Jeffrey Stout joined the Department in 1975 and retired from his teaching post in July 2018. He is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, Democracy and Tradition, and Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. He co-edited Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein and the Cambridge Series in Religion and Critical Thought. He has received Princeton University’s Graduate Mentoring Award (2009) and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2010). He served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2007. Stout’s interests include ethics, social criticism, political thought, modern theology, film, and theories of religion. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in May 2017 and is now expanding them into a book on religion and power in political history. He gave the American Lectures on the History of Religions at five universities in North Carolina in the spring term of 2019. The topic of that series was religion and film.