Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar
This unit, with its focus on relational themes, invites proposals that challenge, enrich, or broaden dominant perceptions of friendship and interreligious engagement, in dialogue with community building issues, needs, and challenges.
Given current uncertainties regarding peace, relationality, and the well-being of the earth and its creatures, we specifically invite papers that:
- consider themes of friendship, interreligious engagement, and community building in relation to 2026’s presidential theme of Future/s
- demonstrate ways in which willing good for one’s friend(s), and being active on their behalf— despite division, conflict, and polarization—spills over into public, political, and ecological action, seeking good not only for the friend, but for their broader community
- address the intersection of friendship studies with religious studies, theology, peace-building or community building from any scholarly perspective and religious tradition(s), and/or demonstrate ways in which the intertwining of such studies has the potential to foster civic practice characterized by global awareness and local engagement.
In Denver, acknowledging the first peoples of Colorado and beyond, we invite proposals that:
- consider the interrelationship of friendship, community building, and diverse forms of spirituality with ecological themes, such as the Colorado—and other rivers—as kin, friend, and lifeblood.
- examine how the legacy of broken treaties between Indigenous peoples and settler governments or institutions challenges ethical, theological, and political understandings of friendship, interreligious engagement, and community formation.
- explore the possibilities for renewed friendship, community life, and future-oriented visioning that emerge when religious communities seek to honor treaties and treaty relationships.
- acknowledge ways in which the past, present, and future are intertwined and seek to understand and learn from the past in the pursuit of flourishing communities, relational healing, interreligious engagement, and/or reconciliation.
Suggestions for AAR proposal writers can be found in Kecia Ali’s Writing a Successful Annual Meeting Proposal. Papers presented will be considered for publication in an edited volume engaging with relational themes.
The purpose of this Seminar is to provide a broad forum in which the important but under-researched relationship of friendship can be studied, discussed, challenged, and ultimately enriched from a variety of religious perspectives. Friendship has personal, public, and political dimensions, and—from an Indigenous perspective— extends to ecological interconnectedness and is not exclusive of kinship relationships. In times characterized by division, conflict, and various forms of othering, we assert that friendship studies contribute towards furthering intercultural and religious understanding and dialogue. Friendship as a religious topic, broadly and creatively defined, touches on matters of faith, ecclesiology, anthropology, history, politics, philosophy, ethics, race, gender, sex, class, and economics, among others. We welcome papers that explore friendship from diverse disciplines and theological/religious perspectives and are open to a variety of methodological approaches.
Multireligious Perspectives on Friendship: Becoming Ourselves in Community— the first volume emerging from this seminar—was published in 2023, in Lexington Books Religion and Borders Series. Seminar papers are eligible to be considered for inclusion in a subsequent published volume focused on interreligious perspectives.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Brian Stiltner | stiltnerb@sacredheart.edu | - | View |
| Mugdha Yeolekar | mugdha.yeolekar@gmail.com | - | View |