Religious Studies: Linell Cady

Professor of Religious Studies
Director, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
TH.D., Harvard
Arrived at ASU : 1983

Office: ECA 381
Phone: (480) 965-2164
E-mail: Linell.Cady@asu.edu

Research Interests

Religion and American public life; categories of religion and the secular.

Biography

Linell Cady is the Franca G. Oreffice Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. She is professor of modern western religious thought, and her work has primarily focused on the relationship between religion and the public/private boundary, with primary attention to the American context. Topics of particular interest include the construction of the modern category of religion and its interface with understandings of the secular and the public; the contested role of religion in public life; and method and theory in the study of religion and theology. She is currently directing two projects funded by the Ford Foundation. The first “Religion, Secularism, and Democracy: A Crossdisciplinary, International Project” is a comparative study of secularisms and the public role of religion in four democracies: France, India, Turkey, and the United States. The second “Teaching and Talking About Religion in Public” is part of Ford’s “Difficult Dialogues” initiative, and will lead to the development of an undergraduate certificate program in religion and conflict at ASU.

Courses Taught

REL 591           Categories of Religion and Secular
REL494/598     Religion and American Public Life
REL 502            Methods and Issues in the Study of Religion
REL 494            Inquiry into Religion and Conflict
REL 305            Myth, Symbol, and Ritual

Selected Publications

Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence, co-edited with Sheldon Simon (London: Routledge, 2007).

“Secularism, Secularizing, and Secularization: Reflections on Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 27:3 (2005): 871-885.

“Categories, Conflicts, and Conundrums: Reflections on the Religion/Secular Divide,” in War and Border Crossings: Ethics When Cultures Clash, ed. Peter French and Jason Short (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain, co-edited with Delwin Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

Pragmatism and the Category of Religion: Reflections on William James and Stanley Fish, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 22:1 (2001): 47-65

Religion, Theology and American Public Life. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.) Japanese edition, Tamagawa University Press, 1997.