BOSTON (RNS) — As nearly 10,000 scholars of religion and the Bible shuttled among 300 sessions at a conference here last weekend, Donald Trump dominated the agenda.
Alarm about Trump’s presidency — and the anti-intellectual forces several scholars say he has empowered — pervaded the annual joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, which ended on Tuesday (Nov. 21).
At last year’s AAR/SBL meeting, weeks after Trump’s election with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, the academics were “in shock,” recalled the new AAR president, Mercer University professor David Gushee.
