I am a scholar of religion, ethics, and politics at the University of Chicago, where I teach in the Divinity School and in the College. My interest in philosophy and the history of western thought and literature began in earnest during my senior year of high school, expanded while I was an undergraduate major of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, and assumed new directions as a Master’s and doctoral student at Catholic University and the University of Chicago, respectively. I completed my doctorate as a new faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, whose multidisciplinary vision of the field resonated with my formative experiences at UVa and catalyzed a number of research projects and teaching opportunities in religion, ethics, and public life. At IU I served as Director of Graduate Studies and was departmental Chair in addition to sitting on a number of departmental, college-level, and campus committees. I also held adjunct appointments in Philosophy and American Studies. From 2003-2013, I was Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, during which time I was also a co-editor of the Medical Ethics series at Indiana University Press.

At the University of Chicago, I am one of four faculty members of the Religious Ethics Area of the Divinity School. My course offerings contribute to two of the school’s Committees: Constructive Studies, and Social and Cultural Sciences of Religion. I also teach a course on the ethics of war in the Fundamentals Program in the College, and have held several independent reading courses for graduate and undergraduate students. Details about my course offerings are available on the Courses and Syllabi menu on this website.

My books include Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996); Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003), Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (Columbia University Press, 2010), Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Why Study Religion? (Oxford University Press, 2021). A separate Books page on my site describes each of these works. In addition, I edited War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992). My essays have appeared in the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Ethics and International Affairs, the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Harvard Theological Review, and Theological Studies. I serve on a number of editorial boards of journals in the study of religion and ethics, and am an Associate Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics.

A full list of my publications, grants, awards, and scholarly activities can be found on my CV.