Religious ethics; religion and conflict; Christian thought; religion and politics/public life; just war tradition; religion, ethics and international affairs; justice; sovereignty; war crimes tribunals; death penalty.

John Carlson joined the religious studies faculty in 2005 after completing his Ph.D. in ethics from The University of Chicago Divinity School. There he was also a founding member of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, serving as the project coordinator for the University of Chicago office (2000-2003). He has received graduate fellowships from Pew Charitable Trusts (2001), the Bradley Foundation (2003-04), and the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2004-05). Professor Carlson is coeditor of, and contributor to, two books: The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics and Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. He is also series editor (with Jean Bethke Elshtain) of the Eerdmans Religion, Ethics, and Public Life Series. Since arriving at ASU, he has published (or has forthcoming) articles from several journals including Religion and Human Rights, Journal of Religious Ethics, and Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled Human Nature, Limited Justice, and the Ordering of Relations in Political Ethics, a political-theological examination of how views of human nature and the divine shape our political understandings of justice. He is also co-editing a volume on religion, violence, and America. Professor Carlson serves as co-principal investigator of two research projects funded by the Ford Foundation: Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy and Teaching and Talking about Religion in Public for which he is also project coordinator.

Religion, Violence, and Peace
Religion, Ethics, and International Affairs

“God, War, and the Secular: Varieties of Religious and Ethical Traditions,” Barry Law Review (Fall 2006, pp. 1-20).

“God's Disbelief and Ours: Religious Perils and Possibilities of Human Rights, ” Religion and Human Rights: An International Journal (Nijhoff/Brill, May 2006, pp. 5-15).

Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning, coedited with Erik Owens and Eric Elshtain (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics, coedited with Erik Owens (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003).