as a teacher for the Missouri Scholars Academy. Last year, I was a Dissertation Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. After a year of enjoying the sunshine, the ocean and the mountain views, it was time for me to take some next steps. In the fall of 2007, I began my first tenure-track position at the University of Oklahoma's Honors College. I am a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and African-American Studies. Just to add more major changes to my life in one year, I also got married and moved into a house in Oklahoma City. My husband, family and I were all happy to share my wedding with many friends from MU and my great mentor, Jill Raitt. I hope to continue in her footsteps as a future McNair Scholars Program mentor, vigorous discussion leader and influential scholar in my field. This summer, I will begin work on adapting my dissertation to a book manuscript; it is an examination of programs for and discourses on African-American girls during the Great Migration era.”

Rich Gleba (B.J., B.A. ‘94) joined MU’s School of Medicine after serving five years as an editor at a daily newspaper. He is now Director of the School’s Office of Communication and Innovation and can be reached at glebar [at] health.missouri.edu. (posted March 2008)

In May 2007 Elizabeth Hartsig (B.A. ’04) graduated with a M.F.A.W. in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, having completed The Whales, a collection of stories that made up her thesis. The recipient of a post-graduate fellowship, Elizabeth continues to write and teach fiction at Washington University, though she happily recollects her R.S. days in Columbia, where she first knocked elbows with Walker Percy, Martin Buber, and Annie Dillard. In 2008, she will bicycle with a sworn enemy across the entire country. No skipping states. (posted February 2008)

Benjamin Hebblethwaite (B.A. ’93) is now an Assistant Professor in Haitian Creole at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He received an M.A. in French Literature from Purdue University and an M.A. in French Linguistics from Indiana University. He earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in August, 2007. His dissertation can be read at ProQuest for free: "Intrasentential Code-Switching among Miami Haitian Creole-English Bilinguals". He is co-editor (with Jacques Pierre) of The Gospel of Thomas in English, Haitian Creole and French (Gainesville: Classic Editions, 2005), and assistant editor of the Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary, ed. Albert Valdman (Bloomington, IN.: Creole Institute, 2007). In Gainesville, he is one of the founders of the Nederlands Convertatie Groep, a club for lovers of the Dutch language. Recently he wrote, “My main interest is in Haitian Creole linguistics but my link to Religious Studies lives on through my current research on Haitian Vodou.” (posted February 2008)

Jonathan A. Lanman (M.A. ’05) is a graduate student at the newly formed Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Before arriving at Oxford in 2006, he received an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Missouri, Columbia and Ph.D. candidacy from the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. A condensed version of his M.A. thesis, a cognitive evaluation of the Marshall Sahlins-Gananath Obeyesekere debate concerning Native Hawaiian responses to the arrival of Captain James Cook, is being published in the volume Ritual and Cognition: Challenges for the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Harvey Whitehouse & James Laidlaw (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007). His doctoral work involves experimentally investigating the effects of discourse about supernatural agents on human behavior (specifically reputation-relevant behaviors) as well as conducting ethnographic and historical investigations into how individuals in a variety of socio-communicative settings employ discourse about supernatural agents in order to influence the behavior of others. He is the author of “Are We All ‘Believers?’” in The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques, edited by Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, Erica Harris, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, and Karen Wyman (Santa Margarita, CA: The Collins Foundation Press, 2008). (posted February 2008)

Jodi Letterman (B.A. ‘93) is about to receive her M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Riverside. In March 2008 she presented a paper, "New Religious Movements: Challenges for the Mystic Discourse" at the regional AAR conference, WECSOR. Her paper looks at the work of Sarah Pike and Wayne Proudfoot. In October of 2007, Jodi presented a small talk at the Generos en Crisis conference at UCR on "The Moral Ambiguity of La Malinche." She is applying to enter a PhD program in 2009 after teaching for a year in the Sacramento/Folsom area. (posted February 2008)

