Myriam Renaud

Ph.D. Candidate in Religious Thought and Ethics, University of Chicago

Myriam Renaud is a religion scholar at the University of Chicago Divinity School specializing in contemporary religious thought and global ethics. Her academic work focuses on identifying concepts of God that may best orient believers toward a moral life in today’s religiously and culturally pluralistic world. She also focuses on the intersection of global ethics with the U.N.’s human development goals and with human rights. Her work is grounded in her advanced study and research on philosophical Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought.

Myriam has published several book reviews and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and The Anglican Theological Review. She is also the co-editor and contributor of a chapter to God and the Moral Life (Routledge, 2018). She is currently at work on a volume of comparative theology, which explores and compares the concepts of God elaborated by several contemporary Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologians.

Myriam is a two-time recipient of the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Langdon Gilkey Scholarship, was selected as a 2012-13 Junior Dissertation Fellow in the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, and was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship by the Unitarian Universalist Association. She is a 2017-2019 Sinai and Synapses Fellow. For three and a half years, she served as Managing Editor of the Martin Marty Center’s twice-weekly, online publication, Sightings, in which scholars comment on religion in public life. She has organized three academic conferences at the University of Chicago: on how God relates to the moral life, on religion and income inequality, and on multi-religious perspectives on global issues.

Myriam is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Christian Ethics, the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought, and the Religion News Association. A finalist for a 2017 religion newswriter award, she publishes articles analyzing religion in public life in general-audience publications like The Atlantic (online), Sightings, and Religion Dispatches. Her work has been cited in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Al Jazeera.