Brad Gregory

Biography

My principal research interests center on Christianity in the Reformation era (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), including magisterial Protestantism, radical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism approached comparatively and cross-confessionally. I am also concerned to understand the long-term ideological influences and institutional consequences of the Reformation era on the making of the modern Western world. Another of my areas of research and interest is methodology and theory in the understanding of religion and history.

Selected Publications:

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).

Co-editor, with Alister Chapman and J. R. D. Coffey, Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

"Reforming the Reformation: God's Truth and the Exercise of Power," forthcoming in Reforming Reformation, ed. Thomas Mayer (Aldershot, U.K. and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate).

"No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion," History and Theory, 47 (2008): 495-519.

"Anabaptist Martyrdom: Imperatives, Experience, and Memorialization," in Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1524-1700, ed. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), pp. 467-506.

SFP Featured Course: Christianity/Commerce/Consumer

The capitalism and consumerism that now influences the entire world arose within a religious culture-that of Western Christianity-whose central figure extolled poverty and self-denial, and whose most important early missionary wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evils." How did this happen? This course takes a long-term view of the emergence of modern economic life in relationship to Christianity beginning with the upturn in commerce and the monetization of the European economy in the eleventh century and continuing through the relationship between markets and Christian morality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the religio-political disruptions of the Reformation era laid the foundations for the disembedding of economics from Christian ethics and thus made possible modern Western capitalism and consumerism.