Podcast appearances and mentions of marty center

This week, religion scholars Reza Aslan and Ilan Stavans sit down with Emily D. Crews to discuss their new anthology, A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, a historic collection of the radicals and freethinkers that sparked a country's journey through divinity—praising, challenging, and redefining the sacred. This book and conversation are presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum's special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture, of which Stavans and Crews were advisors. American Prophets is now on display at the AWM. This program was part of the 2026 American Writers Festival. Co-hosted by the American Writers Museum and Chicago Public Library, the American Writers Festival is a free literary event featuring in-depth conversations with diverse writers from across genres and backgrounds. This conversation took place June 7, 2026 and was recorded live at the Harold Washington Library Center. AWM PODCAST NETWORK HUB More about A Nation Wrestles with God: Spanning more than 400 years of spiritual transformation and imagination, A Nation Wrestles with God collects diverse writers—poets, novelists, theologians, scientists, musicians, politicians, comedians, artists, mavericks, naturalists, futurists, and more—whose daring texts incited dialogue, even change, and continue to influence a growing nation. From the pre-colonial to the present day, these landmark stories, poems, essays, letters, speeches, songs, comic strips, and more awoke new generations to free religious thought. On the occasion of America's 250th year of independence, and during a time of deep ideological division, this sweeping anthology is an urgent reminder of the pluralities that strengthen and unite us. About the speakers: REZA ASLAN is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy- and Peabody-nominated producer, and scholar of religions. He is the author of numerous internationally bestselling books, including the #1 New York Times Bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, currently in development at Fremantle Media with Pablo Larrain attached to direct. A former Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of the prestigious James Joyce Award, Aslan has helped craft the mythologies for Hollywood's most acclaimed franchises, including Dune, Game of Thrones, and The Leftovers. In addition to his writing and production work, he has served as host and executive producer of CNN's Believer and Rough Draft with Reza Aslan, and co-hosts the podcast Metaphysical Milkshake alongside Rainn Wilson. His latest book, An American Martyr in Persia, was nominated for the PEN/Jacqueline Beograd Weld Award. Born in Iran, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their four children. EMILY D. CREWS is the Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In collaboration with its staff and faculty co-directors, she sets the research and programming agenda of the Marty Center. She also acts as its public representative and leads its partnerships with collaborators across the University, the city of Chicago, and beyond. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School's PhD program in the History of Religions, Emily is a scholar of Christianities in Africa and the United States. Emily is the co-editor of Remembering Jonathan Z. Smith: A Career and Its Consequence (with Russell McCutcheon, 2020) and African Diaspora Religions in 5 Minutes (with Curtis J. Evans, 2024). She has published scholarly articles in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Religion and Theology, and numerous edited volumes, as well as articles for the public in Sightings and The Local Palate. She was recently a scholar-consultant on the Court Theatre's production of The Gospel at Colonus. ILAN STAVANS is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic's Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile's Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans's work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen.

This week, we present a panel discussion with a range of scholars exploring religion through narrative games. This is a special episode in conjunction with our new exhibit Level Up: Writers & Gamers, on display now at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place April 11, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. Featured panelists: Emily Crews, Executive Director of the Marty Center at University of Chicago Divinity School; Keisha Howard, creator of Sugar Gamers; Ghnewa Hayek, Assoicate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at University of Chicago; and Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at University of Chicago. AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME

Marty Center Senior Fellow Symposium 2015-2016 by Nancy Frankenberry "Believing Scientists in America: Trials and Tribulations of Theistic Evolution." Nancy Frankenberry is John Phillips Professor in Religion Emerita at Dartmouth College where she taught courses in philosophy of religion; women and gender studies and religion; and science and religion. Her research and writing have attempted to span all three areas. She is the author or editor/co-editor of five books, as well as over sixty scholarly articles, book chapters, and critical reviews. Most recently, she has completed a series of five papers in the general area of religious epistemology. With the completion of a book-manuscript tentatively titled “Pragmatism and the End of Religion,” she expects to wrap up her work in philosophy of religion While a senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center Prof. Frankenberry turns to issues facing the wider public in connection with science and religion debates. Her new project, “Great Issues in Religion and Evolution,” investigates the intellectual challenge of Darwinism and evolutionary biology to religious belief and practice in the USA for the last 150 years.

