ISR Staff  |
Post-Doc Fellows  |
Graduate Fellows  |
Scholars  |
Resident & Non-Resident Scholars
A-C | D-F | G-I | J-L | M-P | S-V | W-Z
Scholars (Last Name: A-C)
Denis Alexander
Non-Resident Scholar, Science & Religion
St. Edmonds College, Cambridge
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Biography
Dr. Denis Alexander is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, to which he was elected a Fellow in 1998. Dr. Alexander is also a Senior Affiliated Scientist at The Babraham Institute, Cambridge, where he supervises a research group in cancer and immunology, and where for many years he was Chairman of the Molecular Immunology Programme and Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development. Dr. Alexander was previously at the Imperial Cancer Research Laboratories in London (now Cancer Research UK), and prior to that spent 15 years developing university departments and laboratories overseas, latterly as Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the Medical Faculty of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where he helped to establish the first prenatal diagnosis clinic in the Arab World. Dr. Alexander was initially an Open Scholar at Oxford reading Biochemistry, before obtaining a PhD in Neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.
Dr. Alexander writes, lectures and broadcasts widely in the field of science and religion. Since 1992 he has been Editor of the journal Science & Christian Belief, and currently serves on the National Committee of Christians in Science and as a member of the International Society for Science and Religion.
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Christopher Bader
Resident Scholar, Religion & Criminology
Baylor University
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Curriculum Vitae
Recent Publications
Christopher Bader is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baylor University. His two specialties are the sociology of religion and criminology. He has authored ten articles which have appeared in journals such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, Sociological Perspectives, Growth and Change, Western Criminology Review and Teaching Sociology. Bader has several works in progress or under review, including "A Survival Study of Communes: An examination of how images of God impact behavior and attitudes" (with colleague Paul Froese), and a study of how religion within the family influences deviant behavior. A consultant for the American Religion Data Archive for the last five years, Bader helps the site to add data files to its collection and add new on-line analysis features. He also consulted with the Religious Congregations & Membership Study (2000), helping them prepare a CD for distribution with their publications.
Abjar Bahkou
Resident Scholar, Arabic
Baylor University
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Curriculum Vitae
Abjar Bahkou is an adjunct professor of Arabic literature and language at the University of North Texas, Denton and at Baylor University. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 in Islamic Studies from the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies and his Ph.D. in Education in 1998 from Salesian Pontifical University both in Rome, Italy. He is fluent in Arabic, Syriac (Classical Aramaic), English, Italian, French and Hebrew (Biblical). He is the author of numerous publications on Islamic and Christian studies.
David Bebbington
Non-Resident Scholar, History of Religion
University of Stirling, Scotland
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Curriculum Vitae
Homepage
David Bebbington took his degrees at the University of Cambridge and joined the Department in 1976. He was promoted to a Personal Chair in 1999. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Baylor University, Texas, in the fall semesters of 2003 and 2005. In 2006-07, he was the President of the Ecclesiastical History Society.
His principal research interests are in the history of politics, religion, ideas and society in Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and in the history of the global Evangelical movement. His books include "Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s" (1989), "Victorian Nonconformity (1992), William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain" (1993), "Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England" (2000), "The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics" (2004) and "The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody" (2005). He has edited "The Baptists in Scotland" (1988), "Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America", the "British Isles and Beyond, 1700-1990" (1994), "Gladstone Centenary Essays" (2000), The "Gospel in the World: International Baptist Studies" (2002) and "Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations" (2003). He is at present working on a study of global religious revivals in the Victorian period.
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Francis Beckwith
Resident Scholar, Philosophy & Church-State Studies
Baylor University
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Recent Publications
Homepage
Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University, where he is also Fellow and Faculty Associate in the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion. Although his appointment is in the department of philosophy, he also teaches courses in political science as well as in the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, where he served as its Associate Director from July 2003 until January 2007.
In 2008-09 he is serving on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in Notre Dame's Center for Ethics & Culture.
Prior to arriving at Baylor in July 2003, Professor Beckwith served on the full-time faculty of the politics department at Princeton University as a Visiting Research Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
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Susan Bratton
Non-Resident Scholar, Environmental Studies
Baylor University
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Curriculum Vitae
Recent Publications
As Chair of Environmental Studies, my major goal is to support our students by organizing an interdisciplinary curriculum with student friendly undergraduate and graduate degree programs. I love teaching, and my favorite courses include Conserving Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management. My present research interests are primarily in environmental ethics, and recent projects have investigated the ethics of commercial fishing and the environmental ethics of Christian art. I am also supervising research involving habitat assessment in local forests and along the shores of Lake Waco. I remain committed to a peaceful and intellectually stimulating synthesis of Christian values and thought with environmental education, and believe the Department of Environmental Studies can set a good example to the rest of the campus in its pursuit of interdisciplinarity in the sciences and social sciences.
Arthur Brooks
Non-Resident Scholar, Culture, Politics, and American Life
President, AEI
Homepage
Arthur C. Brooks became the president of American Enterprise Institute in January 2009. He is the former Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Whitman School of Management. Brooks earned his PhD in Public Policy Analysis from the Rand Graduate School in 1998, and also holds an MA and BA in economics.
Mr. Brooks has published approximately 100 articles and books on the connections between culture, politics, and economic life in America. He speaks frequently in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, is a contributing editor to Reader's Digest, and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and other publications. His new book, on happiness in America, is Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It (Basic Books). In 2006 he published Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books), on American charitable giving, which the Wall Street Journal called a "lucidly written, carefully distilled and persuasively cogent work, a tidy time-bomb of a book," and on which Brooks briefed President George W. Bush and the First Lady in February 2007. In 2008 he also published the textbook Social Entrepreneurship(Prentice-Hall). Currently, he is working on a book called The Virtue of Vice: Why Bad Things Are Good for Us, set for release at the end of 2009.
Preceding his work in academia, Mr. Brooks spent 12 years as a professional French hornist, holding positions with the City Orchestra of Barcelona and other ensembles. He is a native of Seattle, Washington, and currently lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife Ester and their three children.
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R. Andrew Chesnut
Non-Resident Scholar, History of Religion-Latin America
Virginia Commonwealth University
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Curriculum Vitae
Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut is the Bishop Walter Sullivan Endowed Chair of Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a leading international authority on Christianity in Latin America, especially in Brazil and Mexico. He is the author of two books and many scholarly articles. His first book “Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty” (Rutgers University Press, 1997), examines the meteoric growth of Pentecostalism among the popular classes of Brazil.
The book focuses on a single religion, whereas his second book, “Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy” (Oxford 2003), considers the three religious groups that have prospered the most in the
region’s new pluralist
landscape; Charismatic Catholicism, Protestant Pentecostalism and African diasporan faiths. “Competitive Spirits” was recently published in paperback. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, is the subject of his current book project. Before joining Virginia Commonwealth University, he taught at the University of Houston for 11 years.
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William R. Clark
Non-Resident Scholar, World Politics - International Relations
The University of Michigan
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Homepage
William Clark's research explores how political and social institutions can simultaneously be the product of human choice and an important determinant of human behavior. Much of his work has focused on the political control of the macroeconomy in an open economy setting. Specifically, he has examined a) the effect of central bank independence, capital mobility, and fixed exchange rates on monetary and fiscal policy choices made by survival-maximizing incumbents; b) the effect of elections and partisanship on macroeconomic outcomes; and c) the choice of monetary institutions in a world of mobile capital. He has also done some work on the politics of international trade.