William D. Dinges, Ph.D.
Dr. William D. Dinges is an Ordinary Professor of Religious Studies in the School of Theology and Religious Studies, and a fellow of the Life Cycle Institute at The Catholic University of America. He has received his Ph.D. in American Studies in 1983 from the University of Kansas, and has been on the faculty at Catholic University for the past twenty-three years.
Dr. Dinges’ research interests include a variety of topics from the spheres of religion and culture: religious movements, religion and social change, fundamentalism, religion in America (Catholicism in particular), and religion and ecology. Dr. Dinges has published articles on these and related topics in Sociological Analysis, U.S. Catholic Historian, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Religion and American Culture, The Way, The Living Light, America, Commonweal, and in other scholarly and popular journals and anthologies. He has a long-standing interest in Catholic traditionalism and was a contributor on the topic within the ‘Fundamentalist Project" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2003 he concluded a year-long ethnographic study of ten Home Missions Dioceses in the United States (An Ethnographic Report on Select Home Missions Dioceses. Committee on the Home Missions, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2003, 180 pp.) Prior to this project, Dr. Dinges co-authored a book with Dean Hoge, Mary Johnson, S.N.D. de N., and Juan Gonzales, Jr., on Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). Dr. Dinges is currently working on a book-length study of the cultural construction of the sacred in the Latin Tridentine Mass. This work examines issues of identity, ritual change and social conflict among American Catholics in relationship to the Second Vatican Council’s transformation of the liturgy.
In addition to his teaching and research, over the past twelve years Dr. Dinges has lectured on the role of religion in American culture to numerous foreign delegations (a significant number coming from Muslim countries) participating in the U.S. State Department International Visitors Program.
Contact Information
Email: Dinges[at]cua.edu
Phone: (202) 319-5999
Website: http://ipr.cua.edu/res/docs/faculty/dinges-vitae.rtf
Department: Department of Theology and Religious Studies
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