Sara Ronis

Our current context creates an environment of fear and distrust, as well as real barriers to Socratic learning. And that is by design, and to the detriment of our students.

❤️

I am genuinely honored when students choose to talk to me about their lives outside of class, to explore how theology can speak to what is going on with them and their communities. And I'm always aware that our conversations may have dangerous consequences I'm not trained to handle.

Being a professor in 2026 is authentically responding to a student's curiosity and attempts to connect what we're learning in class to the complexities of their own life, while always assuming that anything you say or write is being recorded and could be sent to politicians and/or other groups.

Thinking about this midrash I learned with @sararonis.bsky.social

The Roman Empire is like a pig - just as a pig covers itself in mud but shows off its hooves as if to say "look how kosher and clean I am!" Rome is prideful and violent and thieving but loves to show off its courts of justice. 1/2

I have to keep an open Word document on my computer where I immediately everything I do, because otherwise, my annual reports would be blank - but also somehow some things just magically...happened?

One of my fav NYE fun facts:

We celebrate the new year on Jan 1 in large part because the Roman senate needed to hastily appoint Q. Fulvius Nobilior as consul before the start of the year (then, the Ides of March), so that he could go fight the revolting Celtiberi in Hispania

1. This is stressful, and the world is stressful enough. and 2. Now I have to find a place to print it when I get to the conference. Folks who do this regularly, what is your secret to success?

Joining the club of people finishing their conference papers on the plane, and boy do I not like this.

Everyone else on the panel works on medieval/early modern questions, so I'd love for folks in ancient Judaism to come and share your thoughts too!

List of conference presentations at this panel. The second presentation reads "Bad Romance: Rereading the Divorce Formulae in the Babylonian Incantation Bowls" - Sara Ronis, St. Mary's University, Texas.

Going to be at AJS? Come hear my truly wild paper, as part of the panel "Getting Together, Splitting Up: Representations and Realities of Marriage and Divorce in Premodern Jewish Communities." Mon, December 15, 3:15 to 4:45pm.

This is excellent!

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Good morning! AI is being force-fed to you by a handful of billionaires who will lose a bunch of money if they fail to convince you that you need it. You do not need it 🫶

This bowl is HS 3034 in Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Museum Collections: volume 1 (2020).

An image of a demon drawn in the middle of a Babylonian incantation bowl. The demon has wide horizontal hair and triangles where shoulders should be.

For all my concerns about the Babylonian incantation bowls, you cannot deny that this demon's shoulder pads are absolute🔥

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

‘From combustion engines to tobacco, universities have been used in the past to whitewash now-controversial products. For a long time, the tobacco industry pointed to research it subsidized at universities to claim its products were healthy.’ - Olivia Guest.

Curious about folks' thoughts on this.

to what that means for gatekeeping the vast amounts of unpublished materials. These bowls are so important, and SO cool, but with this scholarly ecosystem, it's such a hard field to wrap my brain around - or to encourage others to join (2/2)

Doing some reading of publications of Babylonian Incantation Bowls this morning, and reminded all over again about how unhealthy the infrastructure of this field is, from its very foundation on unprovenanced materials, to the requirement to receive the patronage of wealthy collectors (1/2)

I would read the heck out of academic pamphlets on ancient religions.

Absolutely! I'm really interested in the multiple modes of propaganda this sign represents.

Get this book!

Particularly interesting to me that the "West" here is represented by Israel, with Bibi kneeling, and the message doubled in Hebrew on the right.

Ack, apologies for the wonky capitalization. On my phone on a plane...

Check out the muslim public affairs committee - MPAC.

a cat is raising its paws in the air with the words `` grabby hands '' written below it . Alt: a cat is raising its paws in the air with the words `` grabby hands '' written below it .

Congratulations!!!

What a gift to have people read your work so carefully and generously!

Demons in the Details - Reading Religion The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In this book, Sara R...

"masterful" and "an indispensable resource"--Max Strassfield's glowing review of @sararonis.bsky.social's DEMONS IN THE DETAILS at Reading Religion
readingreligion.org/978052038617...

I'm so sorry to hear that. Her book was really formative for me as I was thinking about my dissertation topic.

Deportation of Emma Goldman as a radical "alien" | Jewish Women's Archive On December 21, 1919, Emma Goldman, along with 248 other radical "aliens," was deported to the Soviet Union on the S.S. Buford under the 1918 Alien Act, which allowed for the expulsion of any alien fo...

Just posting this Jewish Women's Archive article about the deportation of Emma Goldman and over 200 other accused anarchists in 1918 for... reasons jwa.org/thisweek/dec...