Interreligious Studies Interactive Workshop

Guides for interreligious dialogue tend to avoid specifically interracial dynamics. Similarly, guides for anti-racism avoid interreligious dynamics. Race and religion are simultaneously interwoven social constructions and lived realities that impact dialogue together. Building on the work of Khyati Joshi, who focuses on the systemic contexts of white Christian privilege, this interactive discussion will introduce relevant research and articulate three problematic postures of "centering," "othering," and "misrelating" that white Christians often bring to specifically interreligious interactions. Through a practical exercise scrutinizing current interreligious policy, participants will build skills for attending to the unique ways white privilege and Christian privilege converge to impede substantive interreligious progress and how to make realignments. 

This interactive workshop will discuss core aspects of Resisting Anti-Judaism: Practices of Christian Solidarity (Fortress, 2026). The fundamental argument of this book is that while Christians in the post-Shoah era have done significant work in rejecting the most odious elements of bias against Jews, there still remains many structural elements of anti-Judaism within Christian thought and practices. In order to deal with these difficult remainders, it is necessary for Christians to advance new paradigms for thinking about and engaging with Jews and Judaism. This workshop will focus on three core ideas from this book, anti-supersessionism, covenantal imagination, and solidarity, and provide concrete illustration of their implementation.

Interreligious Studies is increasingly charged with developing new models of formation and professional preparation amid shifting religious demographics, rising nonreligion, and intensifying pressures on higher education and adjacent professional fields. This paper reports results from a comprehensive MDiv Effectiveness Assessment at a Divinity School attached to a Research University that is intentionally multireligious and multi-vocational. Ministry formation (inside and beyond congregational settings) requires interreligious competence as a baseline professional capacity, not an elective specialization. Using a pragmatic, mixed-methods design (institutional data analysis; qualitative analysis of direct measures of student work; stakeholder surveys, interviews, and focus groups), we identify what most strongly predict vocational readiness for interreligious practice and teaching. Findings highlight transferable competencies cultivated through multireligious cohort learning, practice-facing pedagogy, and field-based formation where religious difference is operational. We offer grounded implications for curriculum design, faculty development, and evaluation strategies for formation for applied interreligious leadership.

I am developing a preliminary model of studying religious boundary-work that I wish to discuss at the interactive workshop. It proposes five areas of investigation: the location of the boundary; the Interpretation of the postulated difference; the means by which boundaries are expressed, interpreted, and possibly enforced; the motives for drawing boundaries, and the agents involved in boundary-work. I would love to have a critical conversation with colleagues in the field about how this model might be useful in the analysis of interreligious situations.

The panel advances a model of teaching that bridges scholarship and lived experience without collapsing one into the other. It argues that death and dying, far from being marginal topics, provide a generative lens for interreligious learning and ethical formation. By integrating comparative ritual study, practitioner insight, reflective practice, and critical theory, educators can transform how mortality is addressed in higher education, healthcare institutions and congregations.

This session will be of interest to scholars of religion, theology, pastoral care, medical humanities, and related fields seeking pedagogical approaches that are intellectually rigorous, interreligiously literate, and responsive to the existential realities shaping students’ lives.

This interactive workshop roundtable introduces a new edited volume, Beyond Dialogue: New Paradigms in Interfaith Discourse (SUNY Press, 2026). Given the most recent rise in religious extremism, and the suppression of free speech that has targeted dissenting voices and marginalized communities, we have felt it both urgent and important to critically approach the possibilities and limitations of interfaith discourse, in our communities and through our scholarship. Contributors blend academic analysis with activist praxis, employing diverse methodologies spanning theology, history, sociology, and anthropology. Through case studies from North America and beyond, close textual readings, and theoretical interventions––featuring  underrepresented voices including Pagan, Baha'i, and "nones" perspectives often absent from interreligious scholarship––we ask: beyond dialogue, toward what? Brief presentations from editors and contributors on the volume will introduce critical frameworks including "Beyond Interfaith Settlerhood" and "Engaged Buddhism as Engaged Community.”We offer brief remarks before opening to a larger conversation, inviting collaboration with fellow scholar-practitioners. 

Campus interfaith work is often structured around professional staff designing programs for students. This presentation proposes a different model, more at home in student affairs, wherein students are the primary architects of interfaith encounter, and reflects on three years of implementation at a mid-size university. Several student office worker lines were reconceived as an "Interfaith Fellows" program, tasking students with designing programming rooted in their own identities and communities. One fellow's hosting of Ganesh Chaturthi revealed significant unmet demand for Hindu religious life that institutional structures had not previously addressed. A partnership with the student-led Dialogue Society produced monthly interfaith dinners averaging thirty attendees, centering structured conversation across religious difference in a format students shaped and sustained. This presentation reflects on what the model requires institutionally, what it makes possible pedagogically, and what it suggests about student agency and genuine interfaith encounter.

This paper addresses the impact of Hindu college students’ interreligious engagement upon their overall sense of belonging in the context of student clubs/organizations. Data was gathered using interviews and photo-elicitation, and the research method was thematic analysis informed by descriptive phenomenology. Educational researchers have commonly focused on institutionally-sponsored clubs and events as sites of belonging for religiously minoritized students, but these sites were heavily problematized in this study. Because interfaith events typically have an educational focus, they center non-Hindu students while Hindu students assume the labor of religious literacy-building for their peers. Hindu students also experienced religious coercion related to non-Hindu student organizations. Positive experiences of interreligious engagement in group settings were significant but not institutionally-coordinated. Overall, this study provides insight into the role of Christian privilege in interfaith programming and its potential impact upon Hindu students. 

This paper proposes a new framework to rectify Western-based bias in academic interreligious studies by suggesting the inculturation theology of religious diversity—focusing on the common theme of inculturation among different religions. It examines how various religious traditions have adapted their theologies of belonging and community through the process of inculturation. Specifically, this paper analyzes two key examples: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian vision of local education and World Christianity’s vision of a new Christendom. By examining these cases, this paper shows the mechanics of inculturation at both theoretical and practical levels. Ultimately, it demonstrate how the process of inculturation fosters mutual transformation and develops new religious phenomena. By offering a phenomenological approach rather than a philosophical imposition, the paper shows how different religions reconcile differences and blur their boundaries through continuous communication within the process of inculturation. Based on this, the paper also attempts to illuminate the future of interreligious dialogue/theology.

This presentation has two goals. First, I will define the term ‘covenantal pluralism,’ a task complicated both by the relative newness of the literature—leaving the term at times underdetermined—and by the fact that the term encompasses multiple components. Second, I will examine some of the theoretical challenges and underlying assumptions of the term. Ultimately, although covenantal pluralism offers a robust form of religious pluralism, I will argue that the term requires further clarification if it is to serve as a useful framework for addressing some of our present-day religiously charged conflicts. 

This paper examines the Buddhist "Walk for Peace" sponsored by the Hương Đạo Vipassana Bhavana Center in Ft. Worth, Texas.  From October 2025 through February 2026,  19 monks walked across several southern states on a 2,300 mile pilgrimage to Washington DC.   We'll consider how the Walk allowed for interreligious dialogue both as language and collective, embodied experience.   By examining the monks' voluntary suffering and daily "peace talks" hosted by civic groups, public schools, and churches, we'll see how audiences-- in-person and virtual--recognized a shared purpose and expressed an organic curiosity about Buddhist philosophy and rituals.   Finally, we'll imagine how shared embodied experiences might help establish interfaith understanding at a time when many white Christian Nationalists consider themselves under assault.