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Background

As a historian of religious traditions, Jones is interested in the way in which minority Christian movements communicate with the outside world. While his research focuses on religious dissent in 16th- and 17th-century England, he also studies the shifting meanings of religious radicalism, the history of biblical interpretation, and theories and methods in the study of religion. Jones' work has appeared in Teaching Theology and Religion, Church History and Religious Culture, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Nova Religio, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Church History.

Publications

• Jones, D. F. (2026) “Teaching New Religious Movements Historically: Distance, Empathy, and Cults in the Classroom.” Teaching Theology & Religion 29, no. 1
• Jones, D.F. (2025) “Controversy and Conscience: Abiezer Coppe’s Return to Orthodoxy.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 24, no. 2
• Jones, D.F. (2022) “The Living Sense of Scripture: John Everard’s Puritan Hermeneutics in Seventeenth-Century England.” Church History and Religious Culture 102
• Jones, D.F. (2018) “Mischievous Information: Apostasy, Rituals of Telling, and the Sixteenth-Century Family of Love.” Church History 87, no. 3
• Jones, D.F. (2014) “Debating the Literal Sense in England: The Scripture-Learned and the Family of Love.” Sixteenth Century Journal 45, no. 4

Education

• PhD, The University of Iowa
• MA, The University of Chicago
• BA, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Research Interests

• Teaching methods in Religious Studies
• European Reformation, 16th- and 17th-century England, religious dissent, methods in the study of religion
• Reception of foundational or orthodox religious texts by supposedly radical Christian groups
• Sixteenth-century debates over Protestant biblical interpretation
• New religious movements in twentieth-century America

Teaching Interests

• RELG 101: Religions of the World
• RELG 312: Radical Religious Movements
• RELG 361: The Bible and its Interpretation
• RELG 320: Protestant Christianity
• RELG 383A: UFO Religions

Research Profile