Religious Studies

May 2025

Archives for May 2025

From Nonprofit Leadership to Healthcare

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Landyn Ford graduated with a BA in religious studies and a concentration in nonprofit leadership in 2023. 

During his time at UT, he participated in numerous programs at the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy and conducted an undergraduate thesis study on healthcare sharing ministries under the supervision of Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballos. 

Ford currently serves as the volunteer programs manager at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital (ETCH) while completing a master’s degree in healthcare administration through the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. 

In his role at ETCH, Ford oversees various programs, including the VolunTeen Program for high school students, which provides volunteer opportunities and attracts nearly 120 students each summer from across East Tennessee. He has developed two new programs for ETCH: the Children’s Hospital Immersive Medical Program (CHIMP) and a Career and Technical Education (CTE) Day. These educational initiatives are designed for students interested in healthcare careers and nonprofit organizations. CHIMP, for example, offers teens who have served at least one summer in the VolunTeen Program a weeklong opportunity to participate in interactive and hands-on experiences, problem-based learning sessions, and healthcare professional forums. 

On top of these leadership roles, he assists the adult volunteer program, managing approximately 200 active volunteers, overseeing onboarding, training, and data management. 

Ford credits his undergraduate work in religious studies for preparing him for graduate school and his work in the healthcare field, noting the student programs, professors, and classes. “UT prepared me to be a productive student, lifelong learner, and committed member of my community, workplace, and society,” he said. 

The future looks bright for Ford. After he finishes his master’s degree, he plans to pursue further graduate work in bioethics and continue to build a career in the healthcare industry. 

We are proud to have Landyn as an alumnus!

Robinson Recognized Religious Studies as Vital

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Sherill Pace Robinson had just recently begun serving as chair of the Department of Religious Studies Board of Visitors when he passed away in November 2024. However, he was a longtime supporter of organizations in the Knoxville community, including the department, and had shared the following comments.

For Pace Robinson, supporting the Department of Religious Studies was part of a family legacy. 

“My parents were very involved in all things Jewish in Knoxville and were integral in the establishment of the chair of Judaic studies,” he explained. “This ingrained in me a sense of responsibility in maintaining religious education for the students at the University of Tennessee.”

His parents, however, insisted that he and his siblings attend college away from their Knoxville home. So his wife, Karen Robinson (’81), is the only family member to have graduated from Rocky Top. She serves on the UT Alumni Board of Directors. 

“I have been a big fan of the university—athletics and academics—my whole life,” he said. After earning a degree in finance, he returned to Knoxville and joined the family business, wholesale distributor Modern Supply Co. Robinson spent his entire career with the company and served as CEO for 25 years before retiring in 2017. 

He also served as a volunteer and leader in numerous organizations, including the Knoxville Jewish Federation, Knoxville Jewish Alliance, Heska Amuna Synagogue, Knoxville Jewish Community Family of Funds, Webb School of Knoxville, Knoxville Utilities Board, and Sertoma.

Together he and his wife established the Karen and Pace Robinson Endowment in Judaic Studies. 

“Karen and I feel a moral obligation towards philanthropy,” Pace Robinson said. “We saw the need to help supplement a small but important part of the university’s education system. This fund also helped me to honor my parent’s efforts with religious studies. “

As a part of the department’s Board of Visitors, he also learned more about the university, how it works and how it benefits students.

“Religious studies is a small but vital part of UT,” he said. “The trend toward de-emphasizing the humanities is concerning and makes the significance of religious studies all the more important these days. The faculty and staff do a great job of managing with limited resources but need outside help to supplement their efforts and continue the vital work of the department.”

Shepardson Publishing New Research

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After completing five years as head of the Department of Religious Studies, Professor Tina Shepardson spent her 2023-24 research leave completing several projects. Among the most exciting was her third monograph, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity, which should appear by late summer 2025. 

Shepardson also submitted several shorter research projects and saw the publication of others, including “Teach Your Children Well: Martyrs, Monks and Mothers in Severus of Antioch,” in New Trajectories in Syriac Studies; “Jews and Christians in Pagan Antiquity from the First through the Third Centuries,” co-authored with Paula Fredriksen in the Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity; “Christianity Emerges in the Era of Late Antiquity,” in Entangling Web: The Fractious Story of Christianity in Europe; “Embodied Readers: Teaching the New Testament in Rural Protestant America,” in Activism, Bible, and Research-Based Teaching: Practical Approaches for the Global Biblical Studies Classroom; and “Speaking of Jews: Late Antique Antioch’s Shifting Anti-Jewish Rhetoric,” in Antioch on the Orontes: History, Society, Ecology, and Visual Culture. 

