Professor Miller’s research interests include religion and public life, political and social ethics, theory and method in religious thought and ethics, and practical ethics. He is the author of Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 1996); Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (Indiana University Press, 2003), and Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (Columbia University Press, 2010). His recent book, Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture, seeks to chart and expand the field of religious ethics by exploring the implications of taking a cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences (Columbia University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Religious Ethics, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Ethics and International Affairs, Harvard Theological Review, and Theological Studies.
With his faculty colleagues in Religious Ethics, Miller has launched a new initiative at the Divinity School—a two-year cycle of readings, “Minor Classics in Ethics,” focusing on recent essays that have revitalized forgotten themes or have posed new questions for moral philosophers and religious ethicists to take up. Miller’s courses are organized so that students can situate arguments, theories, or concepts within a larger historical and intellectual arc. He is currently at work on two research projects: a critical monograph on the ethics of religious studies, and an intellectual history of “nature” in early modern and modern critical discourses about religion.