Michael D. McNally (Carleton, BA ; Harvard Univ., MDiv, MA, PhD), 2001-, teaches courses in American religion and culture and Native American religious traditions. His special interests include the tradition and history of Minnesota's Anishinaabe Ojibwe community, Native American Christianity, and lived religion in America. He is author of Honoring Edlers:  Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion (2009), Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (2000), editor of Art of Tradition: Sacred Story, Song, and Dance among Michigan's Anishinaabe (2006), and a number of book chapters and journal articles. His current research projects explores the intersection between Native American traditions, the category of "religion", and various facets of the law.

Kristin Bloomer (Wesleyan University, B.A; University of Montana, M.F.A; Cambridge University, B.A, M.A; University of Chicago, Ph.D) teaches courses in Christianities and religions of South Asia, with specializations in spirit possession and women's and gender studies.  Her research pertains to Christianity, Hinduism, and spirit possession in postcolonial south India; her more general interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of subjectivity, with particular attention to religiosity, gender, and embodiment.  She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Possessed by Mary: Hinduism, Catholicism and Spirit Possession in Contemporary Tamil Nadu, South India," and ethnography of Marian spirit possession in India's most southeastern state.  Theoretically, her work addresses questions of religion and postcoloniality, ritual and performativity, feminist approaches to ethnography, and relationships between religion, gender, and the body.  Her methods aims to explore and interrogate ideas of agency and of subjectivity that pertain not only to the postcolonial "Other," but also to the anthropologist-scholar.

Bloomer's academic publications include:  "Hermeneutics," in Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology:  An Encyclopedia. eds. Richard Warms and John McGee (SAGE Publications Inc., forthcoming); "Comparative Theology, Comparative Religions, and Hindu-Christian Studies: Ethnography as Method," in The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2008; "Notes From the Field: Retrieving the Dead," The Martin Marty Center for Religion and Culture Web Forum, University of Chicago, February 2005, "http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/022005/index.shtml"; and several book reviews.

Before entering academia, she worked for several years as a print journalist and earned an M.F.A. in non-fiction writing.

Roger R. Jackson (Wesleyan, BA; Wisconsin, MA, PhD), 1983-84, 1989-, teaches the religions of South Asia and Tibet. His special interests include Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and ritual; Buddhist religious poetry; religion and society in Sri Lanka; the study of mysticism; and contemporary Buddhist thought. He is author of Is Enlightenment Possible? (1993) and Tantric Treasures (2004), co-author of The Wheel of Time: Kalachakra in Context (1985), editor of The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems (2009), co-editor of Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (1996), Buddhist Theology (1999), and Mahamudra and the Bka'brgyud Tradition (2011), and has published many articles and reviews.  He is a past editor of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and is currently co-editor of the Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies.

Louis E. Newman (Univ. of Minnesota, BA, MA: Brown Univ., PhD), 1983 -, teaches courses in Judaic studies and has special interests in Jewish ethics and contemporary Jewish life and thought, especially in America. He is the author of Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics (1998), and An Introduction to Jewish Ethics (2005).  He is co-editor (with Elliot Dorff) of Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality (1995) and Contemporary Jewish Theology (1999) and three other volumes on ethical issues in a series entitled Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices.  His most recent book is Repentance:  The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah (2010).

Lori K. Pearson (St. Olaf College, BA; Harvard, MTS, ThD), 2003--, is a specialist in the history of Christian theology with particular interests in 19th-century German Protestant thought, modern philosophy of religion, hermeneutics, race, and feminist theory. Her current research focuses on theories of tradition, and on concepts of religion, modernity, and the secular in the long nineteenth century.  She is author of Beyond Essence:  Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity (2008), co-editor of The Future of the Study of Religion (2004), and author of articles and papers dealing with Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and other topics.

