The 2024 Harrod Lecture with Kathleen Sands

Kathleen Sands is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her teaching, research, and writing are guided by one question: what are we fighting about when we fight about “religion”? By identifying the people, needs, and values at work in these conflicts, she hopes to translate them into productive social ethics.

Sands’ most recent book is America’s Religious Wars: The Embattled Heart of Our Public Life. She also authored Escape From Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology and edited God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life. Her articles have appeared in New Literary History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Culture and Religion, The Native American Law Review, Social Text and Isis: A Journal of the History of Science. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Law and Religion, and The American Quarterly. Presently, she serves on the Executive Committee of the American Academy of Religion.

Host or Publisher Vanderbilt Divinity School