I’m an assistant professor in religious studies, specializing in religion in America. The fact that I think my random thoughts are worth projecting into cyberspace is a testament either to my narcissism or to my unbounded enthusiasm for the study of American religion. I’d prefer you decide it’s “unbounded enthusiasm.” But I’ll readily confess to narcissism, being, as I am, a self-critical, self-obsessed Calvinist subject. It’s a classically American thing to be.
Metacritical bio:
John-Charles Duffy teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Once that basic information is out of the way, he finds that writing a bio blurb gets tricky. Usually he lists several of the journals where his published articles have appeared; but now that he’s finished his doctorate, he worries that listing a bunch of journals just highlights the fact he hasn’t published his first book yet. He’s currently revising his dissertation, which analyzed the cultural politics of recent interfaith dialogues between evangelical Protestants and Mormons in the U.S. The study is ultimately about how American religious conservatives currently theorize and practice pluralism; he’s still working on how to express that in a succinct, sexy way. John-Charles has a husband and a dog who are, of course, a big part of his life; but since he doesn’t regard that information as pertinent to a professional bio, he never mentions it.
