The Religion and Politics in American Public Life lecture series, co-coordinated for 2014-15 by Professors Courtney Bender, Jean Cohen, Josef Sorett, and John Torpey, is a series of public conversations that explore the often contentious role of religion in American political and public life. Each session features a speaker presenting on a timely, topical intersection of religion with American politics and society, such as civil religion, public discourses of morality, and reproductive and sexual rights.
The series is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life; the PhD Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY; the Department of Political Science at Columbia University; and the Department of Religion at Columbia University.
For a list of previous speakers and topics, see ircpl.org/americanpubliclife. All talks in this series are free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Email info@ircpl.org with any questions.
The audio recording of this event is now available here.
Darren Dochuk is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Associate Professor in the Humanities in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, winner of The Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize, the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning book prize for outstanding
historical writing on any subject in U.S. history, and the Organization of American Historians’ Ellis W. Hawley prize for best book in post-Civil War U.S. political history. He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region, and is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Anointed With Oil: God and Black Gold in Modern America. He is also involved in a number of collaborative initiatives, including a symposium and collection of essays that examine religion during Barack Obama’s presidency and a project sponsored by the Danforth Center, “Beyond the Culture Wars: Recasting Religion and Politics in the Twentieth Century,” which will include a conference and edited volume.