What Drives Us to Do the Things We Do?

Elena A. Stepanova is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a Principal Research Fellow at the Ural Institute of Humanities, Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg, Russia). She worked as a visiting fellow at Emory University (Atlanta, USA, 1989–90) and Iliff School of Theology (Denver, USA, 1996–97). In 2010–14 she served as the academic director of the Open Society Institute-funded seminar “Religion: Maximalism and Minimalism”. In 2019, she participated in the Fulbright Scholar Program doing her research at the School of Theology, Boston University. In 2023, she’s a Visiting Fellow at IRES Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Uppsala University, Sweden). She is the author of about 150 articles, book chapters, and books. Her main research interests are centered around inter-confessional relations, secularism and post-secularism, religion in public space, and contemporary Christianity.