Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
The concept that women’s confinement in the home is for their protection was irreconcilable to me. But in our differences we found learning opportunities instead of distance.
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Designer clothing brands that cater to Muslim consumers in the Middle East have mushroomed, in spite of the fact that some of this clothing is manufactured in Muslim-unfriendly countries.
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While Muslims as believers might focus on halal in the context of the global market as the realm that enables them to exert theological, cultural, and political agency against Western modernity, the impulses that shape their theological orientations and religious acts seem quite aligned with some aspects of that modernity.
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Does an increase in everyday piety through “brand Islam” simultaneously and necessarily weaken the authority of Islamic religious institutions?
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Can prophetic indictment balance lamentation with justice, irony with hope? Read the full article »
Read More →In multiple cases across Europe, a growing list of rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) converges on an apparent consensus: the expanding presence of Islam throughout Europe presents a pronounced challenge to Western conceptions of secular law and human rights. Read the full article »
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Due to his sole preoccupation with a secularized Christian and Western story of human-humanism-humanitarianism, Asad’s genealogy misses ongoing, creative, and complex contemporary engagements with the ethics and practices, promises and ambivalences of all humanistic projects—engagements that can and do inform the ways in which humanitarianism is being envisioned, enacted, and critiqued.
Read More →Lynch’s research is to be celebrated for the ways it foregrounds and explicates the importance of interrogating the discursive formations that inform religious ethics and popular casuistry. Her neo-Weberian framing allows for an elastic lens through which to examine the intersections of neoliberal and (African) orientalist discourses in the diffusion and praxis of the technocratic donor-driven apparatus of humanitarianism and development work. Read the full article »
Read More →Religious and secular identities and reasons constitute much of the ethical motivations for activists’ political practices. These categories are often sources of deep difference but they also point toward the transformation that only differences can bring—the transformation that can sustain, rather than eliminate, deep religious-secular pluralism. Focusing solely on the dynamics of power obscures our capacity to describe and theorize this normative work. Read the full article »
Read More →Last spring, when Scott Appleby phoned me about the launch of Contending Modernities, I was immediately intrigued. I have worked for many years in various forums of Muslim-Christian relations so I knew that Scott was proposing a project of significant scope and consequence. I am grateful to the University of Notre Dame for undertaking this initiative and hope that I can offer a few words that may prove helpful as the project progresses.
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