2026-2027 Welcome Message

August 24, 2026 

With the new academic year upon us, we are excited to catch up with old friends and to extend a warm welcome to those of you just arriving on campus and in our community.

Founded in 2019 with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, IU’s Center for Religion and the Human seeks to reshape academic and public conversations about religion and its relevance to fundamental and emergent questions about the nature of the human and human society. We use the interdisciplinary study of religion to facilitate new approaches to the crises in human life that epitomize our current moment. Our projects include scholarship across the domains of law, the liberal state, literature, the arts, technology, and social and environmental justice.

Located at 1211 E Atwater Avenue, just a block south of Sycamore Hall, the CRH serves as a vibrant intellectual and social hub, bringing people together in formal and informal capacities to advance our mission and enhance religious and humanistic inquiry across campus and beyond—with local, national, and international participants and audiences.

We offer a full slate of programming, including a regular lineup of public events spotlighted below. Be sure check in regularly on our website for the latest news and additions to our calendar. Here’s a sampling of what’s happening at the CRH this Fall:

The Nimbus by Robert P. Baird

The Religion & the Human Lecture Serieswill feature the journalist and novelist Robert P. Baird. Baird’s writing appears in The Guardian, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other venues. His 2025 novel The Nimbus—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and New Yorker—tells the story of “a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion, and parenthood.” Holding a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School, Baird will discuss with students the shape of his career outside of academia. His lecture, “ ‘You Were Not Made to Live Like Brutes’ : On the Use and Abuse of Humanism in the Age of AI,” will be on Thursday, October 1, at 6pm.

Reading Group for The Nimbus: To prepare for Robert P. Baird’s visit, the CRH will sponsor a reading group to discuss the novel. More details coming soon!

Postdoctoral Fellow Kori Pacyniak

Finally, Please Welcome CRH Postdoc Kori Pacyniak. A scholar of queer and trans studies in religion, Kori holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, and graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity School and Boston University. Their dissertation, Sacred Bodies, Sacred Lives: Trans Catholic Joy, Resistance, and Liberation, took an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to explore how trans communities navigate institutional religion through ritual practice, theological imagination, and embodied forms of spiritual authority, foregrounding the voices of transgender Catholics and making interventions in ritual theory and ethics. Their scholarship and public commentary on LGBTQ+ inclusion in Catholicism have been featured in national and regional media outlets including The Washington Post, CBS, and The New Yorker. At IU, Kori will oversee the American Religion in 100 Objects project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Welcome Kori!