Religious Freedom Project
Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs has received a $2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to support the interdisciplinary study of religious...
RELATED THEME
Religion as Intrinsic to Human Experience
Recent decades have seen an explosion of academic interest in the anthropological, philosophical, psychological, and biological basis of religious experience as a human universal. Scholars across...more >>
AT THE CENTER
PROJECT LEADERS
Thomas Farr
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate...
Timothy Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and...
ASSOCIATE SCHOLARS
José Casanova
José Casanova is one of the world's top scholars in the sociology of religion. He is a professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown...
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she also has...
William Inboden
William Inboden is Assistant Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center for International...
David Novak
David Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the...
Daniel Philpott
Daniel Philpott is exploring Catholic and Protestant contributions to democracy from the years 1800-2000 for the Christianity and Freedom Project....
Mona Siddiqui
Mona Siddiqui, OBE is Professor of Islamic and Inter-religious Studies and Assistant Principal for Religion and Society at the University of...
Monica Duffy Toft
Monica Duffy Toft is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Initiative on Religion in...
Roger Trigg
Roger Trigg, of St Cross College, Oxford, is Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford, and a member of both the...
PROJECT STAFF
A.J. Nolte
A.J. Nolte joined the RFP at the beginning of October 2012, after two years as a research assistant at the Center for Complex Operations, National...
Kyle Vander Meulen
Kyle Vander Meulen joined the Berkley Center in January 2011. Before coming to the Center, he completed his master's studies in Divinity at the...
May 3, 2011
The Cognitive Science of Religion
Is religious experience intrinsically related to human cognition? In recent decades this question has prompted significant academic interest from a wide range of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, biology, philosophy, and psychology. The result of this research is an emerging consensus among scientists that the mind has a natural bias towards religious ideas. The human inclination towards religion, if true, would have consequences for the treatment of religion in public affairs. Cognitive psychologist Justin Barrett has been a leading figure in the exploration of this question and spoke to Religious Freedom Project on May 4, 2011. Richard Sosis, a prominent scholar in the field of evolutionary anthropology offered a formal response. Following their interventions, a general discussion ensued between invited scholars representing a diverse set of academic fields.
Participants
Justin Barrett
Justin L. Barrett is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Barrett is a founding editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and is author of...
Thomas Farr
Full List of Publications
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Del Ratzsch
Del Ratzsch is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College. He specializes in the philosophy of science and has written extensively on issues surrounding design arguments. His other research interests include...
Georges Rey
Georges Rey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Rey has been a visiting professor at Stanford and MIT, and has been a visiting researcher there, at the University of Split (as a Fulbright fellow), and at the...
Rebekah Richert
Rebekah Richert is Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on pretense, imagination, and religion in childhood and adolescence. She has published various articles on these...
Jeffrey Schloss
Jeffrey Schloss holds the T.B. Walker Chair of Natural and Behavioral Sciences at Westmont College, where he is also the Director of the Center for Faith, Ethics & Life Sciences. His research interests include evolutionary accounts of human...
Timothy Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government Department, Georgetown University. He is a political...
Richard Sosis
Richard Sosis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion, with...
Roger Trigg
Roger Trigg, of St Cross College, Oxford, is Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford, and a member of both the University's Faculties of Philosophy and of Theology and Religion. From 2007 to 2011, he served as...