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Theorizing Modernities

Constructing responsive theory to understand and evaluate the dynamics of modernity.

Featured in Theorizing Modernities

  • Scientific Literacy for Madrasa Graduates: A Project for Religious Renewal at the University of Notre Dame

    The goal of Madrasa Discourses is to transform the intellectual culture within madrasa scholarship by bringing it into conversation with contemporary intellectu...


  • Sustainable Resources: Reimagining Our Relationship with the Earth

    In the age of the anthropocene—climate change brought about by human actions—religious traditions can offer vital resources for reimagining a sustainable relati...


  • Border-Crossers: Interrogating Boundaries through Bodies

    What we can infer from this panel is that the political, racial, and religious markers which compose borders are also etched and negotiated on the bodies of the...


  • The Price of (non) Whiteness

    Are American Jews willing to forfeit some of that privilege, whatever that might mean, as a gesture to those whose who cannot “pass” into the space of whiteness...


  • Introduction to Policing Analogies

    The interrogation of normative representation and the creation of multi-racial and multi-gendered spaces are inadvertently rendered invisible and inaudible with...


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Theorizing Modernities Articles

Germany’s Split Identity: Liberal at Home, Reactionary on Palestine

Series: Symposium on The Moral Triangle
Amos Goldberg
February 9, 2022January 19, 2024

Personal and collective identities always hold tensions, ambivalences, paradoxes, and even contradictions. But when these become so extreme that the gaps cannot be negotiated, mitigated, bridged, or even discussed, they become a reason for deep (political) concern.

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Introduction to Symposium on The Moral Triangle

Series: Symposium on The Moral Triangle
Joshua S. Lupo
February 9, 2022March 4, 2022

What readers will discern in these pages is that the historical traumas experienced by one group can occlude the realities of violence and oppression in another.

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Modern Religion, Modern Sign, Modern Ritual

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Niloofar Haeri
January 18, 2022January 25, 2024

When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others.

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The Divergent Encounter between Prayer and Poetry in Contemporary Iran

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Setrag Manoukian
December 17, 2021January 20, 2022

The relationship between prayer and poetry in these women’s practices is far from simple. Prayer and poetry are too similar to be separated, but too different to be equated.

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Religion, Modernity, and Experience: Reflections on Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Ata Anzali
December 14, 2021January 20, 2022

A close analysis of ʿerfān and hāl, I believe, is very helpful in unsettling some of the dominant binaries through which religion is often understood in Iran.

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires">Read More →

“The Dead Don’t Go Anywhere”: Phenomenology, Religious Studies, and History

Joshua S. Lupo
December 8, 2021February 1, 2024

Rather than disinterested studies of “other people” who might do theology, unlike those of us in the social sciences or humanities, we might imagine those whom we study as fellow travelers with whom we share a world.

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A Ritual of One’s Own

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Ahoo Najafian
December 7, 2021January 20, 2022

Haeri illustrates that in Iran, religion is constituted by poetry and that in the public imagination, poetry plays an authoritative role in defining, destabilizing, and pushing the boundaries of religion.

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Language and Feeling in Ritual Practice

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Monique Scheer
December 2, 2021January 20, 2022

Conventional wisdom, biased toward Protestant Christianity, would claim that “modern religion” is the kind that fits best to modern society, which is defined and purportedly organized as secular.

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Teaching Islamic Poetry Beyond Orientalism

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Brenna Moore
November 30, 2021January 20, 2022

Haeri’s book enables us to keep this mystical language alive in our classroom while making sure we don’t ossify it as the orientalists did, and only see it as part of Islam’s past, the domain of rarefied male elites, and as disconnected to living Muslims today

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Textual Encounters: Meaning and Time in Islamic Studies

Series: Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires
Kabir Tambar
November 22, 2021January 20, 2022

Haeri’s monograph provides a double reframing—of meaning in terms of recitation and of prayer in terms of the presence of multiple voices.

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