Director, Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies

Senior Adjunct Faculty, Department of Theology

College of Arts & Sciences

Email: hsgustafson@stthomas.edu

Education

• Ph.D., Religion, Claremont Graduate University

• M.A., Philosophy, Claremont Graduate University

• M.A., Theology, University of St. Thomas

• B.A., Philosophy & Theology, Boston College

Expertise: Interreligious Studies; Study of Religion; Theology; Religious Identity; Lived Interreligious Relations; Dialogue Methods; Approaches to Religious Diversity; Interreligious Leadership; Civic Religious Pluralism

Dr. Hans Gustafson is Director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas (MN) and Senior Adjunct Faculty in Theology. In addition to directing the Center, he leads the university’s Interfaith Fellows Program and its Holocaust & Genocide Studies minor, convenes the Higher Education Group for the Minnesota Multifaith Network, and directs the Norway J-Term program, From Frozen Lakes to Frosty Fjords: Dialogue, Diversity, and Leadership in Minnesota & Norway. He is also the Past President of the Association for Interreligious / Interfaith Studies (AIIS) and is co-chair of the Interreligious and Interfaith Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

Gustafson is the author of Everyday Wisdom: Interreligious Studies in a Pluralistic World (Fortress, 2023) and Everyday Encounters: Humanizing Dialogue in Theory and Practice (Fortress, 2025), and editor of Interreligious Studies: Dispatches from an Emerging Field (Baylor University Press, 2020). His scholarship explores interreligious encounter, lived religion, religious identity, civic religious pluralism, and mapping the field. He has published widely in journals such as the Journal of Interreligious Studies, Teaching Theology & Religion, Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology, and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. His public-facing scholarship includes a civic learning module co-authored with Elinor Pierce of Harvard University's Pluralism Project for PBS’s Under-Told Stories Project.

As an instructor, Gustafson offers undergraduate and graduate courses including Interreligious Encounter, Lived Religion, Dialogue and Disagreement in Religiously Diverse Secular Societies, Religion in Public and Professional Life, and others. His pedagogy integrates experiential learning, structured dialogue, civic engagement, and personal narrative, with a focus on cultivating interreligious phronesis - the practical wisdom required to engage religious diversity with skill and integrity.

Across his teaching, scholarship, and leadership, Gustafson is committed to cultivating healthy communities of disagreement, strengthening civic religious pluralism, and equipping emerging scholars and practitioners to navigate and lead within religiously diverse societies.