Courtney Bender

Courtney Bender is the Ada Byron Bampton Tremaine Professor of Religion at Columbia University. A sociologist and religious studies scholar, she is the author of Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (University of Chicago 2003) and the award-winning The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (University of Chicago 2010) and co-editor of three collected volumes on religion and secularity, religious pluralism, and the future of the sociology of religion. Most recently she is one of eight co-authors of the 2022 book The Abyss, or, Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion (University of Chicago Press). Her current research investigates twentieth century secular planning and architectural projects meant to shape the future of American religion, or the "religion of the future."