Featured Publications
Editors Robert W. Hefner and Zainal Abidin Bagir illuminate the less formal yet pervasive processes of lived pluralism in Indonesian Pluralities. Part of the Contending Modernities series through Notre Dame Press.
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Featured
Decoloniality
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They Say “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” Look, We Are All over Palestine
Series: Decoloniality in PracticeTackling the homophobic deployment of religion requires using theological tools that expand interpretations of religious meanings and orients them to the suffering of queer communities.
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Empire and Race in Comparative Religious Ethics
Comparativists ought to ask how imperial and racial formations have shaped the settings within which peoples have acted and thought, regarding them not as wholly determinative but as nevertheless integral components of peoples’ ethical lives.
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Towards a Decolonial Approach to the Qur’an
A decolonial approach to the Qur’an also means de-Christianizing how we understand it as a text and its relationship to Muslims.
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Global Currents
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Contending Populisms: Pope Francis’s Response to the Politics of Division
Our research in East London shows how citizens in some of the poorest neighborhoods of England harnessed their religious convictions to work together to discern and promote a truly common good.
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Notes on the Coup in Myanmar: Karmic Kingship, Legitimacy, and Sovereignty
Aung San Suu Kyi has been negotiating between two divergent models for political legitimacy and sovereignty. On the one hand are western principles of human rights and democracy, on the other is karmic kingship.
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The IHRA’s Careless Conflations on Antisemitism (and Few Alternatives)
Branding as “antisemitic” criticism of Israeli actions pertaining to its occupation—on the ground that this applies a double standard—is Orwellian.
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Theorizing Modernities
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Can We Mediate between the Historical and the Rational? Reflections on al-Juwaynī’s Epistemology and Politics
Integrating quotidian practices into natural human reason seems to me to be the only way to provide them a secure foundation in modernity, when even deeply embodied customs cannot provide stability.
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A Spurned Bride? Religion and Religious Community in the Absence of a Caliph
That the Caliph’s writ could hardly be said to extend beyond his palace walls mattered less than the fact that the institution itself was the source of tremendous symbolic power.
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Law and Politics under the Abbasids: A Symposium
The coherence in the Juwaynian project is by no means assumed in this book. Rather, it is demonstrated through a painstaking reading of a number of his most influential texts in the domains of legal theory and theology.
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Field Notes
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Madrasa Discourses Free and Online
There is a fear that the Islamic scholarly debate is at risk of losing to the secular modern world.
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Literature, Theology, and Abul Kalām Āzād
Series: Madrasa DiscoursesTo think critically means one has to closely study one’s surroundings and look at things in unprecedented ways. We know that the voice of literature has the power to create such new ways of seeing.
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Madrasa Discourses Goes to Bangladesh
Series: Madrasa DiscoursesAt the end of the workshop, it was clear that there was enthusiastic interest in both the topics and approach adopted by Madrasa Discourses. It was also clear that there were unique challenges as well as possibilities that might come with expanding the existing program to include Bangladesh.
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Research Areas
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Madrasa Discourses
A conciliation of traditional Islamic thought with contemporary scientific and philosophical worldviews can result in orthodox affirmations of human dignity that are essential for peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic world.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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Reexamining Religion and Modernities
Addressing resurgent populism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia in Euro-America requires integrating diverse approaches to the study of religion and modernity with insights from the critical study of race, nationalism, and peace.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 →