My research asks how religion is formed, interpreted, sustained, and reorganized in American life. The projects below share an interest in what religious actors do with institutions, texts, places, and inherited categories.
01 / Rural American religion
Congregations, clergy, and institutional scarcity
Interview-based work in rural Oklahoma examines the difference between present religious vitality and longer-term organizational viability. The project considers pastoral labor, succession, finance, geographic isolation, collaboration, and the forms of relational authority that become especially visible in small congregations.
02 / Sermons & discourse
Preaching through uncertainty
A comparative sermon project treats preaching as a culturally embedded interpretive practice. It examines how rural Protestant pastors use theological vocabularies of providence, identity, community, hardship, and belonging to interpret social, economic, and environmental uncertainty.
03 / Digital religion & early Christianity
Searchability, reception, and authority
Work on noncanonical early Christian texts examines what happens when writings once framed through loss, secrecy, exclusion, or suppression become routinely searchable. The project focuses on retrieval, textual reduction, digital reception, and the inherited public category of “Gnosticism.”
04 / Religion & public life
Scientific trust and vaccination
Quantitative work examines religious affiliation, religiosity, trust in scientists, science-policy skepticism, political orientation, and COVID-19 vaccination using a 2022 U.S. adult survey.
05 / Congregational documents
Christian Zionism in rural evangelical life
An ongoing computational and qualitative project is building a corpus of publicly available rural church bulletins and congregational documents to study how Israel, prophecy, prayer, scripture, and political commitments appear in ordinary congregational materials.
06 / Theory & method
Constructing the religious object
A broader theoretical project compares what major theories of religion make visible when applied to the same empirical setting. The central question is methodological: what changes when the framework used to define “religion” changes?