Peter J. Thuesen

Peter Thuesen is Professor of Religious Studies, Adjunct Professor of American Studies, Co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and Director of Humanities Research in the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University Indianapolis. From 2009 to 2015, he chaired the IU Indianapolis Department of Religious Studies. A historian of the United States and of American religion, he is currently at work on The People’s Cardinal: Richard Cushing and the Age of Catholic Optimism, a project supported by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. His previous books include Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (Oxford, 2020), which received the 2021 Christianity Today Book Award for History/Biography; Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford, 2009; paperback, 2011), which received the 2010 Christianity Today Book Award for History/Biography; and In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Oxford, 1999; paperback, 2002), which received the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History. He is also editor of a major critical edition, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 26, Catalogues of Books (Yale, 2008), and co-editor (with Philip Goff and Arthur E. Farnsley II) of The Bible in American Life (Oxford, 2017). Educated at Princeton University (Ph.D., M.A.) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A.), he previously taught at Tufts University and at Yale Divinity School.