Jewish Studies Program
Jewish Studies Program
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Caleb Hendrickson

Education

  • PhD (Religious Studies), University of Virginia (expected May 2020)
  • MDiv, Yale Divinity School
  • BA (Religion and Studio Art), St. Olaf College

Dissertation

  • "Picturing Revelation: Paul Tillich, Franz Rosenzweig, and the Modern Visual Imagination"

    • Co-directed by Asher Biemann and Paul Dafydd Jones.

My research stands at the intersection of modern religious thought, aesthetics, and visual studies. I am particularly interested in how religion and theology have shaped our ideas about the visual world, and, in turn, how critical concepts of images and visuality developed in visual studies and art history may create novel perspectives on issues in religion and theology.

In my dissertation, I read two prominent modern theologians – one Christian and one Jewish (Paul Tillich and Franz Rosenzweig) – in relation to some ideas in early twentieth-century philosophy and art history. W.J.T. Mitchell proposes that a “pictorial turn” has occurred in the modern human sciences. I contend that a similar development can be detected in Tillich’s and Rosenzweig’s religious thought. I argue that “revelation,” for both thinkers, names a kind of creative optics by which the religious truth of the world is actively pictured and beheld. Both thinkers thus exhibit a distinctively modern tendency to conceive the meaningful world as a construct of pictorial imagination. These world pictures may be the products of religious imagination. However, I argue that for neither Tillich nor Rosenzweig are they reducible to projections of the self. Rather, they witness to an absolute beyond the “I” by first witnessing to the neighbor, who is encountered as a call to responsibility. In conclusion, I enlist Tillich and Rosenzweig in giving definition to the eye witness as a figure of creative ethical agency in history.

Teaching

  • Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Virginia

    • Faith and Doubt in the Modern Age, Spring 2019

  • Head Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Virginia

    • Theology, Ethics, and Medicine, Fall 2015 (James Childress, Nichole Flores)

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Virginia

    • Introduction to Media Studies, Fall 2019 (Andre Cavalcante)

    • The Kingdom of God in America, Spring 2017 (Charles Marsh)

    • Introduction to Western Religious Traditions, Fall 2016 (Heather Warren)

    • New Testament and Early Christianity, Spring 2016 (Janet Spittler)

    • Religion in America Since 1865, Spring 2015 (Heather Warren)

    • Theology, Ethics, and Medicine, Fall 2014 (James Childress) 

  • Teaching Fellow, Yale Divinity School

    • Faith, Morality, and the Law, Fall 2013 (Cathleen Kaveny)

Publications

  • "'That God of My Youth': Correlations in Franz Rosenzweig and Heinrich Wölfflin" (under review). 

  • Book Review: Prophetic Interruptions: Critical Theory, Emancipation, and Religion in Paul Tillich, Theodor Adomo, and Max Horkheimer (1929-1944) by Bryan Wagoner. Reading Religion, April 2018. 

Papers Presented

  • "Repicturing Franz Rosenzweig in Light of Heinrich Wölfflin's Formalist Aesthetics." Assocation for Jewish Studies Annual Conference. San Diego, December 2019 (upcoming).

  • "The Eye of The Star of Redemption: Rosenzweig's Views of Redemption." Internationale Rosenzweig-Gesellschaft Biannual Meeting. Jerusalem, February 2019.  

  • "The Demonic Arts & The Politics of Critique: Discerning the Spirits of Visual Culture with Paul Tillich." American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting. Boston, November 2017.  

  • “The Theology of the Cross: The Past and Present of God’s Death as seen through the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel.” University of Chicago and Notre Dame Joint Graduate Conference. University of Chicago, October 2016.

  • “Rosenzweig on Death and the Neighbor.” Psychology and the Other conference. Lesley University. Cambridge, Mass., October 2011.

Selected Fellowships and Awards

  • Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia (2019-2020)
  • Rachel Winer Manin Interdisciplinary Jewish Studies Fellowship, University of Virginia (2017-2020)
  • Harriet Jackson Eli Prize for Theology, Yale Divinity School (2013, 2014)
  • The Junia Prize for Distinction in the Study of Religion, St. Olaf College (2009)

Multimedia

  • "Pamunkey: Fractures and Reconstruction of Memory," two-part film regarding the political and cultural recognition of the Pamunkey tribe of eastern Virginia, produced in collaboration with Federico Cuatlacuatl and Ethan Brown for the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia, 2019 (forthcoming).

  • "Freedom's Hat: The U.S. Capitol Building’s ‘Statue of Freedom’ and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery,” eight minute audio piece written and produced for the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia, 2018. Available here.