Winner of the 2022 Iris Book Award

“Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse” by Mary-Jane Rubenstein

The Center for Religion and the Human at IU Bloomington announces Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Colombia University Press, 2014) as winner of the third annual Iris Book Award. Rubenstein is Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University, where she is also affiliated with the Philosophy Department and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

Hosting Paikea: On Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship

by Aaron Glass

"...I wanted to feature Paikea’s story to educate audiences on how Indigenous conceptions of 'active matter' are challenging standard Western ontologies and museum values, and how some museums are productively engaging with communities to adapt and adjust their protocols."

Teaching Queer Christian Theology [Where It Can’t Be Taught]

by Samuel Ernest

"Christian institutions that refuse to hire LGBTQ faculty are precisely the places where queer theology and queer theological pedagogy belongs. Not just because the student body needs it, but due to the constitutive irony of queerness..."

Cultivating Curiosity, or, Why Study Scripture At All?

by M. Adryael Tong

"Different people and different publics will have different reactions, thoughts, and answers to the question. But for me, it is precisely this practice of asking, thinking, and answering that is important."

The Abyss or Life Is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

OCTOBER 2022

"An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time," featuring work by Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, M. Cooper Harriss, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Erik Thorstensen.

Animating Religious Literacy: Japanese Pop Culture and Teaching through Video

by Kaitlyn Ugoretz

What do you know about Japanese religions? And how have you come to know what you know?

TRiP on hiatus in the Fall, returning in the Spring

Furey Awarded Eastman House Residency

Constance Furey will spend October in residency at the Max Eastman house on Martha’s Vineyard, working with her collaborator, Rebecca Schorsch, on Unlearning Religion, a co-authored book about teaching.

El mensaje de mi gente: The Need for Developing an Afro-Latinx Theology

by Guesnerth Josué Perea

"As a Colombian, Black, Latino, ecumenical Christian, I am faced with the complex reality that the expression of the faith I profess, was born in, and grew up with, has often been the very tool used to pilfer the imago dei from me and others of African Descent."

CRH receives second major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation

Unstately Black Religion: A Three-Year Study

We are pleased to announce that co-directors J. Kameron Carter and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan have been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the initiative “Unstately Black Religion: A Three-Year Study.”

Enjoy our recording of the Iris Book Award Prize Ceremony!

FROM FEBRUARY 9, 2022

The Center for Religion and the Human announces Terence Keel’s Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford University Press, 2018) as winner of the second annual Iris Book Award. 

Noli Me Tangere Project

reflections on the pandemic

Our project takes the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the garden after she discovers his empty tomb — noli me tangere (“touch me not”) — as a provocation for reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, and on other pandemics, viral and social, that engulf us.

Now in paperback

Theologies of American Exceptionalism

A collection of fifteen interlocking essays reflecting on the vagaries of exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. Loosely and generatively curious, these essays bring together a range of historical and contemporary voices, some familiar and some less so, to stimulate new thought about America. Available in paperback, or in a free e-book version.

Church State Corporation

Symposium Essays

The journal Political Theology hosts an online symposium on CRH Co-Director Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's newest book Church State Corporation (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

The sympsium features an introduction by Vincent Lloyd and essays by Yael Almog, Spencer Dew, Joshua Mauldin, and Méadhbh McIvor, followed by Winnifred Sullivan's response.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson in conversation with J. Kameron Carter

From Wednesday, March 24

Please enjoy our recording of this event!

J. Kameron Carter hosted a conversation with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020).