As I continue catching up on recent events, I wanted to share that I am part of the Winter 2024 Sacred Writes cohort. Funded by the Luce and ACLS foundations, Sacred Writes trains scholars of religion to do more public facing work. In January we met in Boston for three days of training, to be followed by a series of meetings with editors and continued mentorship for the next few months. I had not been back to Boston since October 2005 when we packed up for our first move to Boulder. It was great getting to take those walks down memory lane, especially going to the beautiful Boston Public Library at Copley Square.

This was an incredible training that has already helped me feel more confident about writing for newspapers, magazines, and other public facing outlets. Our training in academia tends to be very focused on learning to make very detailed arguments for other specialists, which is certainly an important skillset. At the same time, how many people will ever read my dissertation compared to the piece I published in Humanities North Dakota about religion and science fiction? Scholars can make a huge impact by varying the types of audiences we engage with. I love me an academic conference as much as the next PhD does, but nothing compares to the energy in the room during one my presentations at Denver Fan Expo on subjects like “Religious Fundamentalism in The Mandalorian.” Reaching the public at large gives us a chance to reach a much broader audience, as well as learning what people outside of the Ivory Tower think about these subjects that are so near and dear to our hearts.

I look forward to sharing news about my journey into public scholarship over the coming months! So far, it involves learning to write in the 750-1000 word length, which is quite different from the 6000-10000 word length that we academics usually write in.