With interests ranging from the Bible to birds, it’s appropriate that Michael Greenwald is teaching in a liberal arts setting. The associate professor of religious studies earned his B.A. in astronomy, earned his M.A. in Hebrew Letters and was ordained a rabbi in 1975.  He received his Ph.D. in New Testament and Christian Origins from Boston University in 1989. 

“As a rabbi with a doctorate in the study of early Christianity, I have spent my academic career studying the relationship between Jews and Christians in the first centuries after Jesus,” he explains. However, true to the liberal arts, his most recent presentation was a paper on “Religion and Theology in the Fantasy World of J.R.R. Tolkien” at a conference last May.

“Nothing can be more satisfying than taking students from a point where they are struggling to learn material to the point where they can use what they know to think about things independently,” he says. “My goal is not to teach students what to think, but how to go about the process of thinking.”

Among the courses Greenwald teaches are The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, Religious Traditions of Judaism, the Holocaust, History of the Middle East Since 1914, and “occasionally on the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, religion in Tolkien, and anti-Semitism.”  He has also taught in St. Lawrence’s First-year Program, most recently Literature of the Ancient World.

A lifelong hiker, Greenwald has become an avid birder, studying birds “from the outermost Aleutians to the Florida Keys” and in Israel, Tunisia, the British Isles, Costa Rica and the West Indies. He spends his summers as a volunteer naturalist in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and has offered a First-Year Seminar on the birds of northern New York.