This panel investigates ritual as a site of creative resistance, communal solidarity, and theological reimagination across diverse religious and cultural contexts. Drawing first on a visual ethnography of ecumenical shared ministries in rural Canada, the papers explore how differently ritualized bodies negotiate belonging when they worship together, or fail to, in shared space. From Canada, the panel turns to the aftermath of Karbala, arguing that Zaynab bint Ali's lamentation and sermon inaugurate a tradition of "devotional resistance" in which grief becomes a future-oriented moral practice, visible in contemporary rituals like Arbaeen. In Chicago, IMAN's "Faithful Fridays" gatherings enact a barzakh moral imagination—a prefigurative politics that cultivates solidarity across religious, racial, and class lines. Finally, amid violent ICE enforcement in Minneapolis, music, dance, and Native American ceremonial movement emerge as embodied ritual resistance. Together, these papers argue that ritual is never mere repetition, but an active and urgent negotiation of power, memory, and hope.
“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).
My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.
This paper examines how ritual practices emerging from the aftermath of Karbala, particularly lamentation, sermon, and pilgrimage, function as modes of theological production and moral agency in Shii Islam. Centering Zaynab bint Ali’s sermon in Yazid’s court and the ritual traditions that followed it, the paper argues that grief operates not merely as commemoration but as a future-oriented ethical practice that preserves and reconfigures power after mass violence. Drawing on ritual theory, feminist studies of religion, and historical analysis, the paper challenges dominant assumptions that ritual primarily stabilizes tradition or expresses submission. Instead, it demonstrates how Zaynab’s ritualized speech and mourning inaugurate a form of “devotional resistance” in which memory and endurance generate moral authority. By tracing how these practices continue in rituals such as Arbaeen, the paper shows how ritual connects past trauma to future ethical possibility, offering a model for studying ritual as both preservation and transformation.
In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in a Muslim ethics of community organizing as a means to cultivate solidarity with the Muslim and non-Muslim other. In order to accomplish this, I focus on the “Faithful Fridays” interfaith gatherings held by contemporary American Muslim community organizer IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network) in the Chicago area. Such ritual performances not only cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and class-based lines; they also function as forms of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world not dominated by state, capitalist, or racial supremacist logics. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the barzakh to capture a discursive space which both divides and connects and thus opens up new ways of conceiving the self and other. Consequently, a barzakh moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.
Rather than look at protests becoming rituals, I here consider a case where ritual as part of protest. I maintain that because of consistent and violent attacks by ICE on protesters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, physical ritual movement became a vital part of protests.
A resident of the area, and was part of the resistance to ICE agents arrest and detention of citizens. Here, I offer my scholarly observations on events, paired with theory on ritual and protest. This includes reviewing Victor Turner and Richard Schechner’s understanding of ritual and protest, considering theatrical and group components. However, I focus mainly on critical understandings of the use of music and dance in protests. To do so, I describe and examine two specific examples from the Minneapolis ICE protests - Westminster Presbyterian church and the Singing Resistance movement, and Native American dances at memorial sites.