Lori G. Beaman

Lori G. Beaman is Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, served as Leibniz Professor at Leipzig University, and is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award. Trained in sociology, law, and philosophy, she is an internationally recognized scholar in the study of religion, nonreligion, and social change.

She leads the SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant project Nonreligion in a Complex Future (2019–2026), a major international, comparative, and interdisciplinary research initiative examining the social impact of the rapid growth of nonreligion in Canada, Australia, the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland), the United States, the United Kingdom, as well as Brazil and Argentina.

She developed the concept of deep equality, an empirically grounded framework for understanding how people in diverse societies live well together. Her current research extends this work to emerging terrestrial relations in the context of the climate crisis. Deep equality also serves as a central conceptual framework in the Repairing Sociality, Safeguarding Democracy project, in which she is a co-investigator.

Her publications include Unearthing Lifestances: What Community Gardens Tell Us About Nonreligion (co-edited, De Gruyter, 2025), Religion and Nonreligion in Same-Sex Marriage Debates: Emerging Imaginaries (co-edited, De Gruyter, 2026), The Transition of Religion to Culture in Law and Public Discourse (Routledge, 2020), and Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity (Oxford University Press, 2017).