Ken Chitwood holds many titles, and chief among them — according to his website — is “Religion Nerd.”
Chitwood is a religion scholar, journalist and public theologian who splits his time between Germany and the United States. As a scholar, he primarily writes about Muslim communities in the Americas, interreligious engagement, ethnography, humanitarianism, and philanthropy, as well as manifestations of religion-beyond-religion in a global and digital age.
He’ll speak at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, part of the Interfaith Lecture Series and its Week Nine theme: “All Rise: Save Us and Look Beyond.”
Through the week, the Department of Religion is exploring, from the perspectives of numerous faith traditions, what it means to seek salvation, and what it means to look beyond the suffering and limitations of human life on earth, and beyond the horizon of all we can know or understand.
Chitwood’s first book, 2021’s The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean, won the Religion News Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award. In it, he traces the 500-year history of Muslims in Latin America and the Caribbean, from Muslims’ deep roots in the region, to the current connections among the multiple networks of people, ideas, economies, politics, and religion that extend across the Americas and beyond. His second book, AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Lives of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, is forthcoming with University of Texas Press. Currently, Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth; affiliate researcher with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture; and research fellow with the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at Indiana University. Previously, he’s been the Fritz Thyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures & Societies at Freie Universität Berlin and a fellow with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Engaged Spirituality Project.
But this summer, he’s scholar-in-residence at First Lutheran in Venice Beach, California, and Chitwood is a practicing Lutheran whose interreligious work has taken him all across the globe, accenting “glocal” 21st-century Christianity. A widely published journalist and editor of ReligionLink, a premier resource for people writing on religion, Chitwood is interested in global theologies, multi-cultural ministry, and the contextualization of doctrines and practices across religious boundaries, physical borders and cultural barriers. He was Sojourner’s Faith and Immigration Reporter in 2024 and is a former journalist-fellow with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Spiritual Exemplars Project.
