Noreen Khawaja, who has been awarded the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Oustanding Scholarly Publication or Research by an untenured faculty member for her book The Religion of Existence. The prize is awarded each year by the Humanities Advisory Committee.
In their commendation, the committee said this about her book:
The committee was dazzled by the erudition and philosophical sophistication of your account of mid-century existential philosophy and its relationship to Christian traditions of self-examination and self-remaking—traditions of “working on the self.” The book allows us to see major thinkers anew—especially Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, thinkers who continue to cast long intellectual shadows. But it also suggests, more radically, that we need to reconceive what is religious about secularism, and what we mean by “Christian” thought. As you ask how these relate to some of religion’s and humanism’s most fundamental questions–what is the “true” self and how does one establish its authenticity?—readers feel the supposed difference between religion and secularism begin to shift. That is a thrilling effect for any reader walking through the argument with you, and will, we predict, change the parameters of conversation about existential thought as such.