Talking about Religion: Faculty Book Interviews as a Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue

Abstract

Since May 2010, I have been conducting interviews with faculty members affiliated with the Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. Those interviews have centered on recent publications – mostly books – by those faculty; they last anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half, and all are freely available from the library Web site and the university's institutional repository. In May 2016 I started a second series of interviews, this one focusing on open access publications (so far, journal articles). These interviews tend to be shorter; all of them are also available online, along with copies of the publications discussed. Topics for both series of interviews are wide-ranging but tend to be religious/theological or philosophical in nature and have included discussions of books concerned with various aspects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In this presentation, I will talk about why and how I do the interviews, difficulties encountered during the interview process, feedback received (including impressions from interviewees), benefits of the interviews, and future directions.