Dr. Dereck Daschke
Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Mondays and Wednesdays, 1-3pm
Thursdays, 3-5pm
The University of Chicago Divinity School, AM Divinity, 1992; PhD Divinity, 2000
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, BA Psychology/BA Religious Studies, 1990
Dr. Daschke joined the Truman faculty in 2000. His academic interests include shamanism, apocalypticism, the psychology of religion, religion and film, religion and health, and ancient and modern Judaism. In 2010 he published two books: City of Ruins: Mourning Jerusalem through Jewish Apocalypse and A Cry Instead of Justice: The Bible and Cultures of Violence in Psychological Perspective. He is co-editor with Dr. Ashcraft of the textbook anthology New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. His work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (forthcoming), Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism, Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America, Psychology and the Bible, Studies in Jewish Civilization 12: Millennialism from the Hebrew Bible to the Present, Journal of Psychology and Christianity, and American Imago. He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Religion and Film, for which he has reviewed films at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2015 he was awarded a sabbatical to study shamanisitic healing in Brazil, from which he published the chapter “‘It’s the Song that Cures’: Healing, Music, and Ayahuasca in Brazil’s Santo Daime Churches” in the collection Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). He is currently the Secretary of the Delta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Truman.