Dr. Bryan Rennie, the Vira I. Heinz professor of religion at Westminster College, recently participated in a conference at the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago.

"The 100th anniversary of the birth of Mircea Eliade is in 2007, and 2005 commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Joachim Wach," Rennie said. "To evaluate the legacy of Eliade and Wach to the discipline of the history of religions, the Martin Marty Center chose the intermediary year, 2006, to hold a two-day conference to reflect upon the academic contributions and political lives of these two historians of religion, and also the relationship between their works and their lives."

Rennie was one of only eight scholars from around the world invited to speak on Eliade and one of only four from the United States. The others invited from the U.S. were Matei Calinescu, from the University of Indiana at Bloomington; Carlo Ginzburg, Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies, UCLA; and Jonathan Z. Smith, Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities in the College, University of Chicago. The Eliade scholars from abroad were Moshe Idel, Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; Daniel Dubuisson, Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Lille, France; Antoine Faivre, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Religieuses, at the Sorbonne, Paris; and Florin Turcanu of the University of Bucharest.

"This discussion of the life and work of Mircea Eliade was particularly significant because the position that I have taken in defense of the famous Romanian/American historian of religion is, after twenty years of contentious debate, beginning to win out," Rennie said. "To me, the most exciting part of the conference was on the final day when graduate students of the history of religion at the University of Chicago presented their own papers. The two students who spoke on Eliade took positions similar to my own and informed by my publications. They defended Eliade in the same way as I have been doing for twenty years now."

Rennie, who has been with Westminster College since 1994, earned his undergraduate degree, master's and Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Rennie has written four books and 13 articles about Eliade.

Contact Rennie at (724) 946-7151 or e-mail brennie@westminster.edu for more information.

Dr. Bryan Rennie