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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
Photo Credit: United Church of Christ/Jessie Palatucci. UCC March and Action to Stop Deportations at Baltimore ICE Office. Rev. Traci Blackmon, Executive Minister for the United Church of Christ.

Understanding Religion in Light of Shifting Practice

Series: Religion Book Symposium
Abdulkader Tayob
April 9, 2018

“Religion” calls for rethinking the familiar models used to think of religion and public life: control, capitulation, co-optation, or rejection.

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Toward a Common Respectful Attentiveness to Religions

Series: Religion Book Symposium
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
March 9, 2018March 16, 2018

Christian Smith helps us see that people who are religious can more confidently lay our claim to a public sphere which is no longer a neutral, secular space.

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Drepung monastery is one of the largest monasteries in Tibet. It was from here that the 2nd through the 5th Dalai Lama lived and ruled - until the 5th commissioned the Potala to be built.

On Sameness, Difference and Wholeness

Series: Religion Book Symposium
Anne C. Klein
February 16, 2018

When we study medicine, biology, even the arts, we understand that every human being is much more like us than not. But with religion, difference dominates.

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‘Not Me, Not That’: Thinking Race and Catholic Modernity

Series: Decolonizing Narratives
Brenna Moore
December 1, 2017August 7, 2019

Subaltern voices are not just about “diversity,” but about approximating a more honest, rich and enlarged sense of truth and the world.

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Forget Pinkwashing, its Brownwashing Time: Self-Orientalizing on the US Campus

Series: Decolonizing Narratives
Gil Hochberg
November 24, 2017January 25, 2024

First I saw a large portrait of a Native American wearing a traditional headdress, with the word “Judah” written across it. Here, brown-washing and self-orientalism perform political work, masking settler colonialism with the language and images of nativism.

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The Role of Heritage and Tradition (Turāth) in the Search for Muslim Identity

Series: Beyond Coexistence
Ebrahim Moosa
November 2, 2017November 3, 2017

Without careful nurturing and dedicated attention to the past as well as the present, tradition becomes an instrument of power, and a source of learned ignorance.

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Eternal Enmities: A Jewish Decolonial Re-Evaluation of Western Altruism

Series: Decolonizing Narratives
Santiago Slabodsky
October 31, 2017February 1, 2024

The Jewish-Muslim case is one of many that invite us to unveil what has been hidden, contest what has been naturalized, and move beyond modern/colonial liberal narratives.

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Muslims and the Making of America

Series: Decolonizing Narratives
Amir Hussain
October 20, 2017October 20, 2017

The history of the United States is a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious one. But that history is often not told.

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Pious Fashion: Designing Modern Muslim Citizens

Series: Decolonizing Narratives
Elizabeth Bucar
October 17, 2017January 19, 2024

Men’s clothing is the marker of the nation’s power and modernity; women’s clothing is the marker of its morality, honor, and ethnic identity.

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Dignity is Not Power Blind

Dania Straughan
October 12, 2017April 17, 2018

Atrocious things have been perpetrated in societies that also value dignity.

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