Future/s of Interreligious Studies: Places of Encounter, Belonging, and Resilience

During Operation Metro Surge (December 2025–February 2026), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions targeting and terrorizing Latinx and Somali immigrants and refugees produced widespread fear, anxiety, and instability across Minnesota. Reports of racial profiling, surveillance, aggressive tactics, and economic hardship created an environment where many residents felt unsafe participating in daily public life.

In this context, Minnesota’s long-standing interfaith relationships—built through years of dialogue, trust-building, and shared civic engagement—served as vital social infrastructure. Faith leaders from diverse traditions mobilized to provide pastoral care, public witness, and coordinated moral leadership, helping communities facing fear and uncertainty respond collectively rather than in isolation.

This proposal examines how interfaith networks function as civic infrastructure during crises, focusing on the Minnesota Multifaith Network and collaborating organizations during Operation Metro Surge. It argues sustained interfaith relationships strengthen resilience, support leadership, and transform strain into solidarity.

Instances of religious discrimination are not always clear, ranging from overt acts to subtle microaggressions. While research distinguishes these types, we know little about how the physical context shapes these experiences. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with victims of religious discrimination, drawn from a national U.S. survey sample, we examine how narratives of religious discrimination vary across regulated spaces (with formal rules and boundaries, such as workplaces/airports) and unregulated spaces (such as parks and sidewalks). We find that victims felt more uncertain about whether an incident constituted discrimination in regulated spaces. Conversely, they expressed greater certainty and fear regarding incidents in unregulated spaces. These findings shift the focus from the individual to the context of discrimination, highlighting the power of place in shaping how discriminatory interactions are experienced. This expands the field beyond workplace studies on discrimination, comparing how the nature of the physical place itself shapes the victim’s experience.

Interreligious and interfaith studies have emerged over the past several decades as a dynamic multidisciplinary field responding to changing global religious realities. Increasing religious pluralism, the growth of religious nones, intensifying political polarization, and the destabilizing rise of social media and AI have created new challenges for religious communities and scholars who seek to understand and cultivate constructive engagement across difference. Within this context, the future of interreligious and interfaith studies will depend not only on theoretical reflection but also on careful attention to local practices in which religious communities learn to live together amid diversity. This paper argues that local interfaith initiatives can serve as laboratories for the future of applied interreligious studies. Drawing on qualitative research with members of the Alachua County Faith Leaders Alliance (ACFLA) in Florida, this study explores how interreligious collaboration contributes to grassroots peacebuilding and offers emerging models for the field.

This paper presents a case study showing an emerging trajectory for the future of interreligious encounter: an Interfaithless Beach Party (IBP) held regularly between 2014 and 2022, which was a striking example of the growing number of initiatives in the United States in which exes from different high-demand religious groups navigate the difficult process of religious exit together. Using data from surveys and interviews conducted with IBP attendees, I argue that associating so-called interfaithlessness with interfaith becomes legible by thinking of interfaithlessness not as peripheral to but rather as a transposition of interfaith. Through this lens, the IBP allowed for interfaith encounter at its best, fostering not just proximity between exes from different religions, but meaningful interreligious exchange that complicates assumptions about America’s growing nonreligious population. The analysis suggests that the current age of religious exit may bring about not less but more opportunity for meaningful connection across (ex)religious difference.