Nicholas Buck, PhD
I am a scholar of religion and ethics currently serving on faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University, where I teach courses on ethics, religion, and politics. My training and research lie at the intersections of religious studies, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Along with broad interests in these disciplines, I also have a background in the Christian tradition, which much of my work engages.
Most of my current writing falls into one of three research trajectories. I am at work on a book-length project that theorizes democracy in terms of political belonging, which engages select modern and contemporary thinkers and draws out their use of religious ideas and institutions in offering a distinct (and, necessarily, perpetually unfinished) agenda for the democratic project. Relatedly, I continue to think and write on the ethics and politics of nonviolence, primarily in conversation with the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. In the vein of moral theory, I am also interested in the significance of perception for the moral life, as well as the forces, ideas, and practices (religious and otherwise) that shape it.
More information about my academic background can be found in my curriculum vitae, and a record of most of my published writing can be found here.