I read Donna Haraway's When Species Meet recently.  Near the end of the book she talks a bit about her colleague at UCSC Gary Lease.  (About the book tomorrow.)  I took several classes from Lease back in the day.  He taught in religious studies, as far as I knew then all concerned with the ancient Mediterranean religions.  The classes I took concerned that -- Mithraic cults and the like.  Quite interesting stuff, even for the likes of me.  What stood out was the effectiveness of Lease in conveying something of the experiences involved in the religions, what it is that was done, not just recitation of the doctrines and/or beliefs.  We sacrificed a ram in one class.  In addition to the shock of killing an animal, there was an attempt to convey the import for the religion of sacrifice.  I thought him a wonderful teacher.  He introduced me to Metamorphosis, a work I still think about and have re-read (in translation I hasten to add).  The focus on experiential aspects of the ancient religions made them intelligible I thought.  (Really, myths alone get dull pretty quickly I think, particularly when one is lounging about in Santa Cruz.)  And it made it a little easier to understand religious belief at all.  I thought he was a prototypical teacher for SC, an odd guy committed to interesting things and activities, and out of the mold.  Not a lot of folks on the UCSC faculty hunted.  Lease died in January, and I had been thinking about that off and on.  Dying and dead people have been on my mind a good deal in recent months.  And then Lease pops up in a book, which, even in the few pages, convey well what Lease was like, at least to students like me.
There is a memorial scholarship: