Meet the Faculty

Richard B. Miller

• Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Director, Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions
• Adjunct Instructor, American Studies Program
• Affiliate Faculty, IU Center for Bioethics

Education

• Ph.D. at University of Chicago, 1985

Contact Information

Background

• PI, “Virtuous Empathy,” ($199,617), Grant from University of Chicago, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, 2010
• James P. Holland Award for Exemplary Teaching and Service to Students, IU College of Arts and Sciences, 2007
• PI, IU New Frontiers Grant for “Privacy in Public: Ethics, Privacy, and the Technology of Public Surveillance” 2006-7
• College Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Fall 2004
• Residential Fellow, Program for Ethics and the Professions, Harvard University, 1997-98
• Finkelstein Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, 1997-2001
• Bross Prize for Interpretations of Conflict, 1991
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1990
• Outstanding Young Faculty Award, Indiana University, 1989
• Lilly Summer Research Fellowship, 1988

I work in religious thought and ethics at the intersections of moral theory, political philosophy, cultural and social criticism, and Western religion. My research ranges between theory and practice and situates itself within the wider contours of the academic study of religion. Much of my focus is on social and political ethics and some of it turns on issues of moral psychology.

All of my research and teaching falls under the rubric of “social criticism and the ethics of belief.” I understand that rubric to be multivalent. I examine ethical idioms and arguments that arise from religious traditions, and I put those idioms and arguments to critical scrutiny in one or another comparative way.

In my first book, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991) I examine 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 first 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.  Ideas and arguments around which my research revolved during these three phases, especially the notion of rights and liberal social criticism, fed into my fourth book, Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (Columbia University Press, 2010, forthcoming).  That book draws on liberal political and moral theory to clarify the injustice of 9/11 and develops the implications of that judgment for thinking more broadly about respect for persons and religious toleration, multiculturalism, and the relationship between religion and ethics. I also direct the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at IU and, with Eric Meslin of the IU Center for Bioethics, co-edit a new IU Press series, Bioethics and the Humanities.

My graduate courses include Contemporary Religious Ethics, Religion and Social Criticism, 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 (2005, spring 2006, fall 2008, spring 2009, fall 2009, spring 2010 and fall 2010) Religious Studies 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. For a list of dissertations of our alumni, please visit other links on our webpage. You can also visit my personal web page for more information.

Research Interests

• Theory and Method in Religious Ethics
• History of Christian Ethics
• Political and Social Criticism
• Moral Theory and Practical Reason

Courses Recently Taught

• Contemporary Religious Ethics
• Religion, Ethics, & Public Life
• Religion, Justice, & Culture
• Religion & The Self: Augustine, Kierkegaard, Freud
• War & Peace in Western Religions
• Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics

Publications

Books

Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991)

Editor, War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics (Louisville: John Knox/Westminster, 1992)

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).  

Recent Articles (since 2000)

• “Humanitarian Intervention, Altruism, and the Limits of Casuistry,” Journal of Religious Ethics 28.1 (Spring 2000): 3-35.
• “Legitimation, Justification, and the Politics of Rescue,” in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, ed. William J. Buckley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm Eerdmans, 2000), 384-98.
• “Religion, Ethics, and Clinical Immersion: An Appraisal of Three Pioneers,” in Caring Well: Religion, Narrative, and Health Care Ethics, ed. David H. Smith (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2000), 17-42.
• “Christian Attitudes toward Boundaries: Metaphysical and Geographical,” in Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David Miller and Sohail Hashmi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15-37. Reprinted in Christian Political Ethics, ed. John Coleman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
• “The Virtues and Vices of Civil Society,” in Civil Society and Government, ed., Nancy Rosenblum and Robert Post (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 370-96.
• “Aquinas and the Presumption against Killing and War,” Journal of Religion 82.2 (April 2002): 173-204.Reprinted in Thomas Aquinas (International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought), ed. John Inglis (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006). 
• “Thinking about War and Justice: A Reply to Jean Bethke Elshtain,” at http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/052003/response_miller.shtml
• “Role Responsibility in Pediatrics: Appeasing or Transforming Parental Demands?” in Ethical Dilemmas in Pediatrics: Cases and Commentaries, ed. Lorry R. Frankel, Ammon Goldworth, Mary V. Rorty, and William A. Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21-29.
• “On Making a Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33.3 (September 2005): 409-43.
• “Rules,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 220-236
• “On Medicine, Culture, and Children's Basic Interests: A Reply to Three Critics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 34.1 (March 2006): 177-89.
• “Art, (Human) Nature, and Social Criticism,” Introduction to Human Nature (Bloomington: SoFA Gallery, 2007), 3-6.
• “Justifications of the Iraq War Examined,” Ethics and International Affairs 22 (Spring 2008): 43-67.    
• “On Duties and Debts to Children,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 91.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 167-88.
• “Just War, Civic Virtue, and Democratic Social Criticism: Augustinian Reflections,” Journal of Religion 89.1 (January 2009): 1-30.
• “Killing, Self-Defense, and Bad Luck,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37.1 (March 2009): 131-58.
• “The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37.3 (September 2009): 533-64.