Reflections on 25 Years of Young Scholars

In the fall of 1991 I was in the midst of fifteen weeks of mandated bed rest and under medical supervision, awaiting the birth of my first child.  His abrupt decision to arrive weeks ahead of schedule had thrown a wrench into my carefully calibrated plans:  finish the PhD, start a teaching position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, commence plans for a family, revise the book project, get tenure.  Jittery from medication, lonely and bored out of my mind, and fearful of an uncertain outcome to the pregnancy, I came across an ad for a new academic program that promised intellectual companionship and mentoring from William Hutchison and Catherine Albanese, two of the bright lights in our field.  So, with my lumbering computer tilted precariously on a stand next to me, I sat up in bed and applied, not knowing what I might be getting into.

Over twenty-five years the Young Scholars in American Religion program has developed from an experimental adventure to a cherished and highly competitive program for early-career scholars.  It provides an opportunity for unmatched collegiality and disciplined conversation about teaching, research, and myriad professional anxieties that reside at the heart of our professional enterprise.  The relationships that I developed in those early years have been sustained and enriched by a steady building of friendships with subsequent classes of scholars; we have met over the years, compared notes, and been able to help one another work through the many issues, big and small, that arise in our day-to-day work environments.

The most helpful aspect of the program, from my perspective, is the ability it provides to integrate personal and professional goals.  Just as important, it offers a venue to discuss how to juggle the two at a time in life when that task often seems overwhelming.   It allows us to address the lives we actually lead, rather than the aspirations we might have to uninterrupted mental labor.  My oldest son arrived fully healthy at full term that fall, but I left him briefly when he was barely ten weeks old to attend my first Young Scholars conference.  By the fall of 2014, when I met as a mentor to another cohort of YSAR participants, three members of our group were encouraged to bring their infants with them to the meeting and to strategize with us about how to balance the many demands of parenting, teaching, and scholarship.

Obviously children aren’t the only pressure placed on academic careers.  Health issues, divorces, parental care, the stress of moves—all of these and more comprise the realities that humanize and ground us, and that often get relegated to the background noise of the purportedly more important issues of how we will write and teach and publish.  The beauty of YSAR is that it has allowed for the integration of the personal and professional.  And in this sense, it has welcomed and honored the participation of those who might otherwise feel shut out of more narrowly focused “career-building” workshops.  In turn, the collaborative opportunities afforded by the resulting friendships have reshaped the field in significant ways, through edited volumes, surprising insights, and years of extended discussion that subtly shift our thinking about projects.

So bravo and happy birthday, Young Scholars!  And kudos to its sponsors and sustainers who enable the continued creation of lively meetings and generative relationships.

With gratitude,

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

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2022-24 YSAR Application

Beginning in the fall of 2022, a series of seminars devoted to the enhancement of teaching and research will be offered in Indianapolis. The aims of all sessions of the program are to develop ideas and methods of teaching in a supportive workshop environment, stimulate scholarly research and writing, and create a community of scholars that will continue into the future.

The dates for these seminars are:

  • Session I: October 20th-23rd, 2022
  • Session II: March 30th-April 2nd, 2023
  • Session III: October 12th-15th, 2023
  • Session IV: April 11th-14th, 2024
  • Participants will also be expected to join 3 virtual meetings.

 

Jennifer Graber and Omar M. McRoberts will lead the 2022-2024 seminars.

Jennifer Graber is Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a PhD in Religion from Duke University in 2006. She works on religion and violence, inter-religious encounters, and visionary movements in American prisons and on the American frontier. Her first book, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America, explores the intersection of church and state during the founding of the nation’s first prisons. Her latest book, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West, considers religious transformations among Kiowa Indians and Anglo Americans during their conflict over Indian Territory, or what is now known as Oklahoma. Her new project, “Our World Renewed,” focuses on Native actors, sources, and epistemologies in the so-called Ghost Dance of 1870 and 1890.

Most recently, Professor Graber has published an article on Native American “prophets” in American Religion, consulted with the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art and the Sing Sing Prison Museum, served on UT’s College of Liberal Arts Diversity and Inclusion Plan Task Force and the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities, and has shared work in The Canopy Form and H-Net Federal History.

