Featured
Field Notes
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The Ambivalence of Modernity Seen from Abidjan
Modernity is embraced for its scientific and technological wonders, but is also associated with moral decline especially with regard to family and sexual ethics.
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Land and Authority in Postcolonial Cameroon
This is a conflict of authority in a postcolonial state, involving state, traditional, and religious leadership, and as such evokes the transformations that African countries have undergone in the imperial and post imperial age.
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Madrasa Graduates: Children of Abraham and Aristotle
Renewal takes place when two sources of knowledge—of the world and of scripture—collide.
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Theorizing Modernities
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Action as Prayer: Lessons from Oceti Sakowin
The prayer practices at Oceti Sakowin camp offered a holistic and positive relationship between prayer and action, a relationship not often found between prayer and action within Christianity.
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Prayer, Peace, and the Imagination: A Catholic Sacramental Perspective
Ritual and sacrament can serve as powerful vehicles for social transformation.
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“To Be Absolutely Fair and Impartial”: Religious Instruction and Near East Relief’s Turn to Development
The Near East Relief transition to a “non-sectarian” missionary organization in the 1920s was largely a pragmatic adjustment that enabled continued provision of spiritual support. To be non-sectarian, therefore, cannot be conflated with being secular.
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Global Currents
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Diplomacy as Hypocrisy: The Biya System in Rome and at the Vatican
May the time come when every head of State who goes to meet the Pope and every bishop or priest fears hearing the prophetic message.
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Theo-Politics in Flux: The ‘Alt-Right’ on God, Christendom, and the Nation
Newly empowered, US white nationalists straddle pre- or a-modern theology and Christianity, re-constructed and re-lived on internet forums and tv-shows of late-modernity. Willard tracks the contentions in the US white nationalist right through the lens of Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”.
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Taking it Back from the Global Catholic Right: Reclaiming the Underworld of the Religious Imagination
Brenna Moore points to Catholicism’s legacy of “risky thinkers” and rich theological resources as potential tools for resistance.
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Research Areas
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Muslim Humanities
The humanities since the nineteenth century have investigated language, music, art, literature, theology, and poetry. Muslims have long been participants in these rich intellectual traditions, as majorities or minorities in the past and present.Read More →
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Science and the Human Person
Rapid advances in science and technology are raising fundamental questions about human life, flourishing, suffering, and death. These and other ethical questions at the intersection of science and the human person have a global character, encompassing all of humanity.Read More →
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Global Migration and the New Cosmopolitanism
The global expansion of migration over the past two generations has ushered in major social and economic changes, as well as profound ethical challenges concerning how citizens are to coexist in pluralistic societies.Read More →