Our Mission

Baylor ISR exists to initiate, support, and conduct research on religion, involving scholars and projects spanning the intellectual spectrum.

 Featured Scholar

Meet the acclaimed scholars of Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion

Meet Byron R. Johnson

Director, Institute for Studies of Religion
Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences

Byron Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. He is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR). He is a Faculty Scholar in the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, Senior Fellow with the Witherspoon Institute (Princeton), Senior Fellow at the Sagamore Institute (Indianapolis), and is a Senior Advisor at the Religious Freedom Institute (Washington, DC).


 Baylor ISR Events

Research, lecture, and special speaking events

The Transcendentalists And Their World @ Lewis-Birkhead Lecture Hall in the Armstrong Browning Library
Sep 27 @ 1:00 pm – 4:45 pm
1:00 pm
Between the 1820s and the 1840s, New England gave rise to the Transcendentalist movement, which in many ways foreshadows the idealism and the activism of the 1960s, with its mysticism and political radicalism, its bold[...]
Oct 4 @ 8:00 am – Oct 6 @ 8:00 am
International Evangelicalism: Studies in the History of Global Connections @ Baylor University
8:00 am
Date: October 4 – 6, 2023 Time: 8am – 12pm each day Topics of papers on the nineteenth century include the Berlin Missionary Seminary, the influence of the Swiss Réveil, Evangelicals and established churches in[...]
The Many Lives of Psalm 91 @ Lewis-Birkhead Lecture Hall in the Armstrong Browning Library
Oct 11 @ 9:30 am – 4:30 pm
9:30 am
For over two thousand years, Jews and Christians alike have made Psalm 91 one of the most commonly used and cited parts of the Bible. Depending on the era, Psalm 91 is protective; it is triumphalist; it[...]