Richard B. Miller                                       
Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions
Professor of Religious Studies
Indiana University
Bloomington
PH: 812.855.0261
Fax: 812.855.3315
 

Course Offerings

Projects

 Vita

Books

Research Materials

Poynter Center

Religious Studies

Ethics Bowl

I work in religious and philosophical ethics, religious thought, social and cultural criticism, and political philosophy.  My Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991) examines aspects of cultural pluralism as they are played out in debates between pacifists and just-war theorists. My second book, Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996), draws on theories of interpretation, practical reasoning, and social criticism to consider the morality of the Gulf War, liberalism and its discontents, Roman Catholic sexual ethics, medical ethics, gender ideology, and theories about the academic study of religion.  In the 1990s my research expanded in bioethics, one fruit of which is Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003).  That book builds on a fellowship year at Harvard and six months as a participant-observer in a pediatric intensive care unit.

In addition, I have published essays in Journal of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the Annual for the Society of Christian Ethics.  Those articles address religion and American public intellectuals, identity politics and multicultural justice, the ethics of Aquinas, and the morality of humanitarian intervention. 

I now direct the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and, with Eric Meslin of the IU Center for Bioethics, I co-edit a new IU Press series, Bioethics and the Humanities. Among the initiatives at the Poynter Center is an annual Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship and Seminar, the details of which can be accessed at the Poynter Center website.  My work-in-progress includes a book entitled, 9/11, War, and Moral Memory.

Graduate offerings include Virtue and Freedom; From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism (2 semesters); Religion, Justice, and Culture; Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics; Religion and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud; War and Peace in Western Religion, and occasional reading courses. I also mentor graduate students as Associate Instructors in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, a large introductory undergraduate course. Those interested in specific course details may consult course descriptions.  All graduate work in religious thought and ethics at Indiana University is keenly interdisciplinary and includes a monthly workshop of faculty and graduate students who meet to discuss work-in-progress.

In the spring 2007, I am teaching “Religion and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud,” the syllabus for which can be accessed here.