Hector Avalos

From Philosopedia.org

Avalos, Hector (1958— )

An Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Director of the U.S. Latino/a Studies Program at Iowa State University (Ames), where he was named the “1996 Professor of the Year" and a 2003-04 Master Teacher. The author of six books, he is known for his work in biblical studies, science and religion, religious violence, health care in the ancient world, and U.S. Latino Studies.

Avalos received his undergraduate degree in anthropology in 1982 from the University of Arizona. After a year of graduate work in anthropology, Avalos received a Master of Theological Studies degree from the Harvard Divinity School in 1985, and a Ph.D. in biblical studies from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civillizations at Harvard in 1991.

Born into a Pentecostal family in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Avalos came to the United States to accompany his grandmother, who worked as a housekeeper. By 1968 he had become a child preacher who gave the keynote sermon at the age of nine before hundreds at the Territorial Convention of the Church of God in Glendale, Arizona. He railed against the ascendant sexual revolution, rock music, long hair on men, mini-skirts, and other ideas that were anathema to his Pentecostal church.

By his early teens, he was a zealous believer, willing to go anywhere, to suffer any sacrifice, to preach the word of salvation to the “pagan” masses. He prayed for the sick, many of whom said that God had healed them through his prayers. In high school he began a program of self-study which encompassed the study of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Near Eastern history, philosophy, and theology. But, reading about chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, and the Apollo mission, he decided in his first year in college that there might not be a God as defined by traditional Christianity.

“The logical consequence of this realization,” Avalos has written, “was that miracles went down the drain.” Finding that the God-myth was not necessary for a fulfilling and constructive life, he became a biblical scholar and an agnostic/atheist/secular humanist. The two philosophers he came most to admire were Spinoza and Hume.

In 1979, he developed a life-threatening illness called Wegner’s Granulomatosis, which is a chronic condition in which the immune system attacks its own tissues as though they are foreign implants. A form of vasculitis, it is an extremely rare disorder that attacks the respiratory tract, the nasal sinuses, and the kidney in a progressively destructive process. Avalos has also suffered from a painful, systemic arthritis that is part of the disease.

He is author of "Mary at Medjugorje” (Free Inquiry, Spring 1994), a critical inquiry into the supposed 1980s appearance of Jesus’s mother in a little town in Bosnia-Herzegovina (formerly Yugoslavia). More Marian devotees showed up than appeared during the Jesus apparition stories of early Christianity, he found.

His interest in biblical studies and in his physical condition led him to write Illness and 'Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (1995). A work in medical anthropology, it compares the temples of Asclepius in Greece, the temples of Gula/Ninisina in Mesopotamia, and the temples of Yahweh to explain the socio-religious features that led Israel to develop its own ideas about the role of the temple in health care.

In 1996 Avalos was appointed executive director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Also in 1996 at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, Avalos spoke about the failure of the theology of liberation.

In 1999, he published Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, which argued that Christianity began, in part, as a health care reform movement.

Also known for his work in US. Latino Studies, Avalos edited, and contributed to, Introduction to the U.S. Latina and Latino Religious Experience, which was published by Brill in 2004. In 2005, he published Strangers in Our Own Land: Religion in U.S. Latina/o Literature, the first systematic study of how religion is portrayed in U.S. Latino/a Literature.

In the summer of 2005, Avalos and two colleagues in the sciences (Jim Colbert and Michael Clough) wrote a faculty statement, which expressed rejection of any attempt to portray Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor. The Statement was eventually signed by over 120 faculty members at Iowa State University, and hundreds of others at the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa.

In 2005, Avalos wrote Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence,' which offered a new theory for the role of religion in violence from ancient to modern times.

{“How Bible Study Made An Unbeliever Out of Me,” Freethought Today, August 1991; WAS, interviews}