About
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. For the 2021-2022 academic year, I am working for Reading Religion, the book review website of the American Academy of Religion. For the prior academic year, I was a teaching fellow in American Studies at TU Dortmund in Germany. I work at the intersection of religion, philosophy, and politics, especially in the American and European contexts. I am particularly interested in how our most basic philosophical and theological commitments influence the way we approach political and ethical problems. Beliefs about the scope of divine sovereignty and the nature of human agency, for example, cannot help but shape our normative aspirations. My dissertation focuses more narrowly on the concept of contingency, and explores the moral and political implications of the claim that the world is subject to contingent events, or events that fall outside of God’s causal purview. On this view, much occurs contrary to God’s will and intentions, a claim that stands in contrast to the theological determinism/compatibilism embraced by many in the Christian tradition (and the Jewish and Islamic traditions too). For my part, I argue that there are in fact genuinely contingent events, and that a "fallen" world is best thought of as a world beset by contingency. In such a world, moral purity and political harmony are ideals we can strive for, but never fully reach. My central interlocuters are Johnathan Edwards, Kathryn Tanner, St. Anselm, Michael Walzer, and John Rawls.
In addition to my research, I manage the website for the Religion and Its Publics Project. I help edit their blog The Square, and I manage the project's Twitter and Facebook profiles as well. I have also produced a few audio documentaries for the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab at UVA, and am currently the co-project manager of a grant the Lab received from the the Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs. Before starting my PhD at UVa, I did an MA in Theology and Religion at Durham University. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and English literature at the University of Colorado.
To read essentially the same information in different places, you can visit my profile page for the Department of Religious Studies and for Academia.edu. I read an alarming amount of long-form journalism, which I like to share on Twitter.
To read essentially the same information in different places, you can visit my profile page for the Department of Religious Studies and for Academia.edu. I read an alarming amount of long-form journalism, which I like to share on Twitter.