Jerome P. Baggett, Ph.D.Professor of Religion and Society B.A., Boston College; M.T.S., Weston School of Theology; S.T.L., Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union / University of California, Berkeley Email: jbaggett@jstb.edu Office hours: Thursdays at 1-3 pm, and by appointment Phone: (510) 549-5060 Courses offered:
On the Jesuit School faculty since 2001, Jerome Baggett is also a member of the Graduate Theological Union's core doctoral faculty and is a visiting professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. His courses all address different dimensions of the nexus of religion, culture and contemporary society, and they also all attempt to introduce students to various theories and methods in the social sciences. His particular interests include the sociology of religion, social theory (classical and contemporary), sociology of culture, civic engagement and social movement activism, American Catholicism, and secularization theory. Dr. Baggett is the author of Habitat for Humanity: Building Private Homes, Building Public Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001) and Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently conducting research on atheist and freethinker groups in the United States and recently published an essay entitled "Protagoras's Assertion Revisited: American Atheism and Its Accompanying Obscurities" (Implicit Religion, Fall 2011). "I've often heard people wistfully say, in the United States at least, that the 'good old days' for party politics was the Jacksonian era, for literature it was the turn of the 20th century and for professional baseball it was the 1950s and '60s," mused Dr. Baggett at a recent speaking event. "Well, I'm convinced that those days are now for theology and religious studies. The intellectual challenges, the unprecedented religious and spiritual eclecticism and the all-too-glaring need for a faith that does justice makes this a rather singular time for religious scholarship and ministry and, not surprisingly, for the Jesuit School as well." |
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