Richard A. Rosengarten

*Professor Rosengarten is on leave during the autumn, winter, and spring quarters of the 25-26 academic year. 

MA, PhD (University of Chicago)

Richard Rosengarten’s scholarship and teaching are anchored in the Enlightenment and its import for religious (especially Christian) thought and practice. His work focuses on literary prose forms (novel, satire, autobiography, essay) and on modern schools of criticism (literary, biblical, and philosophical) that enact, absorb, engage, and/or transform religion. Literature and criticism intersect via the Enlightenment’s appropriation of the ancient understanding of criticism (distinguishing good from bad) to rethink the relationships of revelation to reason and of providence to history, to the end of distinguishing good religion from bad. The ways that the Enlightenment engaged earlier thought (especially the ancients) is crucial; ditto the Enlightenment’s bequeathals (“liberalism,” “modernism” and their aftermaths). His book on the novelist Henry Fielding is thus framed by engagements with Augustine’s Confessions and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! His forthcoming book on Catholicism’s wrestling match with modernity compares the uses to which Flannery O’Connor, Frida Kahlo, and Simone Weil put Roman Catholic sacramental theology (in story, retablo, and essai, respectively).

Rosengarten serves as an Associate Editor for Literature and Theology and as Chair of the Council on the Graduate Study of Religion.  At the Divinity School, he served as Dean of Students (1991-2000) and also as Dean (2000-2010, 2015-17).