 

Omar M. McRoberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and The College at The University of Chicago. McRoberts’ scholarly and teaching interests include the sociology of religion, urban sociology, urban poverty, race, and collective action.  His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood, is based on an ethnographic study of religious life in Four Corners: a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston containing twenty-nine congregations. It explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in the neighborhood. It won the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

McRoberts currently is writing a book on black religious responses to, and influences on, social welfare policy in the New Deal, War on Poverty, and Welfare Reform eras.

Applying to the Young Scholars program:

Scholars eligible to apply are those working in a subfield of the area of religion in North America, broadly understood, who have a terminal degree in hand, a full-time academic position (tenure track or renewable long-term), and have launched their careers within the last seven years. Scholars are selected with the understanding that they will commit to the program for all seminar dates. Participants are expected to produce two course syllabi, with justification of teaching approach, and a publishable research article over the course of their seminars.

Applicants must submit (a) a curriculum vitae; (b) a 750-word essay indicating why they are interested in participating and describing their current and projected research and teaching interests; and (c) email information for three scholars willing to write letters of reference (portfolios with generic reference letters are not accepted).

All application materials, including letters of recommendation, must be received by April 22nd. Please note that the Center will not request supporting letters until after the application is submitted so plan accordingly. Click here to apply to the Young Scholars program.

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Religion & the Politics of the Vote

February 17th , 2022

On the first Monday of February 2022, the Supreme Court reinstated an Alabama congressional map that a lower court had argued diluted the power of Black voters and was a threat to equal representation for all communities.  These type of challenges, court cases, and state laws are on the rise and the question of the access to the franchise to all eligible voters has come under great scrutiny during the last couple of election cycles.  Who gets to vote? When do voters have opportunity and access to vote? How have and how do electoral maps shape policies, elections, and the future of the US democracy? What roles have religious organizations and emerging activists groups played in bolstering or challenging the dilution of voting rights/access across the country? There has been considerable scholarly and public attention given to the ways that religious institutions and ideologies have impacted and continue to impact the mobilization of voters and political activitsts across the country.  In this episode of Religion &, we will address the long history of the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression, the relationship of religious and civil rights organizations to this act, and how current communities and activists are deploying language, protest, and direct engagement in order to re-imagine and transform the possibilities of democratic participation. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, voting rights, and competing visions of democracy.

 

Cohosts

Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Religious Studies, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI and the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. His research interests are black and womanist theologies, alternative Christianities in the black Atlantic, and the role of scripture in African and African American religious traditions. Joseph has received grants from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning, the Fund for Theological Education, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His most recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between alternative Christian movements and the Black body with a recent article entitled “The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality” in the journal Religions.

Leah Gunning Francis, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, Associate Professor of Christian Education and Practical Theology, Christian Theological Seminary

Leah Gunning Francis is the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Christian Theological Seminary. Her research interests include a focus on transformative education and reflect her commitment to the spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being of women, men and children, highlighted by her particular interest in underserved and minority communities. Dr. Gunning Francis has received numerous awards, including the Engaged Scholars Fellowship (2012) to study issues of risk among middle-class African American young men.  Other awards include the Candler School of Theology’s G. Ray Jordan award for excellence in integrating academic study with constructive leadership service and the Fund for Theological Education’s Doctoral Fellow Award.  She has also been featured in diverse media outlets including Keepin’ It Real with Al Sharpton, RELEVANT Magazine, and the PBS documentary The Talk: Race in America. Her most recent book is Faith after Ferguson: Resilient Leadership in Pursuit of Racial Justice (2021, Chalice Press).

 

Panelists

Besheer Mohamed, Senior Researcher, Pew Research Center

Besheer Mohamed is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. He is an expert on the views, demographic profile and size of U.S. Muslim communities. He also has extensive experience with computational science, as well as developing best practices for quantitative data collection on small populations. Mohamed has appeared in numerous media outlets and regularly briefs policymakers, academics and other important stakeholders. He has also published in traditional academic publications through Oxford University Press and NYU Press, along with the American Sociological Association’s magazine, Contexts. He received his doctorate in sociology and master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Cornell University.

Lerone A. Martin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Chair and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

Martin is the author of the award-winning Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion (New York University Press, 2014). The book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History. In support of his research, Martin has received a number of nationally recognized fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), The Teagle Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, and the Forum for Theological Exploration. Most recently, Martin became Co-Director of a $1 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to fund “The Crossroads Project,” a four-year, multi-institution project to advance public understanding of the history, politics, and cultures of African American religions.

