Jeffrey Stout is professor of religion at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Religion, and is associated with the departments of Philosophy and Politics, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Center for Human Values. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1975, and plans to retire from active teaching in July 2018. He has received Princeton University’s Graduate Mentoring Award (2009) and Princeton’s Presidential Award for Distinguished Teaching (2010).
Stout’s interests include ethics, social criticism, political thought, modern theology, film, and theories of religion. He served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2007, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stout is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, Democracy and Tradition, and Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. With Robert MacSwain, he edited Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein. His essays have appeared in such journals as Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Monist, New Literary History, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and The Journal of Religious Ethics. He serves as an associate editor for the JRE.
Stout also serves on the editorial boards of Theology Today and Contemporary Pragmatism. With Wayne Proudfoot and Nicholas Wolterstorff, he edited the Cambridge University Press Series on Religion and Critical Thought. He was a member of the editorial board of Princeton University Press from 2000 to 2004.
Stout was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1950. He was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements in his teens and twenties. He was graduated from Brown University in 1972, and received his doctorate from Princeton in 1976. At Brown, he chaired a student strike in 1970, ran the Rhode Island Draft Information Center, and founded Issues, a journal of opinion. At Princeton, he chaired the Department of Religion, served as assistant coach of men's soccer, and co-sponsored the faculty Resolution on Divestment in support of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Stout is former chair of the Committee for Film Studies at Princeton. The Museum of Modern Art and the journal Film Comment have published some of his work on film. He has a book manuscript in progress on the cinematic sacred. He served for two years on the board of trustees of Anthology Film Archives.
