I am a historian of late-modern religion and religious ideas. My research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations on one hand, and on religious-secular and church-state relations on the other. My work explores how intellectual communities of established religious traditions mobilize their traditional sources to respond to expansive political, intellectual, and ethical transitions, as well as the implications of these responses for their perceptions of the Other. At the heart of my scholarly interests is how contemporary Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities cope with a series of interrelated challenges: secularization, liberalism—particularly the idea and practice of separating religion from politics—living alongside secular and religious others, and the influence of postcolonial criticism on both Jewish and Christian self-understandings.

At the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew Univerity, I teach the history of religions in modernity, contemporary Christianity, history and theory of secularism, and Jewish-Christian relations.

karma.ben-johanan@mail.huji.ac.il