Meet the Faculty

Richard B. Miller

• Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Director, Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions
• Adjunct Instructor, American Studies Program
• Affiliate Faculty, IU Center for Bioethics
• Adjunct Professor, Center on Philanthropy

Education

• Ph.D. at University of Chicago, 1985

Contact Information

Background

• College Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Fall 2004
• Residential Fellow, Program for Ethics and the Professions, Harvard University, 1997-98
• Finkelstein Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, 1997-2001
• Bross Prize for Interpretations of Conflict, 1991
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1990
• Outstanding Young Faculty Award, Indiana University, 1989
• Lilly Summer Research Fellowship, 1988

I work in religious and philosophical ethics, religious thought, social and cultural criticism, and political philosophy.  My Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991) examines aspects of cultural pluralism as they are played out in debates between pacifists and just-war theorists. My second book, Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996), draws on theories of interpretation, practical reasoning, and social criticism to consider the morality of the Gulf War, liberalism and its discontents, Roman Catholic sexual ethics, medical ethics, gender ideology, and theories about the academic study of religion.  In the 1990s my research expanded in bioethics, one fruit of which is Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003).  That book builds on a fellowship year at Harvard and six months as a participant-observer in a pediatric intensive care unit.

In addition, I have published essays in Journal of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the Annual for the Society of Christian Ethics.  Those articles address religion and American public intellectuals, identity politics and multicultural justice, the ethics of Aquinas, and the morality of humanitarian intervention. 

I now direct the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and, with Eric Meslin of the IU Center for Bioethics, I co-edit a new IU Press series, Bioethics and the Humanities. Among the initiatives at the Poynter Center is an annual Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship and Seminar, the details of which can be accessed at the Poynter Center website (http://www.poynter.indiana.edu).  My work-in-progress includes a book entitled, 9/11, War, and Moral Memory along with essays on rules in moral theory; democracy and dissent; and the role of cultural studies in religious ethics.

My graduate courses include Virtue and Freedom; From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism (2 semesters); Religion, Justice, and Culture; Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics; Religion and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud; War and Peace in Western Religion, and occasional reading courses. I also mentor graduate students as Associate Instructors in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, a large introductory undergraduate course. Those interested in specific course details may consult course descriptions.  All graduate work in religious thought and ethics at Indiana University is keenly interdisciplinary and includes a monthly workshop of faculty and graduate students who meet to discuss work-in-progress. For a list of dissertations of our alumni, please visit other links on our webpage. You can also visit my personal web page for more information.

Research Interests

• Methods in Religious Ethics
• History of Christian Ethics
• Political and Social Criticism
• Moral Theory and Practical Reason

Courses Recently Taught

• Religion, Ethics, & Public Life
• Religion, Justice, & Culture
• Religion & The Self: Augustine, Kierkegaard, Freud
• War & Peace in Western Religions
• Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics

Publications

Books

Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991)

Editor, War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics (Louisville: John Knox/Westminster, 1992)

Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003)

Recent Articles

"Truthtelling, Moral Sources, and Ordinary Life in Jeremy Taylor's Casuistry," in Casuistry in Context, ed. Thomas A. Shannon and James Keenan (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995), 131-57.

"Divine Justice, Evil, and Tradition: Comparative Reflections," in The Ethics of War: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. Terry Nardin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 265-81.

"Love and Death in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit," Annual, Society of Christian Ethics (1996): 21-39.

"Just-War Criteria and Theocentrism," in Christian Ethics: Problems and Prospects, ed. James F. Childress and Lisa Sowle Cahill (Cleveland, Oh.: Pilgrim Press, 1996), 334-356.

"Religion and the American Public Intellectual," Journal of Religious Ethics 25 (Fall 1997): 369-92.

"Critical Representations," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (Winter 1997): 727-44.

"On Identity, Rights, and Multicultural Justice," Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 19 (1999): 261-83.

"The Politics of Religious Studies: Too Coarse a Filter," Bulletin for the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (November1999): 111-12.

"Humanitarian Intervention, Altruism, and the Limits of Casuistry,"Journal of Religious Ethics 28 (Spring 2000): 3-35.

"Legitimation, Justification, and the Politics of Rescue," in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, ed. William J. Buckley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm Eerdmans, 2000), 384-98.

"Religion, Ethics, and Clinical Immersion: An Appraisal of Three Pioneers," in Caring Well: Religion, Narrative, and Health Care Ethics, ed. David H. Smith (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2000), 17-42.

"Christian Attitudes toward Boundaries: Metaphysical and Geographical," in Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David Miller and Sohail Hashmi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15-37.

"The Virtues and Vices of Civil Society," in Civil Society and Government, ed., Nancy Rosenblum and Robert Post (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 370-96.

"Aquinas and the Presumption against Killing and War," Journal of Religion 82 (April 2002): 173-204.

"Thinking about War and Justice: A Reply to Jean Bethke Elshtain," at http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/052003/response_miller.shtml

"Role Responsibility in Pediatrics:  Appeasing or Transforming Parental Demands?" in Ethical Dilemmas in Pediatrics: Cases and Commentaries, ed. Lorry R. Frankel, Ammon Goldworth, Mary V. Rorty, and William A. Silverman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21-29.

"On Making a Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics," Journal of Religious Ethics 33 (September 2005): 409-43.

"Rules," in The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 220-236

"On Medicine, Culture, and Children's Basic Interests: A Reply to Three Critics," Journal of Religious Ethics 34 (March 2006): 177-89.