She also published an earlier book discussion and a public-facing essay on early Christians in Gaza. In addition, Shepardson presented new work at UT’s Late Antiquity Faculty Research Seminar and conferences in Santa Barbara, California; San Antonio, Texas; and Chicago. 

In spring 2024, she was honored to receive a Best Historical Materials Award from an affiliate of the American Library Association for her 2022 co-edited volume Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology, and UT’s Dr. Gilya Schmidt Endowed Faculty Award in Judaic Studies. Despite being on leave she enjoyed facilitating discussions on religious diversity and inclusion at resident assistant training sessions, giving a public talk on the history of Gaza, and discussing her research with Princeton and Yale University graduate students. 

She accepted invitations to be on the advisory boards of the Journal of Early Christian Studies and UT’s Department of Africana Studies.


Teaching, Research, and Outreach Thrive

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headshot photo of Helene Sinnreich

Greetings!

This year has been exciting and impressive for the Department of Religious Studies. Chancellor Donde Plowman presented the Dr. Marva Rudolph Access and Engagement Unit Excellence Award to the department, and individual faculty have been recognized too. Associate Professor Megan Bryson was honored by the Faculty Senate with its Heart and Soul Award, and Associate Professor Erin Darby was named a 2024-25 Athletics Professor of Excellence.

I am excited to tell you about some of our teaching initiatives. Last year, in collaboration with UT’s Teaching and Learning Innovation, Darby and Associate Professor Rachelle Scott developed a specialized version of our Religious Studies 101 course that targets first-year students who struggle during their first semester of college, to mentor them and teach them critical skills. We also now offer online both the religious studies major and our concentration in religion and nonprofit leadership.

Our faculty have been engaged in some really interesting research. Last year, Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballos had a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, during which she completed her book manuscript Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean. She also had two books come out last year, her translation of Abdelfattah Kilito’s La lengua de Adán y otros relatos (Medellín, Colombia: Editorial Sílaba, 2023), and a co-edited volume, Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World Multilingualism and Language Change in the First Centuries of Islam (Brepols, 2024). 

This past summer four of our faculty—Ceballos, Darby, Assistant Professor Marcus Harvey, and Associate Professor Joseph Witt—received stipends to support research initiatives. Harvey is spending this academic year at the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts, completing his first book, “Life Is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Phenomenology. He is following in the footsteps of Assistant Professor Larry Perry, who held a Denbo Center fellowship last year. 

We are excited that we will be adding a new faculty member next year who will help lead our religion and nonprofit leadership program. 

This fall, we hosted our very well-attended annual Siddiqi Lecture on Muslims in the US and a panel on the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, which featured our own faculty experts talking about the intersections between religion and science. In the spring we hosted the Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz Distinguished Lecture on Judaic Studies, featuring Kerry Wallach, and our Distinguished Lecture in Religious Studies was given by Harvard University Professor Tracey Hucks. In March we hosted Rachel Havelock, giving the Karen and Pace Robinson Lecture on Judaic Studies, followed in April by the Anjali annual lecture, a talk titled, “Searching for Sarasvati: Race, Gender, and the Social Lives of Sanskrit in America.” 

I hope we will see you soon at one of our events, in person or over Zoom.

On a personal note, I had a very good summer doing research at the Holocaust Museum and doing some preliminary research in Rwanda looking at Rwandan genocide memorials.

Sincerely,

Helene Sinnreich

Professor and Department Head

Religious Studies Honors Alumnus Educator

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A man taking a selfie with mountains in the background
Sean Blevins (BA ’98, MA ’03) combines his love of the outdoors with his role as high school director at Annoor Academy of Knoxville. In September 2024 he snapped this photo at Geissler Mountain in Colorado while on a backpacking trip with the academy’s ninth graders, “The idea is that we’re going to take you out in the wilderness, and we’re going to do something really hard with you. But the good news is, if you can do this, high school is going to seem easy,” he said. Photo courtesy of Sean Blevins

The Department of Religious Studies has named High School Director Sean Blevins from Annoor Academy of Knoxville the 2025 recipient of its Charles H. Reynolds Distinguished Alumnus Award.

“He demonstrates one of many ways in which our students go on to become important leaders in their community,” said Tina Shepardson, a distinguished professor in the humanities and head of the award selection committee.

“He has dedicated most of his adult life to cultivating his skills as a teacher in different contexts in order to best serve a really broad constituency of students,” said Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballas, who also served on the committee.

Blevins (BA ’98, MA ’03) builds education experiences for students around the same types of learning that were meaningful to him. “The religious studies department has been very formative to me,” he said.

