| Many people know Jane Addams as a Progressive Era leader, pioneering the Settlement House movement with Hull House in Chicago, and later leading an international women's peace movement during World War I that ultimately led to a Nobel Prize. Addams was one of the most famous American women at the time of her death, celebrated as a moral exemplar and a trailblazing social thinker and advocate. She continued to be acknowledged for her social advocacy work, but her constructive contributions to academic fields such as sociology, philosophy, and religious studies have only begun to be recovered in the past few decades.;This dissertation analyzes Addams' theory and praxis as a source for religious ethics in the context of a pluralistic democracy. Addams published most of her work on democracy before women were able to vote in the United States, and her marginal social position informs a conception of democracy that exceeds the mechanics of elections. This dissertation focuses on the way in which she developed an understanding of democracy as a virtue, a culture, and a religious expression, and examines how it might support a more adaptive, inclusive, and cohesive American democracy today. |
