Religion, Ethics, and Public Life

The academic study of religion unfolds in a particular time and place in American life. We live within a crisis in the environment; unfolding dramas in public health and welfare; an explosive emergent science; challenges to moral and ethical norms and an economic marked by instability, chance and inequity. We live amidst brokenness and abundance, pluralist and contending view and a yearning for understanding.  In short, the academy exists within a challenging public world.  We understand that religious studies can be seen as a broad study of the arguments made by religious communities, texts and histories about how to create the social world.   Increasingly, the arguments from religious sources play a role in public life.   Increasingly, the power of religion can be marked by the power of these arguments.   Any advanced research on global public life will entail a serious understanding of religions.

This field of concentration focuses on religious responses to issues in public life, with an emphasis on the environment, bioethics, sexuality, and social policy. Students may choose either of two theoretical approaches, although they are expected to be conversant in both. The first--descriptive and analytical--investigates the responses of religious individuals and communities to political and social movements focused on moral questions; it emphasizes the disciplines of history, sociology, and anthropology. The second approach--critical and constructive--analyzes theological and moral positions on these social phenomena as expressed in many genres; it stresses the disciplines of philosophy and theology. Students may pursue a strict double major in Religion and a second department or may take a more flexible approach, as their interests dictate.   It is our goal to insure that our graduates are skilled in the general discipline of religious studies, and in a specific contested arena of public life, for example, bioethics, health care, law, justice, or political relationships.

Graduate students in REPL at Northwestern may also work across disciplines and schools to craft directed programs. For example, students may work with the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society,  the Buffet Center for Comparative International Studies, The Institute for Policy Studies, the Science and Human Culture program,  or the many centers at Northwestern School of Medicine or Law.  They may study alongside scientists in systems biology, ecology or neuroscience to increase their understanding of these issues in public life that are often the subject of religious reflection. Northwestern’s programs in global health, in public health and public policy, and environmental studies offer academic venues for students interested in the normative aspects  of ethics.  Northwestern is a leading academic center for the study of social ethics, bioethics and comparative religious ethics.   Graduate student participate in campus wide colloquium in topics as diverse as women`s health and the role of complex systems.  In addition, graduate students are invited into our ongoing NIH, NAS and NSF grants in basic and translational research, and have opportunities to train in the pragmatic analysis of national research and its ethical puzzles.  Our commitment to engaged research begins in a determination to train our graduate students in the concrete subject of their study.

Projects in this concentration might either focus on a single religious tradition or take a comparative approach. Our greatest strengths lie in the Islamic, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Buddhist traditions.

Core Faculty

• George Bond (engaged Theravada Buddhism)
• Christine Helmer (early modern to contemporary Protestant theology)
• Robert Orsi (American religious life, especially 20th-century Roman Catholicism)
• Sarah Taylor (American religious life, with an emphasis on “green” religious movements)
• Cristina Traina (Christian ethics, especially sexuality, children, and environment)
• M. Sani Umar (Islamic thought in West Africa)
• Barry Wimpfheimer (Talmud)
• Laurie Zoloth (justice theory, social ethics, Jewish bioethics, clinical and research bioethics)

Support Faculty

• J. Michelle Molina (History of Christianity in early modern Europe and Latin America)
• Brook Ziporyn (Chinese religions, Religion and philosophy)