Program Information
Michael Taber, Chair
240 895 4900
mstaber@smcm.edu
Penny Shissler, Office Clerk
240 895 2159
Program Highlight
The department offers a major and minor in Philosophy and a major and minor in Religious Studies. As an active and energetic department, we are committed towards an intercultural, international and interdisciplinary understanding of the world. We teach across the traditional fields of philosophy and religious studies, and beyond the cultural divides of East and West. Departmental faculty likes to teach in a variety of venues (Nitze Program; Women, Gender and Sexuality; Environmental Studies; Asian Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies), to take students on study tours (Greece, Germany/Poland, India, Thailand, and, in the future, England and Israel), and to bring questions of global relevance to the campus communities through scheduling events with renowned speakers and activists.
Chad Pevateaux
Visiting Instructor of Religious Studies
Departments: Philosophy and Religious Studies
Office: Margaret Brent Hall 205
Email: cjpevateaux@smcm.edu
Phone: 240-895-4278
Bio:
Chad Pevateaux (Ph.D. expected fall 2012, Rice University; M.Div., Harvard Divinity School) specializes in Christianity and comparative mystics, and works on theories of sexuality, race, gender, class, and species. His dissertation, titled “What Mystics May Come: Forming More Perfect Unions from Pragmatism to Posthumanism,” compares how thinkers in the “spiritual but not religious” currents of culture have drawn on mystical practices of “unsaying” to explore the affinities of three modes of union: (1) mystical, (2) embodied, and (3) democratic. He argues that each union exhibits an inherent weakness that is also its greatest strength, opening pathways to rethink religion, ethics, and politics. In all his work as a historian and philosopher of religions, he focuses on justice as relation to the other.