Alan McClure (B.A. ’05 summa cum laude, with departmental honors) and owner of Patric Chocolate, a fine dark chocolate-bar manufacturing company based in Columbia, Mo. You may visit his impressive Web site at http://www.patric-chocolate.com. McClure’s passion for chocolate has led him to Mexico and Central and South America in attempts to arrange special processing and delivery of the very best cacao (cocoa beans) that he could find. “Religious studies made me sensitive to different cultures and world views,” McClure explains. “Central Americans don’t do business the same way that Americans do business. Mexicans do business differently from both.” Another help in the establishment of his business was the demand in religious studies course work for rigorous research, analysis and a questioning mind. “In a business like this, where the focus is on creating the highest-quality dark chocolate, I have to question some of what even the most well-known experts on chocolate manufacture claim. However, questioning blindly can be an amazing waste of time and resources. It really takes the ability to think critically about different issues to narrow the focus for further analysis. I use these intellectual skills every day, and they also marked my work in religious studies courses.” (posted February 2008)

Jawad Qureshi (B.A. 2000) spent a summer in Irbid, Jordan, at the University of Yarmouk as a fellow with the University of Virginia’s Yarmouk Arabic Intensive Summer Program. Upon returning, he taught first year Arabic at UGA and completed a master’s thesis on “The Book of Errors: A Critical Edition and Study of Kitab al-Aghalit of Abu `Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021).” In the academic year 2002-03, Jawad worked in Syria as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2006 he entered the PhD program at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he continues studying Arabic manuscripts in the newly established Islamic Studies program, working with Professors Michael Sells and Malika Zeghal. With Dr Sells he is working on Sufi literature and with Dr Zeghal Jawad is focusing on the early modern and contemporary Muslim world. He hopes to take his comprehensive exams in spring of 2009. (posted February 2008)

Kara Rogers (B.A. ’93) graduated from Indiana University with a combined Ph.D. degree in Folklore and American Studies in December, 2004. Since January, 2005 she has been teaching in the Sociology Dept. at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, MD. In addition to teaching, she runs a program in Folklore & Folklife Studies, funded in part by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Maryland Historical Trust. Rogers plans to publish her completed MA thesis, Leaving the Laurel, the Establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as a book of regional interest for the Southern Appalachian area. She is researching children and “church play” or “playing church.” (posted February 2008)

Antwaun Smith (B.A. ’98). One of only 32 Americans selected as Rhodes Scholars, Smith traveled to Oxford in September 1999 to begin his studies in Chinese religion, culture and language. Prior to attending Oxford, Smith attended Harvard University on a Mellon Scholarship. At MU, Smith worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant in religious studies, a freshman interest group adviser, a writing-intensive tutor and a Basic English instructor. Smith’s other awards include the Chapman, Brooks, McNair and Bright Flight scholarships; Phi Beta Kappa and Golden Key National Honor societies; and a University Scholar Award. Smith completed his JD at the University of Missouri School of Law in May 2007 and is now an attorney with the law firm Shook, Hardy, and Bacon in Kansas City. (posted February 2008)

Constance Steinkuehler (B.A. ’93) received Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is now an Assistant Professor in Educational Communications & Technology in Curriculum & Instruction at UW-Madison, where her husband is also on the faculty. She is co-founder of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative here and chairs the annual GLS conference. She studies virtual worlds, online communities, and learning, and runs a research group called pop-cosmo. For fun she rides horses. In a recent letter she wrote, “My Religious Studies degree was foundational to my current thinking and intellectual life. It’s the basis for my interest in culture, cognition and beliefs, and close analysis of text. I think it also gave me a genuine sensitivity to the socially constructed nature of reality in certain ways without needing to deny that there is a shared reality we all experience. Religious Studies degree gave me a sensitivity to multiple interpretations, I suppose, and the importance of interpretation to individual and cultural life.” (posted February 2008)

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