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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

Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Media Discourse on Possessing Palestine

Series: Weaponizing Religion: Critical Perspectives on Palestine/Israel
Sabina Ali
January 29, 2026January 29, 2026

Indigenous peoples articulate Land as part of an interconnected web of relations and responsibilities, a mode of relating that cannot be reconciled with the structural violence of modern nation-states.

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Introduction to Symposium on Hope in a Secular Age

Series: Symposium on Hope in a Secular Age
Devin Singh and Rick Elgendy
January 21, 2026April 23, 2026

Hope thrives not in certainty but in the creative tension of becoming—a disciplined assertion that even amidst dislocation, the potential for renewal persists.

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Disciplines of Hope in a Secular Age

Series: Symposium on Hope in a Secular Age
Ted Vial
January 21, 2026

For Newheiser, Dionysus and Derrida stay in the tension, which gives us the hope that is needed in our political as well as existential situations

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Mysticism, the Ordinary, and the Sacred: An Interview with Andrew Prevot

Series: CM Conversations
Andrew Prevot and Joshua S. Lupo
December 10, 2025December 12, 2025

Theological mysticism is not anti-normative per se. It is only hostile to those norms that unjustly stigmatize, imperil, or otherwise harm the precious, mysterious creatures God has made.

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Against Abolition, Against Reform: The Case for a Transformational Vision of Restorative Justice

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion
Jason Springs
December 4, 2025

Approached holistically, restorative justice is a theory of justice with concrete practices that foster moral and spiritual forms of association between people.

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Restorative Justice and Prison Education as Transformative Visions of Justice

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion
Connie Mick
December 2, 2025

And for just a second I felt that transformative flash. I felt that maybe this book has the power to stop bullets.

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Resurrecting the Corporate Body: On the Flight of a Legal Fugitive

Brandon Taylor
November 10, 2025November 11, 2025

The modern economy reproduces a political theology of obligation, binding collective life to an abstract order while evacuating it of covenantal purpose.

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Restorative Justice, Lived Religion, and the Theopolitics of Abortion

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion
Rebecca Todd Peters
October 14, 2025

What is revolutionary about restorative justice is that it seeks a complete shift in the ideological foundation of how we think about crime, harm, community, safety, and the common good.

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Reflections on Restorative Justice as Lived Religion: Comparative Notes from a Rural Reservation Town in Upper Michigan

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion
Amy Carr
October 8, 2025

How might construing restorative justice practices as lived religion inform a moral and spiritual account of the broader ways we dwell together in communities?

Restorative Justice as Lived Religion: Comparative Notes from a Rural Reservation Town in Upper Michigan">Read More →

Is Restorative Justice a Tradition? Reframing the Practices and Values of Restorative Justice

Series: Symposium on Restorative Justice and Lived Religion
Joshua S. Lupo
September 30, 2025September 30, 2025

Springs’s account of restorative justice might be strengthened by reframing it not only as a set of practices and a theory of justice but as a moral tradition.

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