Bio

Thomas Albert (“Tal”) Howard (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Professor of Humanities and History and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, where he is affiliated with Christ College, Valparaiso University’s honors college. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. Prior to joining Valparaiso, he taught at Gordon College, where he founded and directed the Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program and led the Center for Faith and Inquiry.

Howard is the author or editor of numerous books, including Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History (Yale University Press, 2025), The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021), The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford University Press, 2016). His scholarship explores the intersections of Christianity, secularization, modern theology, interreligious encounter, and the intellectual history of the modern West.

His writings have also appeared in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, as well as in more general-interest venues such as The Hedgehog Review, The Wall Street Journal, Modern Age, Touchstone, Inside Higher Ed, The National Interest, The Christian Century, First Things, and Commonweal. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

A new book, Modern Christian Theology: An Intellectual History, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2027. Recently, Howard was named a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for a new project, provisionally entitled “Missionaries and Modernity: Christian Proclamation in a Colonial and Postcolonial World.”

He is married to Agnes Rose Howard and they have three children: Elizabeth, Hannah, and Benjamin.

For speaking engagements and other queries, he can be reached at [email protected]