E. Thomas Lawson

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Professor Ernest Thomas (Tom) Lawson is a research scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture (JCC) and co-founder (with Dr Luther Martin and Dr Donald Wiebe) of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). He is a founding member and current President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR).

Professor Lawson is widely considered to be the founder of the cognitive science of religion field. He has published the books Religions of Africa: Traditions in Transformation (1984) and, with Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (1990) and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Ritual Forms (2002). He also played a leading role in the establishment of departments of religion at public universities in the United States during the 1960s. A festschrift in his honor, Religion as a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson, was published in 2004. He is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University.

In addition to his research activities Professor Lawson is an avid painter, traveler, science fiction reader, and bird watcher.