Stephen Prothero
ProfessorÂ
Religion
Boston University
United States of America
Biography
"Stephen Prothero is a C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor of Religion at Boston University specializing in American religions. He received his BA from Yale College in American Studies and his MA and PhD from Harvard University in the Study of Religion. A historian of American religions, Professor Prothero has written six books, including The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Indiana University Press, 1996), which won the Best First Book award of the American Academy of Religion in 1997, and American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), which was named one of the top religion books for 2003 by Publishers Weekly. His two most recent projects are the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–and Doesn’t (HarperOne, 2007) and God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter (HarperOne, 2010)."
Research Interest
Religion, American religions
Publications
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“Introduction,†in Carole Tonkinson, ed., Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 1-20.
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“Lived Religion and the Dead: The Cremation Movement in Gilded Age America,†in David D. Hall, Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 92-115.
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“Cremation American Style: Consumers' Last Rites,†in Marjorie Garber and Rebecca Walkowitz, One Nation Under God?: Religion in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 184-207.
