Nicholas Buck, PhD
I currently serve on the faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. My training and research lie at the intersections of religious studies, moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Along with these broad interests, I also have a background in the Christian tradition, which much of my work engages.
My scholarship approaches the study of religion and its relation to ethics and politics, with specific concern for themes of justice and democracy, from two general directions. First, from outside of any particular religious perspective or tradition, I am interested in the way religion and appeals to it show up in the thought of modern and contemporary writers. Here I am curious about what “religion” does for different thinkers, what it allows them to consider, claim, or get in view, and what might be at stake in their distinctive references to the category. Second, and from within perspectives informed by the resources of religious traditions (mostly the Christian tradition), I am interested in how religious ideas and practices resource visions of ethical and political life. My interests here extend beyond the analytical and critical, and I consider also the contributions such visions might make to contemporary moral and political problems.
I am at work on several different projects that can be mapped onto three broad trajectories. One, which is a book-length project in progress, considers the place and use of religion in the thought of select modern and contemporary thinkers as they imagine political life, which I draw on to offer a theory of democracy in terms of political belonging that presents a distinct (and, necessarily, perpetually unfinished) framing of the democratic project. A second considers the significance of perception and attention for the moral life along with the forces, ideas, and practices (especially but not only religious) that shape them. Finally, a third takes up the ethics and politics of nonviolence, which to this point has been mostly in conversation with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr.
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.