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Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate was elected president of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life (ARIL)/CrossCurrents during a recent meeting of the board of directors in New York City.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate discussed the disappearance of churches in Upstate New York and across the nation with alumnus David Chanatry ’80 during Chanatry’s report, “Another Church Shuttered In MohawkValley,” broadcast on public radio station WAMC on Feb. 12. Plate was quoted earlier this week in a Washington Times article titled “Hollywood films a testament to renewed interest in Bible stories.”

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate was featured in an article in the Deseret News National Edition  titled “How religious art makes secular museums into sacred spaces,” published on Jan. 3. Two sacred objects from the Wellin Museum of Art, an Austrian Schwaz Nativity and a pre-Columbian seated funerary urn, were also displayed prominently in the article.

S. Brent Plate, visiting associate professor of religious studies, wrote an essay published on Dec. 12 on the Religion Dispatches site titled “Religion without God: ‘Cults,’ Pious Atheists, and Our Own Human Bodies.”

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate participated in several events at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The meetings were held Nov. 23-26 in Baltimore.

Crispin Paine, a London-based museums and heritage consultant, will deliver a lecture on the display of sacred objects in a museum context on Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 7:30 p.m., in the Overlook of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art.  His lecture is the first installment in a series titled “Exhibiting the Sacred” and is free and open to the public.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Brent Plate was an invited panelist at the Social Scientific Study of Religion conference in Boston. During the conference the film "Enlarging the Kingdom: African Pentecostals in Italy" was screened.

The first lecture of Professor Brent Rodriguez-Plate’s new course, Religion in the Wild, took place far from its home base in Root Hall.

Hannah Grace O'Connell ’14 and Alison Ritacco ’14 presented “Sharing Sacred Space: Possibilities and Pragmatics” at the 45th annual Pioneer America Society: Association for the Preservation of Artifacts and Landscapes conference on Oct. 11.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate made presentations at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Iliff School of Theology/University of Denver. He presented a synopsis of his forthcoming book, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects, at both places.