About

We are a group of philosophers exploring the philosophy of religion. This includes researching the foundational areas of philosophy that can be applied to questions of religion.

Religion is an important aspect of human culture and meaning-making – for individuals, communities, or entire nations. Predictions used to be loud that religion would die out, as science yields understanding and technology control of our world. Yet if anything, religion’s significance has grown, in familiar and novel ways.

It still plays its traditional role of offering social norms, a connection to the divine, and a framework for understanding self and world. Yet religion is also morphing with social changes, including spiritual movements outside of traditional religious structures, digitalization, a growing awareness of non-traditional (e.g. queer) identities and ways of life, and pressing global concerns such as climate change.

Religion is a force for good but also for harm. On the one hand it can promote fundamentalism, intolerance, terrorism, and war; and religious authority can be perverted to perpetrate sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse. On the other hand, religions have teachings emphasizing compassion, forgiveness, justice, dignity, and the intrinsic value of all created beings; they can provide supportive community in an era of growing loneliness and alienation; they can agitate for social justice; and they can motivate self-transcendence and heroism.

These issues and more form heart of our explorations. We research not from an empirical (e.g., sociological or psychological) perspective, although we often draw on such fields to inform our research. Rather, our mandate is philosophical. We ask questions concerning, for example, what religion and related phenomena are, what forms of insight they might offer or how they might be misused to distort understanding, what thought systems or ideologies underpin them, what ethical values undergird them and whether those values are good, how power structures play out in religious contexts, how to situate ourselves as religious or secular people in pluralist societies, and how to draw on (or perhaps sometimes limit the influence of) religion to improve our world.

We invite you to explore with us.