The Gods We Stand by

I am rereading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience for my fall class Interpreting Religious Experience, and ran across this passage in his lecture on the "Value of Saintliness."

The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.

Spoken as a true pragmatist. This assertion of content that the popularity, "use," persistence of worship, etc., of any particular deity depends upon social circumstances of obligations and responsibilities between self and neighbor that make a society work reflects a pragmatic point of method: that religious issues of god, saintliness, etc., can be or can be best approached through social questions and standards. Together, they form a thesis that the divine, holy, and particularly the status of saintliness represent a distilled, idealized form of individual and social values.

Looking toward a New Year

I have been insanely busy lately. I have been finishing up my dissertation, and last week I finally distributed it. I have also taken a yearlong position at my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University, and so have been working on my fall classes, packing, moving, etc. In the midst of all of this professional business, I am getting married next month. Nonetheless, I have just found a window of time to create my "new faculty bio" for IWU. If anyone has been wondering what I have been up to since I haven't been posting, you can get an appetizer here:

Jared Calaway (IWU Class of ’03) is excited to be returning to IWU as a visiting faculty member after pursuing his M.A. (2005), M.Phil. (2007), and Ph.D. (expected August 2010) in the History of Religions in Late Antiquity at Columbia University in New York City. For two years in a row (Fall 2005-Spring 2007) he was the Morton Smith Presidential Fellow at Columbia, which enabled him to travel through Greece and Italy. For the past two years, he has taught a yearlong literature course for Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, covering twenty-six works of literature from the Iliad to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. His dissertation investigates the interrelationship between sacred space and sacred time in ancient Jewish and Christian literature by tracing how the Sabbath and the Tabernacle variously come together in the Hebrew Bible, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. He has additionally co-authored a new translation and commentary on a late antique Coptic poem called The Thunder: Perfect Mind to be published this November by Palgrave. At IWU he will be joining the Religion Department and teaching “Religions of the World,” “Religious Experience,” and “Introduction to Biblical Literature.” He is looking forward to seeing some familiar faces, while getting to know some of the new.

That's what I have been, what I will be doing! And that's why I haven't been blogging much lately. If you have any suggestions for the courses I'll be teaching this fall, I would love to hear them. If you are around in the midwest, I would love to catch up sometime this academic year.