The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is a research and public outreach institute devoted to the promotion of the understanding of the relation between religion and other features of American culture. Established in 1989, the Center is based in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Now with forty research fellows, the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is considered the premier research institute in the nation working in American religious studies.

IUPUI Campus Center

Center Programs, Activities, and Publications

Center activities include national conferences and symposia, books, essays, bibliographies and research projects, fellowships for young scholars, data-based communication about developments in the field of American religion, a newsletter devoted to the promotion of Center activities, and the semiannual scholarly periodical Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, which is among the highest-ranked academic journals in the nation.

Since its founding, the Center has influenced the field of American religious studies in multiple ways. On an academic level, it led the way in understanding religious pluralism with national conferences that “de-centered” religion. By placing Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and non-mainstream beliefs, behaviors, and rituals together in fashioning an analysis of American religion, the Center helped to increase scholarly and public understandings of the diversity of the American religious experience and established entirely new views from which to study religion in America.

As a public teaching venue, the Center for the Study of Religion and American culture has been unmatched by any other for nearly two decades. Journalists around the globe consistently turn to its officers for their insights about events in the United States. Print, radio, and television journalists interview the Center’s officers and research fellows hundreds of times annually. With seminars for young college, university, and seminary professors, the Center promotes better research and teaching about American religion by faculty. These sessions result in increased awareness and understanding of the diversity of American religious life and the manifold forms in which religion reveals itself in culture (and culture in religion) for thousands of students across the country.

Center Receives Award to Study the Bible in American Life

How do Americans use the Bible in their personal lives, and how do other influences, including religious communities and the internet, shape individuals’ comprehension of scripture? What is the Bible’s role outside of worship, in the lived religion of Americans, both now and in the past?

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is pleased to announce that it has received an award from Lilly Endowment to study these and other questions about the role of Biblical scripture in American life.

The project will be divided into two main stages, the first of which will have both quantitative and qualitative components that will serve the second stage, a national conference to be held on the topic in 2014. The project will culminate with the publication of at least two books, one by the project’s principal investigators, and the second an edited volume of expanded papers presented at the conference.

This year, 2011, marks the 400th Anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The Center is very excited to undertake this study of its influence, significance, and importance in American life and culture.

2011 Conference Proceedings Available for Download

Panelist Kathleen Flake of Vanderbilt University answers a question during the discussion following her presentation at the 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture.

The Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture was held in Indianapolis in June 2011 at the JW Marriott Hotel in Indianapolis. Consisting of a series of roundtable discussions through presentations by top scholars from a variety of perspectives, the 2011 conference continued the conversation that began with the 2009 conference. Nationally known scholars from different backgrounds participated in each session. The panelists sat, quite literally, at a round table in the center of the room, surrounded by over one hundred scholars on risers so everyone could not only learn from the conversation, but also participate in it.

These Proceedings include all of the papers that were read at the conference. What is missing, however, are the lively and spirited conversations that marked each session. Indeed, the discussions continued over coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners. New friends were made and fresh ideas were discovered. While there is room for growth and improvement, the conference is gaining strength as more disciplines and backgrounds are brought to the table. We look forward to that in 2013.

As you will see in these Proceedings, the overarching theme of our second biennial conference was “change.”  We were interested in the changing understandings of both religion and culture, as well as the effects these changes have on the ways of thinking about religion’s role in American culture.

Download 2011 Proceedings
Download 2009 Proceedings

Annoucing the Young Scholars in American Religion 2010-2012

Congratulations to the following individuals who have been selected to participate in the 2010-12 YSAR Program:

Linford D. Fisher, Department of History, Brown University; John H. Hayes, Department of History, Wake Forest University; Matthew S. Hedstrom, American Studies and Religious Studies, University of Virginia; Anna M. Lawrence, Department of History, Florida Atlantic University; Quincy D. Newell, Religious Studies, University of Wyoming; Kevin L. O'Neill, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto; Joshua Paddison, ACLS Postdoc; Michael Pasquier, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Louisiana State University; Elaine A. Pena, American Studies Department, George Washington University; Adrian C. Weimer, Department of History, University of Mississippi; Jeff Wilson, Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of Waterloo; and Lauren F. Winner, Christian Spirituality, Duke Divinity School.

These twelve scholars, with seminar leaders Ann B. Braude and Mark Valeri, will meet in Indianapolis on five occasions: October 14-17, 2010; April 28-May 1 and October 13-16, 2011; and April 26-29 and October 11-14, 2012. Braude is Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and Senior Lecturer in American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. Valeri is the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education.

Signature Center News

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, along with the Binational/Cross-Cultural Health Enhancement Center, the Center for Earth and Environmental Science, PREGMED: Pharmacogenetics and Therapeutics Research, and the Service Learning Research Collaborative, was recently awarded another three years of funding under IUPUI's Signature Center Initiative. The extended funding follows a review of the Center's first three years holding the Signature Center designation.

An IUPUI Signature Center is a research unit disintinctly identifiable with the campus. In addition to representing an area of research strength, the center builds on ongoing activities and has attributes which include being interdisciplinary in character, having the capacity to attract significant external funding, and bringing academic distinction to the campus.