Why This Text Matters | Augustine's Confessions | Richard Miller

Richard B. Miller is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Chicago. He examines the relationship between religion, politics, and ethics in a comparative, critical, and constructive way. His research interests include religion and public life, political and social ethics, theory and method in religious thought and ethics, and practical ethics. He also examines the social contexts and assumptions that organize the study of religion and religious ethics, meta-critically. Given the breadth of possibilities made available by the study of religion, ethics, and politics, Miller’s work does not focus on a single problem, theme, text, author, period, or topic. He is rather drawn to different issues and overlapping domains of inquiry that enlist a range of theoretical vocabularies. Specific topics include the ethics of war and peace, practical reasoning in ethics, bioethics, theories of justice, comparison in religious ethics, ethics and cultural studies, human rights, and moral luck.
Miller’s books include the award winning Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996); Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003), Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (Columbia University Press, 2010), Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Why Study Religion? (Oxford University Press, 2021). In addition, he edited War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992). Miller’s influential essays have appeared in the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Ethics and International Affairs, the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Harvard Theological Review, Theological Studies, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and the Journal of Jewish Ethics (forthcoming). He has served on several editorial boards of journals in the study of religion and ethics and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics.
Miller is currently finishing a new book on moral luck, tentatively titled, A Simple Twist of Fate: Religion, Moral Luck, and Social Criticism. This project brings together Miller’s longstanding interest in (and teaching about) Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Taking up matters of love, justice, fortune, and the moral emotions, A Simple Twist of Fate queries the tension between the experience of moral luck and the desire for solace.
In honor of his retirement, Professor Miller was recently presented with a Festschrift of essays by
colleagues and previous students. Co-edited by two of his former advisees, Bharat Ranganathan and Caroline Anglim, that collection is entitled, Religion and Social Criticism: Tradition, Method, and Values (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024).