Jack Hanson
Jack Hanson is PhD candidate in Religion and Modernity. He studies the history of modern thought and culture, with interests at the intersection of religion, philosophy, and literature. His dissertation, “Sacramental Reason: Theorizing the Catholic in Modern Thought,” examines the role Catholicism plays for thinkers preoccupied with the question of modernity from the nineteenth century to the present. By focusing on the cases of Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Péguy, and Donna Haraway, it argues that, contrary to prevailing modes of critique, Catholicism offers a way of occupying modernity a slant, allowing a critical perspective on narratives of progress that does not lapse into reaction or nostalgia. In charting the fraught proximity these thinkers maintain both to the philosophical mainstream and to Catholic institutional hierarchy, it reconsiders the character of religious affiliation, which functions less as sociological grouping and more as a site of faithful contestation. This in turn raises the question, to be pursued in greater detail in future work, of what it would mean to consider speculative thought, in both its critical and artistic forms, as a kind of ritual practice.
Jack received a BA in English and Philosophy from Suffolk University, Boston, in 2012. He received an AM in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2014 and an AM in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2017. At Yale, he has taught and assisted in a range of courses in the history of Christianity and modern thought and culture. His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Franke Program in the Sciences and Humanities, and the John Henry Newman Fund at Yale.
Jack’s broader interests include method and theory in the study of religion, the history of Romanticism, and the problem of metaphysics from German idealism to the present. In addition to his scholarly research, he writes widely on literature and culture for such publications as Artforum, The Baffler, Commonweal, Gawker, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Nation, among others. He has also published poetry in such journals as Berfrois, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, and PN Review.