Bettina Bergo is Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. Her project at the Marty Center, a monograph entitled Anxiety: History of a Concept in 19th and 20th Century Philosophy and Psychology, traces the intellectual history of anxiety, as an idea and a sign. Aimed at an interdisciplinary readership, the book is concerned with a recurrent theme in disciplines that framed the meaning of life, embodiment, subjectivity, and indeed, intersubjectivity. Abstract: even the so-called egalitarian and loosely structured societies known to anthropology, including hunters such as Inuit or Australian Aborigines, are in structure and practice subordinate segments of inclusive cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life and death powers over the human population. "The Mbowamb spends is whole life completely under the spell and in the company of spirits" (Vicedom and Tischner). "[Arawete] society is not complete on earth: the living are part of the global social structure founded on the alliance between heaven and earth" (Viveiros de Castro). We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms--that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom--to the ethnographic realities of people's dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For Hobbes notwithstanding, something like the political state is the condition of humanity in the state of nature; there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In collaboration with the Marty Center, the Craft of Teaching is pleased to present a special workshop with Martin E. Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity. Reflecting on a lifetime of public engagement, Prof. Marty will discuss concrete strategies for communicating with broader audiences and for enhancing public discourse as scholars of religion. In advance of this workshop, please read Robert Kelly's article, "Public Theology and the Modern Social Imaginary." Also available, for optional advance reading, are selections of Prof. Marty’s published writing on the challenges of public conversation about religion, illustrating exemplary public engagement. The first selection includes the chapters “Argument, Conversation, and Story,” and “Tools for Moving from Argument to Conversation.” The second selection includes “Handle with Care” and “Worth the Risk” The Craft of Teaching (CoT) is the Divinity School's program of pedagogical development for its graduate students, dedicated to preparing a new generation of accomplished educators in the field of religious studies. We bring together Divinity School faculty, current students, and an extensive alumni network of decorated teachers to share our craft and to advance critical reflection on religious studies pedagogy.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In collaboration with the Marty Center, the Craft of Teaching is pleased to present a special workshop with Martin E. Marty, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity. Reflecting on a lifetime of public engagement, Prof. Marty will discuss concrete strategies for communicating with broader audiences and for enhancing public discourse as scholars of religion. In advance of this workshop, please read Robert Kelly's article, "Public Theology and the Modern Social Imaginary." Also available, for optional advance reading, are selections of Prof. Marty’s published writing on the challenges of public conversation about religion, illustrating exemplary public engagement. The first selection includes the chapters “Argument, Conversation, and Story,” and “Tools for Moving from Argument to Conversation.” The second selection includes “Handle with Care” and “Worth the Risk” The Craft of Teaching (CoT) is the Divinity School's program of pedagogical development for its graduate students, dedicated to preparing a new generation of accomplished educators in the field of religious studies. We bring together Divinity School faculty, current students, and an extensive alumni network of decorated teachers to share our craft and to advance critical reflection on religious studies pedagogy.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Encountering When Prophecy Fails, Encountering Cognitive Dissonance: A Forum When Prophecy Fails was published in 1956 and is considered a “classic” by many in the field of social psychology and, arguably, in religious studies (e.g., in history of religions, biblical studies) and other fields as well. Like many such works, the book as its theory of cognitive dissonance has shaped numerous fields – and wider culture – in ways often unacknowledged. But how do the book and its theory speak to us today? How best to understand the long resonances of this book and its theory within academic study and in everyday life? Does the book’s popularity tell us anything about the book’s influence on religion, psychology and science? Did the book alter the object of knowledge in religion and/or in psychology? Does critical reflection suggest new ways to think about the religion, science and psychology relation that moves beyond applying psychological models to religious experience or using religious or spiritual experience to secure psychological concepts or evidence? This symposium will begin with a brief talk on the history of the books' nearly sixty years. Several scholars will join Dr. Bayer to offer further reflection on their own use of the book in their teaching and research. Together these trackings and tracings lend themselves to what may be called an ethnography of encounters with the life-world of a book, its ideas, culture, habitus of its catchy concept of cognitive dissonance, and spheres of action amongst religion, psychology and science. FORUM PARTICIPANTS: Lowell Bloss, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and of Asian Languages and Cultures, (University of Chicago Divinity School, History of Religion, PhD 1972) W. Clark Gilpin, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity and Theology in the Divinity School; also in the College; Interim Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion Susan E. Henking, President, Shimer College (University of Chicago Divinity School, Religion and Psychological Studies, PhD 1988). Seth Patterson, MFA, a professional theater artist and current M.Div. student, will provide a dramatic reading. Betty M. Bayer is professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, where she teaches courses on notions of human nature in histories of women’s psyche, imagining peace, and debates amongst psychology, science, religion and spirituality. Most recently, she has published essays on spirituality and Enchantment in an Age of Occupy (2012). While a senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center she will be working on her book “Revelation or Revolution? Cognitive Dissonance and Persistent Longing in an Age Psychological.” This book entails a history and rethinking of the renowned 1956 book When Prophecy Fails by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Encountering When Prophecy Fails, Encountering Cognitive Dissonance: A Forum When Prophecy Fails was published in 1956 and is considered a “classic” by many in the field of social psychology and, arguably, in religious studies (e.g., in history of religions, biblical studies) and other fields as well. Like many such works, the book as its theory of cognitive dissonance has shaped numerous fields – and wider culture – in ways often unacknowledged. But how do the book and its theory speak to us today? How best to understand the long resonances of this book and its theory within academic study and in everyday life? Does the book’s popularity tell us anything about the book’s influence on religion, psychology and science? Did the book alter the object of knowledge in religion and/or in psychology? Does critical reflection suggest new ways to think about the religion, science and psychology relation that moves beyond applying psychological models to religious experience or using religious or spiritual experience to secure psychological concepts or evidence? This symposium will begin with a brief talk on the history of the books' nearly sixty years. Several scholars will join Dr. Bayer to offer further reflection on their own use of the book in their teaching and research. Together these trackings and tracings lend themselves to what may be called an ethnography of encounters with the life-world of a book, its ideas, culture, habitus of its catchy concept of cognitive dissonance, and spheres of action amongst religion, psychology and science. FORUM PARTICIPANTS: Lowell Bloss, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and of Asian Languages and Cultures, (University of Chicago Divinity School, History of Religion, PhD 1972) W. Clark Gilpin, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity and Theology in the Divinity School; also in the College; Interim Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion Susan E. Henking, President, Shimer College (University of Chicago Divinity School, Religion and Psychological Studies, PhD 1988). Seth Patterson, MFA, a professional theater artist and current M.Div. student, will provide a dramatic reading. Betty M. Bayer is professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, where she teaches courses on notions of human nature in histories of women’s psyche, imagining peace, and debates amongst psychology, science, religion and spirituality. Most recently, she has published essays on spirituality and Enchantment in an Age of Occupy (2012). While a senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center she will be working on her book “Revelation or Revolution? Cognitive Dissonance and Persistent Longing in an Age Psychological.” This book entails a history and rethinking of the renowned 1956 book When Prophecy Fails by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Professor Bayer is Professor of Women's Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a Martin Marty Center Senior Fellow for 2013-2014. Bayer's current project is a history of the renowned 1956 book “When Prophecy Fails” by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Reicken, and Stanley Schachter and its place in the longer and larger history of debate amongst religion, psychology, spirituality and science on the soul or psyche. Situated in mid-1950s America, When Prophecy Fails enters the scene amidst cybernetic science, a time of reframing religion to become "newly psychological" (Ellwood, 1997), a shift in psychology toward cognition and away from behaviorism, and the stirrings of new age spirituality. The book as the theory it introduces thus marks a critical turning point in the long history of interplay amongst psychology, religion, science, and spirituality. The Martin Marty Center encourages advanced research in the diverse disciplines of the study of religion. Each year, the Center hosts fellows under a variety of programs. Senior Fellows are scholars from around the world, typically on leave from their home institutions. They situate their research within a broader cultural frame of reference, bringing their perspectives to bear on religious questions facing the wider public. They do so in the Marty Seminar, in which they present their work and critically discuss the presentations of other fellows, and by delivering a Marty Center symposium. - See more at: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/endings-without-end-when-prophecy-fails-and-rise-new-age-spirituality-and-cognitive-dissonance