 

https://youtu.be/HGqjc56E3gQ

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Religion & Sports

March 21st, 2024

Both sport and religion are multi-billion dollar endeavors in American life. In this episode of Religion &, our panelists explore the multitude of ways that sport and religion converge and diverge in American life. Featuring expertise in the history of sport and religion, sports fandom and religion, and sport and religious experiences, panelists highlight how race, politics, and religion manifest through play. Join us as we consider fields, courts, pitches, and turf and their role in the creation and exporting of American culture.

 

Host

Jennifer Guiliano, Professor of History, IUPUI

Dr. Guiliano has served as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2008-2010) and as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (2010-2011) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. She most recently held a position as Assistant Director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland where she also served as an adjunct instructor in the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Digital Cultures program in the Honor’s College. Dr. Guiliano currently serves as President of the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) Executive Council (2016-2018), as co-director with Trevor Muñoz of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative (HILT: www.dhtraining.org/hilt), and as co-author with Simon Appleford of DevDH.org, a resource for digital humanities project development. Dr. Guiliano completed her 2015 monograph Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America, which traces the appropriation, production, dissemination, and legalization of Native American images as sports mascots in the late 19th and 20th centuries. She is also completing her co-authored work Getting Started in the Digital Humanities with Dr. Appleford.

 

Panelists

Annie Blazer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, College of William and Mary

Annie Blazer is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies. Her courses cover religion in America from the colonial to contemporary period. In particular, Professor Blazer’s courses investigate the relationships between religions and American culture, paying attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality. Professor Blazer’s first book, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (NYU Press), was released in July 2015. The book is an ethnographic exploration of the religious experiences of Christian athletes in the U.S. Professor Blazer’s current research project investigates the effects of gentrification and re-urbanization on religious communities and focuses on the East End of Richmond, Virginia.

Jeffrey Scholes, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Jeffrey Scholes is a Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His research interests center on the relationship between religion and sports and American political theology. He is the author of Vocation and the Politics of Work: Popular Theology in a Consumer Culture (Lexington 2013), Religion and Sports in American Culture (Routledge 2014), Christianity, Race, and Sport (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor with Randall Balmer of Religion and Sport in North America: Critical Essays for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2022). He is currently working on a book on Religion and Sports Fandom.

Onaje Woodbine, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, American University

Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s research explores the varieties of black religious experience, especially as they are lived on the margins of power and outside the bounds of established institutional authority. His most recent book, Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball, garnered national praise as “a profound narrative of survival [and] self-determination … in this season where black male bodies are under attack.” Covered by The New York Times (“street basketball functions as an outlet of mourning and healing of urban youths”), NPR’s All Things Considered (“invites readers to look at basketball differently … as a sacred space where young black boys go to ‘reclaim their humanity’”), ESPN (“full of colorful tales and haunting heartbreaks”), Boston Magazine (“painful, beautiful, nonfiction debut”), and the National Catholic Reporter (“A powerful and deeply moving work … reveals a world of redemption and hope rarely glimpsed from the outside”), Black Gods was longlisted for the 2017 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and named one of The Boston Globe’s best books of 2016.

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Religion & Machines

November 17, 2022

This episode addresses the idea of the human as it is intertwined with issues of anthropogenic exploitation of and extraction from the planet and complicated by relationships with machines. The voices in this episode explore developments in technology and in the American fields of transhumanism and Afrofuturism with the aim of bringing to the fore the ethical, political, and religious implications of the relationality of the human, the machine, and the environment.

 

 

Host

Andrea R. Jain, Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Andrea R. Jain, Ph.D. is professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis and research affiliate at Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford 2014) and Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford, 2020). She received her doctorate degree in religious studies from Rice University in 2010. Her areas of research include religion and capitalism; global spirituality and modern yoga; gender, sexuality, and religion; and theories of religion.

Jain’s current work, including the documentary film Predation, calls for humanities scholars to center questions about the current pandemic and planetary crisis. The purpose of humanities scholarship, Jain argues, should include the following: to remind scientists and health experts that equity must be at the center of their response to pandemic and planetary crisis; to uncover and analyze the needs for repair in the relationships between human societies and environmental bodies and non-human animals; and to diagnose capitalism’s death-dealing structures and the causes of ecological death in the hope that activists, in turn, can build on that scholarship to imagine radically different futures.

