Religion in Public Life
Assistant Professor Rachel Schneider examines how religion shapes communities and is working with organizations in Knoxville to prepare students for nonprofit leadership.
Rachel Schneider joined UT’s Department of Religious Studies in 2025 as an assistant professor of religion and public life. She is part of a strategic, interdisciplinary hiring initiative from the College and Arts and Sciences, “Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures,” aimed at enhancing student success while making life and lives better for people in Tennessee and beyond.
“Much of my academic work is built around helping students and the public see the ways religion shapes the communities around them,” Schneider said. “It asks how religion shapes public life—from workplaces and healthcare to civic engagement and nonprofit leadership—and how religious communities respond to enduring social challenges such as racial and economic inequality.”
She is co-leader on a research project funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations that studies how religious leaders identify and address pressing social needs in their communities, such as food insecurity, mental health care, or access to affordable housing, and how interfaith collaboration can strengthen these efforts.
Community Nonprofit Connection
Schneider is also co-director of the department’s religion and nonprofit leadership undergraduate program, with Lindsay Young Professor Megan Bryson. In that position, she’s building relationships with Knoxville religious and civic leaders.
“There is a rich history of religious and civil leaders partnering to support community flourishing, and I’m excited to connect students with local nonprofit leaders and faith-based organizations so they can learn directly from practitioners,” she said. “In the coming years, I look forward to deepening connections between UT and the wider community to find ways the academic study of religion can enrich and support their work.”
In addition to teaching the Religion and Nonprofit Leadership and Religion and the Workplace courses, Schneider would like to develop a course on religion and international development.
“My hope is that this course will create a focused space for thinking about nonprofit work and humanitarianism on a global scale, because students are increasingly interested in global service and ethical modes of engaging in development work,” she said.
“It is an exciting moment to be part of a department that is growing, innovative, collaborative, and deeply committed to students,” Schneider said. “I hope my work at UT will tackle hard questions and pressing social challenges with academic rigor while also equipping students with the leadership skills and insights they need for professional success in a changing world.”
Christianity in South Africa
Being a Denbo Center for the Humanities and the Arts Faculty Fellow in 2026-2027 will allow Schneider to focus on completing a book about contemporary Christianity and racial inequality in South Africa.
She traveled to South Africa as an undergraduate to learn about racial reconciliation and peacebuilding. “As I began to ask critical questions about the use of Christianity in both South Africa and the United States to perpetrate racial injustice, I was also struck by the presence of religion in the anti-apartheid and US Black freedom struggles and the ways sacred symbols and rhetoric have been deployed by marginalized communities in both these contexts to imagine—and work for—a better world,” she said.