Jonathan VanAntwerpen is a program director at the Henry Luce Foundation, where he leads a grants program that aims to promote innovative thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts, to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religious ideas and spiritual practices in the United States and beyond, and to advance public knowledge. Visit the Luce Foundation’s website to learn more about this work.
Jonathan is co-editor of a series of books on secularism, religion, and public life, including Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press), The Post-Secular in Question (NYU Press), Habermas and Religion (Polity), and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press).
As founding director of the Social Science Research Council’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere, Jonathan led a team that conceived and launched The Immanent Frame, a highly regarded digital initiative publishing original writing by hundreds of scholars across the social sciences and humanities. He served for several years as editor-in-chief.
In addition to his work on secularism and religion, Jonathan has written on the emergence of the field of transitional justice, on American philanthropy and the politics of truth and reconciliation, on transformations in higher education, and on the history of the social sciences. Originally trained as a philosopher, he received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.