For University of Illinois professor Jonathan Ebel, marathon running isn’t just a pastime.

It is also a way to look at the world and a way to live every day. Throughout his career, 12 years

of which he has spent in Champaign-Urbana, he has learned to keep putting one foot in front of

the other and just keep going. “The rewards are long and coming,” Ebel said, knowing that it

takes time for hard work to pay off.

And pay off it has. In 2017, Ebel received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his study of

religion, an award given out to a small number of driven scholars and artists to help them further

research in their fields. Roughly three to five percent of applicants are given the 130 awards, and

typically only two or three are awarded for the study of religion. He has also received a number

of other fellowships from the University, and the Sabbatical Fellowship from the Louisville

Institute.

Born into a progressive, Christian, Navy family in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minn., Ebel

was raised with the military at heart and a strong sense of faith. His father served in Vietnam,

and two great uncles served in World War II so the potential of entering into the service himself

was something that came to mind often. The summer before his senior year of high school his

parents sat down with him and explained that there wouldn’t be enough money for his college

education because of his father’s recent loss of work. Leaving Ebel on his own to pay for

college, he accepted an ROTC scholarship from Harvard University, where he studied

comparative religion with a concentration in government.

After his graduation in 1993, Ebel served as a Naval intelligence officer for four years,

first positioned in Seoul, South Korea, and then at the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island,

Wash. “I’m really glad that I did. I had an amazing experience. I met people I never would

have met, did things I never would have done, and I stayed in the reserves,” he said. “That was a
great support through grad school.” In 1997, he attended graduate school at the University of

Chicago’s Divinity School for seven years. Not long before completion of his doctorate

program, he was deployed during the Iraq War in 2003 to a command in Stuttgart, Germany, and

he returned to complete his Ph.D. in 2004.

Having known he wanted to teach before entering the Navy and now eager to delve into

teaching at the college level, he interviewed and was a finalist for a job at Saint Michael’s

College in Vermont. After visiting the campus and falling in love with the college and the city,

Ebel was ultimately not offered the position. “It was devastating because you get that close and

you feel like this is going to work,” Ebel said.

After a year-long stint of teaching at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas,

Ebel came to the University of Illinois and it is here that he feels he has done the most

outstanding work of his career.

Since the creation of the Masters of Arts program in Religion in 2012, Ebel has been the

director of graduate studies. “Our master’s program has been a tremendous success, and this is

largely thanks to Professor Ebel’s strong commitment to and promotion of the program,” said

Valerie Hoffman, a professor in and head of the Department of Religion, who has worked with

Ebel since he came to the University in 2005. “He is very well liked by his students,” Hoffman

added. Ebel also ran a summer program for high school students in 2015 focusing on global

religion and social justice, and this program has been considered by the College of Liberal Arts

and Sciences as a strong example of how to attract humanities majors to the University. “I love

the work, I love what I do,” Ebel said.

Having published two books, “Faith in the Fight” in 2010 and “G.I. Messiahs” in 2015,

both containing about seven to 10 years of research each, he isn’t afraid to talk about religion,
war, and politics. “I think as a person of faith and as someone who studies religion, I’m

interested in knowing how it is that religion shapes people’s world,” Ebel said. Ebel’s faith

combined with his military service was what opened up the door to his career for him.

His professors at Harvard, professor Diana Eck in particular, brought the study of religion

alive for him, and Eck made him sit back and say, “I want to be just like her, because I love what

she does. And I love the work that she’s doing for me in my life… and I want to do that for

other people.” His experience transformed the way that he thought about life and about himself,

compelling him to give that same experience to others. Ebel writes mostly about religion, the

military, and war, influenced by two things that have been a major part of his life.

Ebel himself is a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that is

generally progressive, open to the LGBT community, and works for social and racial justice in

communities worldwide. His wife, Meredith, is Jewish and his three daughters are being raised

in the Jewish faith, and they have put a strong focus on their Jewish education.

Outside of his personal life, he has studied the interactions between war and religion,

noting that each conflict has been different because religion and its motivation is always

changing. “Religion is always changing, and war is always changing,” Ebel said. “The

experience of war does have a religious effect on people.” According to him, there is, however,

a thread that remains constant throughout all conflicts: some people find a new appreciation for

faith after a conflict, while others come back unable to have faith after their experiences. “The

baseline is that the two things interact, and often our history is written as if they don’t,” he

added.

“Even though when we write histories of religion in America we focus a lot on clergy…

common people really matter too,” Ebel said. This respect for the common people and an
aversion to the modern rhetoric of American politics drove Ebel to run for 13th district

representative and spend much of 2017 campaigning. Seeing attacks on civility from those in

power and lashes against people who struggle to make ends meet, Ebel set out on a mission to

stand for bipartisanship and with a goal to restore the ability to talk across party lines. “It was

mostly the ‘Trump phenomenon’…that [made me want] to run,” he said. This ‘Trump

phenomenon’ refers to ad hominem attacks and one-sided, closed-off thinking that he feels has

been so prevalent in the Trump presidency.

He spent the last year seeking to connect with local communities, reaching out to “the

downtrodden” and those who aren’t the “ultra-wealthy.” “This is a really dark time, I think, in

American history and I really hope that we’re coming out of it,” Ebel said. “And I think one

cause for hope is that there’s a real appetite for real, present, engaged, empathetic politicians.”

Over the course of the campaign trail, he reached out to families in their towns and saw how they

experienced the world, imploring them to share their struggles, their stories, and their concerns.

Despite his best efforts and intentions, Ebel received only 13 percent of the 13th district’s vote,

being surpassed by democratic candidate Betsy Dirksen Londrigan who pulled in approximately

45 percent of the vote, according to Politico.

Thinking about the world we live in today, Ebel simply wants the chance to make a

change. To provide food for those going hungry across the globe, for those in office to take

climate science seriously, and realizing widespread access to healthcare are just a few issues

Ebel takes to heart. Stepping out of his role as a professor and out of his role as a politician,

Ebel’s care for not only the local community but also community and commitment on a global

scale runs deep. “I’d like to see people cared for, people fed, and people really taking seriously

the fact that we’re killing our planet,” he said.

 While he may not yet have had the opportunity to make the grand changes he wishes to

see in the world, he takes the utmost pride in engaging his students and helping them craft the

sense of religious literacy he feels is so important in our everyday lives. His overarching mission

is to impart the idea that religion isn’t something that just happens, it is a concept he thoroughly

believes, from his experience and his studies, that it is active around us all the time. “You cannot

open a newspaper or turn on the television and not hear some story that’s affected by religion in

some way…[it’s] all connected to religion in interesting ways.”

Connor Ciecko
connor@cdcko.com