The Department is proud and excited to welcome Dr. Rodney A. Caruthers II, our first Bruce Gray Postdoctoral Fellow.
Dr. Caruthers received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2019, where he specialized in Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins/New Testament. His dissertation was entitled Learning How to Write Narrative: Jewish Education during the Hellenistic and Early Roman Periods.
This semester, Dr. Caruthers is teaching a section of REL 210 New Testament.
A few words of his own introduction:
I am very pleased to join the Department of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College for the 2020-2021 academic year. The faculty and staff have been incredibly welcoming, and I look forward to my time interacting with students and the wider GAC community. I am honored to be teaching REL 210: New Testament for the first time at Gustavus. It’s been a delight to meet and learn more about the students.
Currently, I am revising my dissertation, Jewish Authors Writing in Greek: How and What They Learned During the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, for publication. Coming up in April 2021, I will be co-hosting the Eighth Enoch Graduate Seminar, which welcomes graduates and postdoctoral scholars from various fields related to biblical studies.
At the moment, I am reading Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament by Sabine Huebner and will offer a review in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.
On the non-academic side, I have found reading short poems and sayings to be enlightening, humorous, and refreshing. One that I recently came across is the Calf Path. I thought it was a good message for continually seeking to be inquisitive about what we do and why.