#57: UNC Professor Brandon Bayne— “Nobody Signed Up for This”

Brandon Bayne is a religion professor at the University of North Carolina. We attended seminary together in Boston and have stayed in touch ever since. I have admired his journey through academia and love how passionate he is about pursuing knowledge and understanding the world around him.

As the COVID-19 crisis first unfolded, and universities were sending students home and trying to figure out how to restructure the university classroom, Brandon sat down and wrote out five principles that would guide his approach to his syllabus. He published it on Facebook and Twitter, thinking it might offer several meaningful ideas for other educators, but the response was so broad and receptive, that Time heard about it and asked him for an interview. In our conversation, Brandon shares those five principles and how recently losing his mom to cancer shaped some of his thinking.

Dr. Bayne's first book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Spanish Borderlands, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press later in 2020. His other publications include: 

"Willy-Nilly Baptisms and Chichimeca Freedoms: Missionary Disputes , Indigenous Desires and the 1695 O'odham Revolt."

“Converting the Pacific: Jesuit Networks between Asia and the Americas,” Oxford Handbook of Iberian Borderlands (Forthcoming, Oxford, 2016)

“Crossings and Contact Zones: Religion, Borderlands, and Las Fronteras of the Americas,” Religion Compass, (Wiley, November, 2014)

Dissertation: “A Passionate Pacification: Salvation and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northern New Spain, 1594 – 1767” (Harvard, May, 2012)

“From Saint to Seeker: Teresa Urrea’s Search for a Place of Her Own,” Church History (Cambridge University Press, 2006)