He intended to major in music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, but realized during his freshman year that his interests were much broader. “I wound up taking two or three religious studies classes, an English class, an astronomy class, and anthropology and really, really loved my religious studies classes,” he said. “I was interested in why people are the way they are. I thought the most interesting answers were somehow tied up with what they believe.”

Blevins settled on a major in religious studies with a minor in English. He was particularly interested in Buddhism, and with encouragement from religious studies Professor Miriam Levering applied to a study abroad program in Bodh Gaya, India. “I lived in a Theravada Buddhist monastery and was able to study there for a semester,” he said. “That was an outstanding experience the first semester of my senior year.”

Career Start

The next semester he began volunteering at Ijams Nature Center a few days a week. Leading elementary school groups on field trips, walking in the woods with children and talking about what they found, was a rewarding experience for Blevins. 

After graduation he worked in environmental education at Ijams through the AmeriCorps national service program. “I spent the next two years in some low-income schools around Knox County building gardens and nature trails, doing waste audits, and starting recycling programs,” Blevins said. “It wasn’t directly connected to my religious studies work, except that I was trying to find a way to live a life that felt meaningful.”

Blevins returned to UT in 2001 to earn a master’s degree in religious studies with a plan to concentrate on the New Testament. “And then September 11th happened, and everything was about Islam,” Blevins said.

“I was taking a class on Islam with (Professor) Rosalind Hackett and was very aware of the discourse that was happening around Islam, the way people were talking about Islam,” he said. “The lived experience of Muslims in America and around the world at that time suddenly became hyper relevant, and so I shifted my focus to Islam.”

The summer after his first year of graduate school, he traveled to Amman, Jordan, studying Arabic and meeting with scholars of Islam. He developed a deep respect for Islam and became Muslim.

Meeting High Standards

Three people posing for a photo at an event
From left, Assistant Professor Manuela Ceballas and Tina Shepardson, distinguished professor in the humanities, served on the committee that selected Sean Blevins (BA ’98, MA ’03) as the 2025 recipient of the Charles H. Reynolds Distinguished Alumnus Award from UT’s Department of Religious Studies.

As a graduate student, Blevins also served as a teaching assistant (TA) in the Department of Religious Studies. “One of the biggest honors I’ve had in my life was when (Professor) James Fitzgerald asked me to be his TA,” Blevins said. 

“As an undergraduate, he was the first professor—the first teacher—I ever had in my life to give me something other than an A on a paper,” he recalled. “It rocked my world.” 

Blevins went to see the professor during his office hours and ask what needed to be better. “I remember what he recommended to me, and that was a very, very eye-opening transformation, meeting somebody who was going to push me to meet new, higher standards. So, when I came back, to have him invite me to be his TA was tremendous.”

After completing the master’s program, Blevins became a lecturer in the department, teaching the history of world religions and a thematic comparison of world religions for five years. He noticed, however, that some incoming students struggled with reading texts and articulating their own arguments in writing, and he decided to become a high school English teacher. Blevins earned his third degree from UT, an MS in English education, in 2009. Later he earned an educational specialist degree.

Blevins taught for two years at Knoxville’s Austin East High School before traveling with his family to Jordan for two years. There he studied Arabic and Islam, and he taught English as a second language. His wife, an attorney, had a Fulbright award to study human trafficking. 

Over the following eight years Blevins taught at L&N STEM Academy, where he was recognized as a Teacher of the Year by students (2015) and faculty (2017). The school’s English department was so successful that he and his colleagues presented their work at conferences for the National Science Teaching Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Rich Classroom Experiences

“I found myself trying to recreate in the classroom what some of my richest classroom learning experiences had been,” he said, “reading something interesting and then talking about it, pulling the ideas out and weighing those ideas.” 

In 2021 the private Islamic school Annoor Academy hired Blevins to develop its high school program. The first seniors will graduate in spring 2026. 

“I intentionally have gone about trying to build what I think of as a reasonable approximation of a liberal arts academy,” he said. “Students are required to take a number of classes that are really explicitly designed to help them understand the world that we live in and why the world is the way it is, and why people behave the way they do, and then, when they go out into the world, how can they be meaningful agents of change in the world.”

Blevins recalls reading a 2023 column by David Brooks titled, “In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human.” “Religious studies speaks directly to that,” Blevins said. “What does it mean to be a human being? How do human beings express their humanity? What are the consequences of believing in certain ways and behaving in certain ways, and what role do rituals and beliefs play in shaping us in our world and our environment and our shared communities?”

“Those are the things that I feel like really matter,” he said, “and those are things that I learned and got to explore for years in religious studies. I’m really grateful for that.”

By Amy Beth Miller