Meet our current steering committee
After initial establishment of the Society, the steering committee will rotate, with at least one position replaced by a new committee member each year. Members of the Steering Committee will be drawn from a diversity of disciplines and methodological approaches.
Tom Carlson
UC Santa Barbara
Areas of research and teaching include religion and modern philosophy (especially German idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction); the history of Christian thought and culture (with special interest in the traditions of mystical and negative theology, as well as relations between theology and the emergence of modern science and politics); and religion, modernity, and post-modernity (with special interest in secularization, religion and politics, and the religious dimensions of technological culture). Main publications: The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (2008); Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999).
Ryan Coyne
The University of Chicago
Ryan Coyne studies the relationship between modern European philosophy and the history of Christian theology. His research thus far has focused on the history of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. His first book, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time and Beyond University of Chicago Press, 2015) examines the shifting roles assigned to religion, and to Augustine of Hippo more specifically, in Martin Heidegger’s early, middle, and later works. Coyne is currently completing a second book tentatively entitled A Spectacle for the Gods: Nietzsche and the Question of Faith. In it, he analyzes Friedrich Nietzsche’s struggle to redefine faith after the death of God, arguing that this struggle sheds new light on recent debates in continental philosophy of religion.
Niki Kasumi Clements
Rice University
Niki Kasumi Clements is a specialist in the work of Michel Foucault, modern philosophy, and late ancient Christian asceticism (which come together in her 2020 monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self, University of Notre Dame Press). On the basis of her research in the Foucault archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 2019 (the sixth collection of which she inventoried for the BnF in 2024), Clements is completing two books that focus on Foucault’s last decade (1974-1984): Chez Foucault: Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality and Foucault the Confessor – focused on Foucault’s unpublished archives to chart his shifting conceptual apparatus of power-knowledge-ethics, notably through his engagement with the history of Christianity and ancient ethics.
Neal DeRoo
Institute for Christian Studies
Neal DeRoo is Senior Member and Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada. He is the author or co-editor of more than 10 books at the intersection of phenomenology and religion, most recently Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion and The Political Logic of Experience.
Christina M. Gschwandtner
Fordham University
Christina M. Gschwandtner is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She is author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (Indiana, 2007), Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments about God in Contemporary Philosophy (Fordham, 2012), Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Indiana, 2014), Marion and Theology (T&T Clark, 2016), Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (Fordham, 2019), Reading Religious Ritual with Ricœur: Between Fragility and Hope (Lexington Press, 2021), Ways of Living Religion: Philosophical Investigations into Religious Experience (Cambridge U Press, 2024), besides many articles and translations at the intersection of phenomenology and religion.
Tamsin Jones
Trinity College
Tamsin Jones is the Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Trinity College, CT, where she teaches courses in the history of Christian thought, gender and religion, and the philosophy of religion. She is the author of A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Indiana University Press, 2011) as well as articles in Modern Theology, Journal of Continental Philosophy of Religion, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Theology and Sexuality, and Political Theology. She is currently finishing up a book entitled Desiring Responsibility: Phenomenology and the Study of Religion.