Tyler Roberts

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

My general area of research is in modern western religious thought. I am particularly interested in the ways in which religious imagination and practice in Europe and the U. S. have been affected by the social and cultural transformations of the past 100 years. One of these transformations involves changes in the way people experience, think about, and symbolize place and their relation to place. Greater individual mobility and increasing "globalization" have had a dramatic impact on the way people experience place. What new symbols of sacred space might emerge from such experience? Can particular spaces continue to play powerful roles in the religious imagination when people are no longer "rooted" to the extent they were previously? What roles does the idea of the sacredness of space or place play in efforts to restore places? I am hopeful that the Center for Prairie Studies will provide the opportunity to work collaboratively on these general questions of place in a concrete, local context.


Tyler Roberts
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Last year, I was somewhat surprised to find the prairie playing a significant role in two of my courses. In the fall, I taught my first tutorial at Grinnell, entitled "God's Wildness: Religion and Nature in American Culture." Having spent all of my life, until 18 months ago, living in New England, "Religion and Nature" meant first of all Henry David Thoreau. But in developing and teaching the course, I took the opportunity to introduce myself, as well as my students, to Iowa's nature, and particularly to the prairie. As people from very different kinds places, discussing our different reactions to the prairie as landscape and as "home" helped us get to the heart of some of the course's central themes. In the spring, I taught a course on religious identity in the U. S., half of which was devoted to the collision of Native American religious traditions, particularly the Sioux, and Christianity. The differences between these cultures with respect to the religious significance of land, property, and nature continues to vex their relationships today and provided a particularly useful way for students to strengthen their grasp of the differences between these world-views. In the future, I plan on developing a comparative course on religious conceptions of place and space.

 

Return to Meet the Faculty/Staff Page

 

Center for Prairie Studies

Home | Grinnell College Home Page

Last updated 03-Dec-2003