Panelists

Jacob Boss, Doctoral Candidate in Religious Studies, Indiana University

Jacob Boss is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University. He is writing his dissertation on religion and grassroots transhumanism. Jacob teaches widely, serving as instructor of record or associate instructor in the Departments of Religious Studies, Informatics, and the Collins Living-Learning Center. He is an editorial assistant for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the co-founder of the Human Augmentation Research Network, hosted by the Center for Religion and the Human at Indiana University. HARN supports graduate students and junior faculty researching transhumanism and human augmentation. Jacob serves on the steering committee for the Human Enhancement and Transhumanism unit of the American Academy of Religion. He is the author of “For the Rest of Time They Heard the Drum” in Theology and Westworld (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)

Joy Bostic, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Case Western Reserve University

Dr. Joy R. Bostic, is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at CWRU and the founding director of the minor in African and African American Studies. Bostic is a Mellon Administrative Fellow and serves as a member of the steering committee for the Mysticism Unit of the American Academy of Religion. She is the author of several book chapters and scholarly articles on race, gender and religion and is the author of African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Bostic’s forthcoming book, Performing Black Gods: Religion, Ritual and Resistance in African American Popular Culture (Routledge, 2021), explores religion, ritual and race in visual culture, music and dance. She is a member of the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR) and is a co-editor of TRRR’s forthcoming volume Black Religious Landscapes (Peter Lang, 2020).

 

Michael P. Hemenway, Director of Design and Data Science, the Association of Theological Schools and Research Associate, h.lab at Case Western Reserve University

Michael P. Hemenway, Ph.D. collaborates with organizations to translate complex business needs into elegant technological solutions. He has nearly 20 years of experience as a solutions architect, instructional designer, and database administrator which has taught him to creatively explore, design, implement, and adapt technologies that fit many different environments. A unique combination of broad experience, exceptional communication skills, and technical capacities allows him to translate complex institutional needs into fitting technological solutions and provide a bridge between organizational culture and emerging technologies.

 

 

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2019 Young Scholars

Faculty Publications

Books

  • Brian Steensland and Xiaoyun Wang. Forthcoming. “Philanthropy as Spiritual Practice: Contemporary Patterns and Prospects,” in Religion and Philanthropy in the United States, edited by David King and Philip Goff. Indiana University Press.
  • King, David P. God’s Internationalists: World Vision and the Age of Evangelical Humanitarianism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

  • Haberski, Raymond, Jr., and Andrew Hartman, eds. American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

  • Haberski, Raymond, Jr. Voice of Empathy: A History of Franciscan Media in the United States. Oceanside, CA: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2018.

  • Goff, Philip, Arthur E. Farnsley, and Peter J. Thuesen, eds. The Bible in American Life. New York, NY: Oxford, 2017.

  • Steensland, Brian, and Philip Goff, eds. The New Evangelical Social Engagement. New York, NY: Oxford, 2014.

  • Farnsley, Arthur E., II. Flea Market Jesus. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012.

  • Davis, Thomas J. John Calvin’s American Legacy. New York, NY: Oxford, 2010.

Public Expressions of Religion in America

The University of Illinois Press has published six volumes written for the Center as part of the Public Expressions of Religion in America project:

Journal Articles

  • Friesen, A. “Generational Change? The Effects of Family, Age and Time on Moral Foundations.” Forthcoming in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics.
  • Lewis, A.R., Blake, W., Mockabee, S.T., Friesen, A. “American Constitutional Faith and the Politics of Hermeneutics.” Forthcoming in Politics & Religion.
  • Friesen, A. (2019). Personality, politics and religion. In Paul A. Djupe and Mark Rozell (Eds.), Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics & Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.824.
  • Steensland, B., Woodberry, R., Park, J.Z., (2018). Structure, placement, and the quest for unidimensional purity in taxonomies of American denominations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 57, 800-806.
  • Steensland, B., Wang, X., Schmidt, L., (2018). Spirituality: What does it mean and to whom? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 57, 450-72.
  • Tucker Edmonds, J.L. (2018). The canonical black body: Alternative African American religions and the disruptive politics of sacrality. Religions, 9(1), 17.
  • Djupe, P.A., Friesen, A. (2018). Moralizing to the choir: The moral foundations of American clergy. Social Science Quarterly, 99(2), 665-682. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12455/full. DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12455.
  • Friesen, A., Smith, K.B., Hibbing, J.R. (2017). Physiological arousal and self-reported valence for erotic images correlate with sexual policy preferences. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 29(3), 449-470. https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article/29/3/449/2669465/Physiological-Arousal-and-SelfReported-Valence-for?guestAccessKey=4940cbd4-0ad9-4fb1-a49f-617ecd798add.
  • Friesen, A., Djupe, P.A. (2017), Conscientious women: The dispositional conditions of institutional treatment on civic involvement. Politics & Gender, 13(1), 57-80. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/9332.
  • Friesen, A., Hibbing, M.V. (2016). The effect of personal economic values on economic policy preferences. Social Science Quarterly, 97(2), 325-337. doi: 10.1111/ssqu.12236. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/9328.
  • Lakens, D., Adolfi, F.G., Albers, C.J., Anvari, F., Apps, M.A.J., Argamon, S.E., Friesen, A., Zwaan, R.A. (2018). Justify your alpha. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 168-171. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0311-x. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0311-x.

