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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

Politics, Religion, and the Priority of Belief

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Giuliana Chamedes
April 26, 2021

We too need to come out from behind the curtain and frame the “so-what” of our story not just in terms of scholarly debates, but with careful attention to what our story can illuminate about the human condition.

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The Vatican’s Foreign Policy: Avoiding Confrontation, Accommodating Interests

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD
April 23, 2021January 27, 2024

Far from living the radical idealism of Jesus, the Church as a realist and discerning body politic accepts that both good and evil will always coexist in this imperfect world.

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The Enduring Appeal of Christian Europe

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Paul Hanebrink
April 21, 2021

A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals just how closely the civic components of Catholic internationalism imitated aspects of its Communist rival—or, more precisely, of Communism as it was imagined in Rome.

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Twentieth-Century Crusades and Crusaders Reimagined

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Cara Burnidge
April 19, 2021April 19, 2021

The “religious” figure and body in this book is not a “faith-based” “non-state actor” seeking to share gospel stories or convert others, but rather a state actor focused on further developing its legal power and political authority.

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Introduction to Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Joshua S. Lupo
April 15, 2021April 26, 2021

This book presents the heretofore understudied history of Catholic international diplomacy in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

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Catholicism in Need of Critical Caretaking

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade
Scott Appleby
April 13, 2021January 27, 2024

So intent was the Vatican on “protecting the Church” that even the horrors of the Holocaust, not lost on Pope Pius XII, failed to scandalize Catholic diplomats and other officials into reconsidering the rights of religious minorities and championing religious freedom.

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Mitigating Punishment’s Overreach

Syed Atif Rizwan
April 12, 2021

For the criminal legal system to claim it is just, it has no choice but to be governed by principles of fairness that must attend to the real possibility of excessive harm.

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An Afro-Jewish Critique of Jews Against Liberation

Lewis R. Gordon
March 26, 2021January 27, 2024

Identification with whiteness leaves no recourse from being identified with the enslaver and master. White Jewish evocation of Exodus thus reeks of hypocrisy so long as such a Jew insists on being white.

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Sovereignty and its Afterlives in Muslim South Asia: A Response

Series: Book Symposium on Defending Muḥammad in Modernity
SherAli Tareen
March 9, 2021March 12, 2021

With the loss of Muslim political sovereignty in nineteenth-century South Asia, the pioneers of the Barelvī and Deobandī orientations and their predecessors articulated and avidly fought for two rival visions of the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the practice of everyday life.

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Decolonial Islamic Studies and Defending Muḥammad in Modernity

Series: Book Symposium on Defending Muḥammad in Modernity
Sohaira Siddiqui
March 4, 2021February 1, 2024

With remarkable subtlety, Tareen impresses upon the reader the distinction between the ability of colonial modernity to affect the nature of intellectual debates and the ability of colonial modernity to affect the content of those debates.

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