Research Interests

My research interests fall into three strands. 

First, the changing nature and function of religion in late modernity—especially as it relates to the West—and why a cultural sociological approach offers the best way to study it. This strand includes my  book, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), an edited volume (with Dick Houtman), The Shape of Spirituality: The Public Significance of a New Religious Formation (Columbia University Press, 2024)  as well as articles in  Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sociology of Religion, The Sociological Review, Religion, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, among others.
 
Second, culture, inequality, and solidarity. I am interested in the role culture plays in both dividing and binding people. As cultural sociologists have long demonstrated, shared meaning systems, repertoires of evaluation, and collective rituals can serve to exclude, stigmatize, and stratify. However, they can also function to unite people, and inspire them to act for the common good. In my work, I try to shed light on both of these functions.  Moreover, I am particularly interested in the role national cultures play in fuelling as well as mitigating economic and social inequalities. This strand includes a forthcoming chapter in The Civil Sphere in Canada (edited by Mervyn Horgan and Jeffrey C. Alexander), as well as my current SSHRC-funded research project on the cultural dimensions of the “diploma divide” in contemporary Canada and the U.S.
 
Third, social theory and the varieties of normative inquiry. Like Marx, I believe a key role of theory is to change the world. But I also believe that both social life and social theory are fundamentally hermeneutic in nature—thus one can never escape the need for interpretation. For this reason, I am interested in interrogating the presuppositions—normative and theoretical—that shape contemporary social theory in order to improve the state of the art. Furthermore, I am interested in reviving an older model of critical social theory, which the late Robert Bellah referred to as “social science as public philosophy.” This strand includes articles published in Civic Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Cultural Sociology, History of the Human Sciences, as well as an article for ​American Journal of Cultural Sociology​ which draws from hermeneutic philosophy to advance what I call a “post-Bourdieusian” cultural theory.

​I am happy to supervise graduate students in any of the above areas.

​Academic Bio

During my BA (Honours) in Philosophy and Drama at Queen's University I won the Pall Ardal Prize in Moral Philosophy. During my MA in Cultural Studies I won the Alfred Bader Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities as well as a SSHRC-CGS scholarship. And during my PhD I won a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Doctoral Scholarship (2017-2020), the Henry Mandelbaum Doctoral Graduate Fellowship (2018), and placed in the Top 5 of the SSHRC Storytellers competition (2018).

During 2017/2018 I was a visiting graduate student in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto, and during the 2019 Lent term I was a visiting graduate student in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, and a visiting scholar at the Woolf Institute. In June 2020, under the supervision of Will Kymlicka, I was awarded my PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen's University.

Between 2020-2022 I was a Banting Fellow based at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at Katholieke Universities (KU) Leuven, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto. From 2022-2023 I was an FWO Fellow based at CeSO, working with Professor Dick Houtman. In 2023, I became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. And in 2024, I became the Associate Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Societal Futures, based jointly at the University of Waterloo and St. Jerome’s University.

​About me

I was born and raised in Toronto. I enjoy long distance running, canoe trips, and conversation. I live in Waterloo, Ontario with my wife, Chantel, and our children, Audrey and Emerson.