National Museum of Mexican Art

My Religious Values in Cultural Context students particularly enjoyed the annual Day of the Dead exhibit. We followed up in class discussion using sugar skulls, tin calaveras, and Richard Garcia's engaging children's book My Aunt Otilia's Spirits.Visit Website

Audio: Robert Frost Reading His Own Work

Students in Human Being and Citizen (University of Chicago) found that audio recordings of lyric poetry - including this one of Frost - engaged them in a different way than had their (sometimes reluctant....) silent reading.Visit Website

Oriental Institute

I have used the Oriental Institute museum itself, as well as the online resources for educators, in almost every class I've taught. What a jewel!Visit Website

Oriental Institute: Egyptian Gallery. Students who visit the Oriental Institute invariably comment on how effectively the intimate space places them within the cultures of the ancient near east.

St. Norbert Abbey

St. Norbert Abbey is a short drive from St. Norbert College (the only Norbertine College in the world). Students visit the abbey during orientation, but they have been more exited about our class trip to the abbey while we are reading Augustine's Confessions.  Norbertine canons regular meet with my students for conversation about contemporary life with the Rule of Augustine, which the order observes.

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Death of a Marine - A Photographer's Journal

Once the Iliad becomes "real" for students, they are able to engage it less as fantasy and more as a human narrative that resonates with contemporary experience. AP photographer Julie Jacobson narrates her graphic photographs from a firefight in Afghanistan in which a Marine is fatally wounded. This kind of resource hit home for many of the freshmen in my section of Human Being and Citizen (University of Chicago - Undergraduate College).

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Print: Wendy Doniger, "A Chaplain for Every Soul"

In the introduction to religion survey courses I've taught at Lake Forest College, I have students comment on contemporary news items related to the topics we're discussing. I also offer a few examples to help them get started: Doniger's public interviews and commentaries are some of students' favorite sources!Visit Website

Movie Clip: Wit and The Runaway Bunny

Margaret Edson's play Wit (here in Mike Nichols' 2001 motion picture adaptation) brings John Donne's "Death be not proud" and Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny to bear on human finitude in relationship to the divine. Students are intrigued by the function of literature for young children in my current research

Video: The Mars Rover and Holst's "Mars"

This somewhat uncanny video sets animated footage of the NASA Mars Rover mission to the Mars movement of Holst's suite The Planets. I used it as a discussion starter in the week we studied creation (Development of Christian Thought - online, Midland University).