Address:
Department of Religious Studies
PO Box 400126
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4126
Religious ethics, esp. comparative religious ethics; Christian thought, esp. Augustine and the Augustinian tradition; religion and culture; religion and politics; evil and sin.
My research and teaching are broadly in the areas of Christian ethics, Comparative Religious Ethics, and Religion and Society. I have recently written books on religion's role in public life in pluralistic democracies, and the first undergraduate textbook that attempts to compare Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ethics, putting each in conversation with the others on a variety of contested moral issues. Through 2010, I am editing the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and that job puts me in touch with many different issues in religious studies today, ranging from methodological issues (e.g., what do we mean when we call something a "religion"?) through material ones (e.g., how is religion changing in a globalized world? How have religions understood their relations to other traditions across history?) Eventually I want to write a small book for classroom use on Augustine's views on evil, and a larger book that would explore Christian understandings of what a flourishing human life is like, and how such flourishing is related to Christian understandings of salvation.