Centre News

Religion professor Beth Glazier-McDonald was named “Best
Storyteller” in Kentucky Monthly's 2011 “Professor Superlatives”
feature. Glazier-McDonald has been telling stories from biblical
history at Centre since 1988.

This spring, for the third consecutive year, Kentucky Monthly magazine asked readers to nominate their favorite professors for their annual “Professor Superlatives” feature. This year, the magazine reports, “the response was overwhelming,” and of the many professors nominated for the “Best Storyteller” award, Beth Glazier-McDonald, H.W. Stodghill Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of Religion, was named the winner.

Glazier-McDonald, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and biblical literature, told Kentucky Monthly that storytelling helps illustrate the meanings rooted in the original Hebrew Bible. “It’s the foundation that’s required to understand other people’s meanings and allows for a cultural perspective,” she told the magazine.

The Kentucky Monthly feature also includes a comment from a former student in Glazier-McDonald’s “History of the Hebrew Bible” course, who said that “students feel like they’ve run a marathon—and enjoyed every minute of it” after each of the professor’s classes. “With her boundless energy and passion for biblical history, she paints the picture of the past without seeming to take a breath.”

Glazier-McDonald is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of George Washington University and earned her M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Chicago. She was a contributing author to Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible, Women in Scripture and Women's Bible Commentary and has written widely on the prophet Malachi.

Serving as a scholar-in-residence and guest speaker (which allowed her to share stories with those outside the Centre community) at Temple Adath Israel in Lexington, Ky., she has also delivered a series of lectures on topics including wisdom literature of the Bible, the tower of Babel story and the Book of Job.