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Fiction can be an invaluable classroom resource even for those whose specialty is not Religion and Literature. Lucy Pick, Senior Lecturer in the Divinity School, Director of the Religious Studies major, and author of the novel Pilgrimage , and Noah Toly, Associate Professor of Politics & International Relations at Wheaton College and former Senior Fellow at the Marty Center (2012-2013), will discuss why and how to use fiction in the religious studies classroom. The Craft of Teaching (CoT) is the Divinity School's program of pedagogical development for its graduate students, dedicated to preparing a new generation of accomplished educators in the field of religious studies. We bring together Divinity School faculty, current students, and an extensive alumni network of decorated teachers to share our craft and to advance critical reflection on religious studies pedagogy.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Professor Bayer is Professor of Women's Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a Martin Marty Center Senior Fellow for 2013-2014. Bayer's current project is a history of the renowned 1956 book “When Prophecy Fails” by social psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Reicken, and Stanley Schachter and its place in the longer and larger history of debate amongst religion, psychology, spirituality and science on the soul or psyche. Situated in mid-1950s America, When Prophecy Fails enters the scene amidst cybernetic science, a time of reframing religion to become "newly psychological" (Ellwood, 1997), a shift in psychology toward cognition and away from behaviorism, and the stirrings of new age spirituality. The book as the theory it introduces thus marks a critical turning point in the long history of interplay amongst psychology, religion, science, and spirituality. The Martin Marty Center encourages advanced research in the diverse disciplines of the study of religion. Each year, the Center hosts fellows under a variety of programs. Senior Fellows are scholars from around the world, typically on leave from their home institutions. They situate their research within a broader cultural frame of reference, bringing their perspectives to bear on religious questions facing the wider public. They do so in the Marty Seminar, in which they present their work and critically discuss the presentations of other fellows, and by delivering a Marty Center symposium. - See more at: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/endings-without-end-when-prophecy-fails-and-rise-new-age-spirituality-and-cognitive-dissonance

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Fiction can be an invaluable classroom resource even for those whose specialty is not Religion and Literature. Lucy Pick, Senior Lecturer in the Divinity School, Director of the Religious Studies major, and author of the novel Pilgrimage, and Noah Toly, Associate Professor of Politics & International Relations at Wheaton College and former Senior Fellow at the Marty Center (2012-2013), will discuss why and how to use fiction in the religious studies classroom. The Craft of Teaching (CoT) is the Divinity School's program of pedagogical development for its graduate students, dedicated to preparing a new generation of accomplished educators in the field of religious studies. We bring together Divinity School faculty, current students, and an extensive alumni network of decorated teachers to share our craft and to advance critical reflection on religious studies pedagogy.