Noah Salomon (Reed College, BA; University of Chicago, MA; University of Chicago, PhD) teaches courses in the study of Islam, with a particular interest in the thought and practice of contemporary Muslim piety movements in Africa and the Middle East.  He is the author of recent and forthcoming articles on contemporary Sudanese Sufism, Salafi reformism, Islamic political thought and praxis, Islamic musical and poetic genres, and the critical study of religion more broadly.  He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled In the Shadow of Salvation: Sufis, Salafis and the Project of Late Islamism in Contemporary Sudan.

Asuka Sango (Wittenberg University, BA; University of Illinois, MA; Princeton University, PhD), 2007-, teaches courses in the religions of East Asia. Her teaching interests include the history of Japanese and Chinese religions, Buddhist ecology, and social activism in Asian religions.  She is the author of recent and forthcoming articles on the development of Buddhist debate in premodern Japan; i.e. a discussion between two (sometimes more than two) monks concerning the (often controversial) doctrinal points of Buddhist scriptures and commentaries.  She is currently working on a book manuscript, which examines Buddhist rituals sponsored by the ancient state of Japan, and analyzes how such ritual performance offered a unique site for producing political power and doctrinal knowledge.

A. Terrance Wiley (Southern Methodist University, B.A.; Georgetown University Law Center, J.D.; Princeton University, M.A, Ph.D) teaches courses at the intersection of religious ethics, law and politics, Peace Studies, and African American Studies,.  He completed his dissertation, “Angelic Troublemakers:  Religion and Anarchism in Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin," in April 2011.

Ian Barbour was a physics major at Swarthmore and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago. After teaching physics in Michigan he earned a divinity degree from Yale. Coming to Carleton in 1955, he founded the department of religion while teaching half time in physics. He began research, teaching, and writing on science and religion, dealing with methodological issues and the theological implications of contemporary science. In the seventies he and a political scientist started an interdisciplinary program currently called Environment and Technology Studies, and wrote about ethical issues raised by technology. In 1989 and 1990 he gave the Gifford Lectures in Scotland. In 1999, Barbour was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He has written or edited a dozen books, most recently When Science Meets Religion which has been translated into 14 languages.

Richard E. Crouter, Emeritus (Occidental, BA; Union Theological Seminary, BD, ThD), 1967- 2003 has a primary interest in the modern religious thought of Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Reinhold Niebuhr. He is the translator of Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1799 On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1996), co-editor of the Journal for the History of Modern of Theology, (1993- ), and author of Friedrich
 Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (2005). His most recent book is Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (2010).

Anne E. Patrick (Medaille College, BA; Univ. of Maryland, MA; Univ. of Chicago, MA, PhD), 1980-, is William H. Laird Professor of Religion and the Liberal Arts. She has a special interest in the areas of religion and literature, and Christian feminist theology and ethics. A past President of the Catholic Theological Society of America, she was also a founding Vice-president of the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews, and the book Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology (1996). She is now completing another volume, Conscience in Context: Vocation, Virtue, and History.

Bardwell Smith (Yale, BA; Yale Divinity School, BD; Yale University, MA, PhD). Taught at Carleton 1960-1995 in East and South Asian religions and philosophies. His special interests include religion and society in Sri Lanka and Buddhism in Japan. He is currently working on a manuscript dealing with Japanese women, child loss, and rituals of grieving. Among his publications have been the following: Unsui: A Diary of Zen Monastic Life; Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka; Warlords, Artists and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century; Essays on Gupta Culture; and The City as a Sacred Center: Essays in Six Asian Contexts. He is a Past President of the American Society for the Study of Religion (ASSR, 1996-1999). Earlier he served as Dean of the College, 1967-72.

Mankato State University, BSN

Sandy Saari joined the Departments of Religion and Philosophy in late July of 2009 as their Administrative Assistant.  Sandy provides administrative support and office management for the two department Chairs and the faculty, along with assisting and supervising student workers.  She worked for nine years in the Admissions Office at Carleton managing the Alumni Admissions Representatives (AAR) Program.  Before joining the Carleton staff, she served as a RN in the Northfield Public Schools and at Methodist and St. Mary's Hospitals in Rochester, MN.