Isaac Weiner
Professor & Director of the Center for the Study of Religion
433 Hagerty Hall
1775 S. College Road
Columbus, OH
43210
Areas of Expertise
- American religions
- Religion and law
- Material and sensory cultures of religion
- Religion and sound
- Theory and method in the study of religion
- Religious pluralism
Education
- B.A. in Religious Studies, Yale University
- Ph.D. in Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Isaac Weiner is a scholar of American religious studies, with research interests in pluralism, law, and sensory culture. His first book, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (NYU Press, 2014), analyzed the politics of religious pluralism in the United States by attending to disputes about religious sound in the public realm. He is co-director of the American Religious Sounds Project (religioussounds.osu.edu), a collaborative digital initiative, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, to document and interpret the diversity of American religious life by attending to its varied sonic cultures. He is also co-editor of Religion, Law, USA (NYU Press, 2019). He teaches core classes in religious studies, as well as more specialized courses, such as religion and law, religion and science, and religion and American culture.
Selected Publications
Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (NYU Press, 2014)
Religion, Law, USA (NYU Press, 2019), co-edited with Joshua Dubler
“Responding to the Dobbs Decision: American Jews and Religious Freedom.” Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas (Spring 2023): 10-23
“The Sabbath Observer, the Idiosyncratist, and the Organization: How the EEOC Imagines Religion at Work.” Journal of Religion and American Culture 32, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 305-337
"And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! Or How the Grinch Heard Christmas," in The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies, eds. Pamela E. Klaassen and Monique Scheer (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019)
“The Corporately Produced Conscience: Emergency Contraception and the Politics of Workplace Accommodations,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 1 (2017): 31-63
“Sound,” in Key Terms in Material Religion, ed. S. Brent Plate, 215-221 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
“Calling Everyone to Pray: Pluralism, Secularism, and the Adhān in Hamtramck, Michigan,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 1049-1077
“The Senses in Religion: Pluralism, Technology, and Change in the Twentieth Century,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000, ed. David Howes, 101-123 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
“Displacement and Re-placement: The International Friendship Bell as a Translocative Technology of Memory,” Material Religion 5, no. 2 (July 2009): 180-205