Scholar of Religion Nancy Ammerman to Retire
April 25, 2018, Boston MA — Biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins wonders whether theologians—at least the kind who study things like Adam and Eve’s original sin, even though Adam and Eve never existed—should get the boot from academia. As a sociologist with a joint appointment at the School of Theology and the College of Arts & Sciences, Nancy Ammerman has spent her career studying both believers in Eden’s couple and those who understand them as allegory.
Ammerman wants you to know two things: she doesn’t take a stand one way or the other on her subjects’ beliefs; she merely studies them. And those who don’t take Genesis as literal history outnumber those who do, highlighting what she calls a common misperception among academics: that people in the pews hold rigid doctrines and “otherworldly” beliefs in an “authoritarian God”—that “religion is about believing without doubt and obeying without question,” she says.
Read the full article by Rich Barlow, originally posted on BU Today here: http://www.bu.edu/today/2018/nancy-ammerman-retires