Our children and parents having all moved out of our longtime home in Norman, Oklahoma, my wife Beth and I now live in a Midtown apartment in Oklahoma City—which makes us feel much younger than we actually are. My lifelong research program continues to address two intersecting themes: how people understand religious others, and how they understand sacred texts—both their own and those of other religions. I teach courses on the Qur’an, Islamic law, Islamic theology, and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma, where I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies.

My publications have dealt mainly with Islamic thought (especially Islamic hermeneutics and legal theory) and with interactions between religious communities (including Muslim reception of the Bible). I am presently studying recent global developments in Qur’anic hermeneutics, reconstructing and translating a Muslim rewriting of the Psalms of David, and elaborating an epistemology for understanding religious others.

My undergraduate studies in math and philosophy were at Gordon College. I subsequently earned an M.A. in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, studied Islamic legal theory in Fez, Morocco, and completed a Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions, with a focus on Islamic thought, at Emory University in 2004. My family and I spent the spring of 2013 in Indonesia.

Both my research and my teaching aim at the development of ethical human relationships characterized by a process of coming to understand through sacrificial listening.