Jonathon S. Kahn

Jonathon S. Kahn (AB Princeton University; PhD, Columbia University 2003) is Professor of Religion. His teaching and writing interests are at the intersection of race, religious ethics, and politics. His current work explores the formation of modern versions of secularism. Kahn is the author of Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2009) and the editor of (with Vincent Lloyd) Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016). His recent essays on secularity include, “When the Westboro Baptist Church Came to Vassar College” in Soundings; “The Virtue of Democratic Faith: A Recovery for Difficult Times” and “Pragmatism, Messianism, and Political Theology after Ted Smith’s Weird John Brown” in Political Theology; “Secularism and Religion in American Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education; and “Reading Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience: Pragmatism, Naturalism, and the Limits of Democratic Discourse”, in Pragmatism and Naturalism. He’s actively working on a book, Secularism in America (Routledge) and after that will turn to a long planned project, Black Democratic Faith: A Reconstruction.