My Current and Upcoming Work

In addition to my teaching responsibilities at University of St. Thomas, I am working on a book manuscript with William McMillan that highlights religious deliberation and skill using the case of the Redeemer family of churches and ministries in New York City. I also have a couple working papers on other aspects of Christianity in hyper-modern contexts, and I’m currently developing new projects that examine Catholicism in the U.S. using the tools of social science.

My Intellectual Approach

It is important to me as a sociologist to be a generalist and intellectual, not merely a social science technician. In that vein, all of my scholarly work is motivated by bigger questions in the areas of philosophical anthropology and moral philosophy — like what is a person and what does it mean to flourish as a person and as a society.

I maintain broad interests in culture, cognitive sociology, movements, cities and urban life, research methods, sociological theory, American religion, civil society, action theory, and the history and philosophy of (social) science.

I am gladly unusual within the discipline of sociology, at least as the discipline stands today. I see many of the cherished orthodoxies of the field as fundamentally mistaken, including radical social constructionism, existentialism, progressivism, identity politics, and more. Instead, I am deeply formed by Christian social and political thought, which offers a profoundly different vision.

I take a broad-sweeping view of Western intellectual and cultural history (“from Aristotle to Zerubavel,” one might say). I enjoy reading both the cutting edge of contemporary sociology and primary and secondary works in classical traditions in philosophy. Both John Levi Martin and St. Thomas Aquinas. My interests include virtue ethics and the natural law tradition, and I am interested in ways those might intersect with the social sciences.

My Recent Background

In the Spring of 2008, I finished my B.A. in sociology with a minor in philosophy at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. That Fall, I moved to South Bend, Indiana, to begin graduate school at University of Notre Dame. I earned my M.A. in sociology from Notre Dame in Fall of 2010. I spent the next year and a half reading, and I passed my comprehensive exams in sociology of religion and sociological theory.

In the Fall of 2012 — the beginning of my fifth year in graduate school — I started my dissertation on the New Calvinist movement, or Reformed resurgence. This project took me to Seattle, Manhattan, and Minneapolis. In the Fall of 2013, I got married and relocated back to Ann Arbor, where I continued to write my dissertation and participated as a visiting graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. I completed my Ph.D. in sociology from Notre Dame in the Spring of 2016.

My primary institutional home in the sociology department at Notre Dame was its Center for the Study of Religion and Society, where Christian Smith was the director. I have presented my research and writing most years (although less so recently) at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and those of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Prior to my current role at University of St. Thomas, I was a visiting assistant professor at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan (for one year), and a research associate at UT-Austin, where I worked with Mark Regnerus (for three years). Before that, I was the director of social research for Docent Research Group — a Christian firm that provides custom research for megachurches and other Christian organizations. Also, from fall 2019 to fall 2021, I was a generations in dialogue fellow at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, where we explored the intersections of sociology with the Christian moral and intellectual tradition.