Professor of Religion; Director of Graduate Program in Religious Studies; Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture; Director of Graduate Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences
Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in this country, in Israel and in Hungary where he was Fulbright Fellow. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970’s.
His many books include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), Inner-worldly Individualism (1994), The Problem of Trust (1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (2000) , with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (2000) Modest Claims, Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (2004), with Weller, Puet and Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008) and most recently, with Weller Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience and Ambiguity (2012), Über die Herausforderung der Verschiedenheit und die neue Wertereligion (2024) and Oaths and Vows: Words as Genesis (2024). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Boundaries and Community: Rules for Re-Engagement will be out in June 2026 through the University of Toronto Press.
In 2020 he was recipient of the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize of the University of Tubingen. He is Founding Director of CEDAR – Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion (www.CEDARnetwork.org) which leads seminars every year on contested aspects of religion and the public square in different parts of the world and has established permanent programs in Japan, Indonesia, Uganda and Kenya. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.