Miriam Attia earned her BA from Stanford in Philosophy and Religious Studies and her MA from GTU in Jewish Studies. Her training covers Christian and Jewish ethics, bioethics, theologies of suffering, conceptions of religious identity, understandings of divine providence, academic writing, ethnographic methods, and inclusive pedagogy. She is researching authority structures in religious institutions, religious gender norms, responses to suffering, just-world beliefs, and how members of traditional religious communities express and receive constructive feedback.

For her dissertation, “Whosoever Resists: Religious Authority, Creative Protest, and Productive Response,” she is conducting ethnographic research with three Chicago congregations, some of whose members are respectfully challenging certain doctrines and policies. Her dissertation examines how religious organizations can maintain stability and identity and provide meaning without delegitimizing challenges from subordinate or marginalized members. Email: mattia@uchicago.edu.

Ranana Dine is a scholar of religious ethics and Jewish studies who works on Jewish and medical ethics with a particular focus on how visual culture impacts the moral life. Her dissertation is entitled “A Jewish Visual Ethics of Death and Dying” and focuses on how a visual approach to the dead body and to memory of loved ones can inform our understandings of obligations to the dead. She argues that first a visual approach to religious ethics broadly, and Jewish ethics in particular, can help us understand better the moral lives of religious practitioners. She then asks what this approach can teach us about the robust moral obligations Jews have to the dead – to their bodies and to their memory. Using theorists including Emmanuel Levinas and Avishai Margalit, and artworks from across the Ashkenazi world, she argues that our obligations to the dead are based in our relationships of care for the living, and that this understanding has implications for bioethics. She holds a BA in religion and art from Williams College, and received her MPhil from the University of Cambridge in theology and medical humanities. 

Johanna Holbrook received her B.A. in Political Science from Colorado College, M.A. in Philosophy from Ryerson University and M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research interests include environmental ethics, Thoreau studies, and the relationship between religion and political life. Her dissertation, “Affective Perception: Thoreau, Nature and Environmental Virtue,” looks to Thoreau as a touchstone for understanding how our mode of perception conditions what we know about and how we act towards the natural world. Drawing on Thoreau’s work, the philosophy of emotion, and environmental ethics, it advances a constructive account of “right perception” that can enable an affective apprehension of the moral value of nature as grounds for our ethical treatment of the more-than-human. It simultaneously appeals to Aristotle’s virtue theory to argue for the necessity of the environmental virtues to support behavioral change, and casts Thoreau as a religious environmental ethicist based on his spiritual views about nature and the divine.  

Zachary Taylor is a scholar of religion, ethics, and theology whose research focuses on the ethics of collective memory and the broader relationship between religion and forms of memory. His dissertation, An Augustinian Ethic of Collective Memory, explores whether and on what basis Christians can justify collective memorial duties in the political sphere. His dissertation defends two, interrelated theses: first, he claims that Augustine supplies moral and theological concepts to justify collective memorial duties indexed to the particular histories of secular political communities. Second, he contends that the scriptural and Eucharistic rituals of Christian liturgy are “rituals of remembrance” that form Christians to be capable of “just remembrance” in political life. His other interests include religious and theological ethics, Roman Catholic moral theology, the philosophy of religion, and the relationship between religion and politics. He earned a B.A. in Classics and Philosophy from Washington and Lee University and an M.Phil. in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion from the University of Cambridge.