Standing Seminar: Religion & Human Personhood, Culture, and Society

Christian Smith is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests focus on religion in modernity, adolescents, American evangelicalism, and culture. He is the author or co-author of numerous books on the interplay between religion, cultural influences, and society, including Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford, 2009), Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money (Oxford, 2008), and Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford, 2003). Currently he is working on several primary research projects on topics such as generosity in human life and society, personhood and human nature in the social sciences, and “multiple modernities” in moral and religious life around the world. Before coming to the University of Notre Dame, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Phil Zuckerman is Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. His research interests focus on secularity, atheism, apostasy, and Scandinavian culture from a sociological perspective. He is the author of Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (Oxford, 2011), Atheism and Secularity (Praeger, 2010), Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (NYU, 2008), as well as of several op-ed pieces that have appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post. His research has also been published in a number of journals. Zuckerman received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.