About my work

My teaching, public lectures, and writings focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? This is tightly bound to the question: What makes humans religious? My answers increasingly come back to basic physical experiences: eating bread, smelling incense, looking at images, listening to music, and touching other bodies. These are all symbolic, meaningful activities that engage religious people. They always have been and, most likely, always will.

Far from ideological arguments that pit theism against atheism, or science against faith, religion happens primarily in the sensual encounters of the human body.  My teaching and writing explore how human sense perceptions affect ways of being religious, and how the operations of religious traditions impact our sensual encounters. These investigations take me through studies in cultural anthropology, art history, cognitive science, film and media studies, alongside my home field, religious studies. My teaching, writing, and public presentations all reflect these various approaches. Further information can be found in the links to the left.