Courtney Bender received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and her B.A. from Swarthmore College. She specializes in contemporary American religion and the social scientific study of religion.

She is author of  The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago 2010), Heaven’s Kitchen: Practicing Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago 2003), and co-editor with Pamela Klassen of the forthcoming volume After Pluralism (Columbia 2010).

Recent Publications

“How Does God Answer Back?” Poetics 2008.

“What the Many Lives of Past Lives Tell us About Contemporary Spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007.

"Touching the Transcendent: On the Status of Religious Experience in the Sociology of Religion" in Everyday Religion, 2007.