Philip Jenkins

Distinguished Senior Fellow
Co-Director, Program on Historical Studies of Religion

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Dr. Philip Jenkins, one of the world's leading religion scholars, has agreed to be a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.  He is currently the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where he has taught since 1980.  An historian by training, Jenkins' work has been lauded in many different disciplines including sociology, criminology, and religious studies. 

Dr Jenkins' major current interests include the study of global Christianity; of new and emerging religious movements; and of twentieth century US history, chiefly post-1970. He has published twenty-two books, which have been translated into ten languages. Some recent titles include Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (2000), The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity (2002), Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America (2006),  The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2006), God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis (2007), and The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia - and How It Died,(2008).

Jenkins holds a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University, where he spent an additional three years working with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, the pioneer of Criminology at Cambridge. In fact, Jenkins has an enduring interest in issues of crime and deviance, and the construction of social problems.  He is considered an international expert on the subject of terrorism.

According to Rodney Stark, Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor, the connection of Jenkins to Baylor is an obvious one -- “Jenkins is a world-class scholar who really appreciates Baylor University's 2012 vision and it makes a great deal of sense for us to be identified with each other.”  Martin Medhurst, Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, agrees with those observations, “Philip Jenkins is truly a rare academic in that his work not only appeals to such a wide range of scholars, but is equally appreciated among popular audiences.”  The Economist magazine has called him “one of America's best scholars of religion”

In his most recent book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died (2008), Jenkins reveals a vast Christian world to the east of the Roman Empire and how the earliest, most influential churches of the East - those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church - died. In this paradigm-shifting book, Jenkins recovers a lost history, showing how the center of Christianity for centuries used to be the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, extending as far as China.

Jenkins will be collaborating with ISR on a number of different research initiatives and will be partnering with ISR scholars on future studies of religion around the globe as well as ongoing historical studies of religion.