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Religion & the Movies

March 16, 2023

In addition to the Beatles being bigger than Jesus Christ, we might argue that movies have been bigger than religion. Movies played in “cathedrals” to popular culture, and the silver screen created icons that defined eras for people all around the world. Furthermore, from the origins of the medium to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the movies have used religious stories, figures, and tropes to attract audiences. But we also know that as much as the idea of religion has grown elastic and contested, movies that depict religion and faith have reflected this complexity. Our panelists expand upon the history of religion in the movies to include other visual mediums and provide a critical comparative perspective on faith and films.

Panelists

Kristian Petersen, Old Dominion University

Kristian Petersen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the editor of Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (2021), New Approaches to Islam in Film (2021), and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture (2023). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims.

Jeanette Reedy Solano, California State University, Fullerton

Jeanette Reedy Solano is a professor, mother, filmmaker, and author of the recently-published book Religion and Film: The Basics (Routledge).  She first discovered the power of using film to understand spirituality sitting in the den of her professor’s study in Hyde Park watching Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev in 1990 and has loved studying religion and film ever since!  She has served as a film critic for The Journal of Religion and Film at Sundance and other Film Festivals.  She is delighted to be reunited with her colleagues from the American Academy of Religion’s Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group to discuss film and religion today.

Rachel Wagner, Ithaca College

Dr. Rachel Wagner is Professor of Religious Studies and Coordinator of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She has published extensively on religion and media on topics including virtual reality, film, apps, role play, media rituals, and guns as a mode of mediation. She has written two single-author books: Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2012), and Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion, Media, Guns (forthcoming, NYU Press, 2024).

 

Host

Raymond Haberski, Jr., Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Raymond Haberski, Jr. is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at IUPUI. He also directs the Institute for American Thought and is part of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. Dr. Haberski is trained in twentieth century U.S. history with a focus on intellectual history. As editor, along with Philip Goff and Rhys Williams, his forthcoming book is titled Civil Religion Today: Religion and the American Nation in the 21st Century (2021).

 

 

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Philip Goff

Philip Goff, Chancellor’s Professor of American Studies, has been the executive director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture since 2000.

Goff’s research specialization is American religious history, with eight books and over 200 articles, reviews and scholarly papers in that area. His recent books include: Civil Religion in America: Religion and the American Nation in the Twenty-First Century (with Rhys Williams and Raymond Haberski), The Bible in American Life (with Arthur Farnsley II and Peter Thuesen), and Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (with Jan Stievermann and Detlef Junker).

Goff has served as a legal consultant for church-state cases, co-authored amicus briefs for cases before the Federal Supreme Court, and been an expert witness in legal cases involving religious groups. Dedicated to public teaching, he has been a scriptwriter, consultant, and interviewee for documentaries related to religion in American life for PBS, BBC, and HBO. Answering questions about religion in North America on national and international news and radio programs, as well as in national newspapers, he is recognized as a leading interpreter of religion’s role in American life. In recent years he was named to Who’s Who Among Teachers, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in the World.

Professor Goff obtained his bachelor’s degree at Nyack College in Religious Studies. He received his MA in Religious Studies from the University of Kansas, where he specialized in method and theory in the study of religion. He completed a PhD in American Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1993. Later that year, he joined the Department of History at California State University, Los Angeles, where he also directed the Social Sciences Major and the Liberal Studies Program at various times. In 2000 he initially joined the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He moved to American Studies upon the creation of doctoral program there, where he teaches, directs the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, and is lead co-editor the journal Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. He is also an adjunct professor in history and religious studies.

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2018 Young Scholars

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