In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper thinks through the concept-practice of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the subject-self) as a form of ethico-politics among a group of anti-colonial writers and actors in the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). I investigate how takwīn al-nafs troubles the assumed secularity of freedom (and its correlates, liberation, emancipation) as a category of political modernity in its troubling of the boundaries of the ethical/political, as well as the self-contained subject self in the relationship of the anthropos to other living beings: the Divine, as well as animals, plants, the earth, and other celestial beings. Drawing from archival material, publications, and ethnographic fieldwork with students of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars and the philosopher and critic Malek Bennabi, I explore how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and as an enduring mode of re-membering a dismembered epistemic and ethical-political horizon.

This paper examines how asylum adjudications based on conversion to Christianity expose the paradoxes of religious freedom within secular nation-states. While the 1951 Refugee Convention upholds the right to change religion as grounds for asylum, European courts overwhelmingly reject such claims. Decision-makers assess not only persecution risk but also the “genuineness” of conversion, thereby constructing a “Christian orthodoxy” that is far removed from the lived religion of converts or their German supporters.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Germany, this paper argues that courts “secularize” Christianity by transforming it into a legal category, using religious freedom as a mechanism of exclusion rather than inclusion. Asylum seeking converts to Christianity must navigate a contradiction: invoking religious freedom while seeking cultural belonging to a secular state with a Christian history that distrusts overt religiosity. This process reveals how secularism does not simply protect freedom but also constrains it, reinforcing racial and national boundaries.

Against the backdrop of increasing constraints and surveillance in the name of secular “liberation,” French Muslim women pursue a vision of freedom that refuses any binary opposition between secularism and Muslim piety. Drawing on decolonial feminism and Islamic moral psychology, as well as on “secular sensibilities” of choice, rights, and liberation, French Muslim women pursue their freedom through spaces of gender and racial non-mixité. They engage with the moral language of choice, freedom, and rights in a way that intensifies rather than diluting their pious aspirations. Freedom is cherished as a devotional virtue cultivated in community, rather than as an individualized resistance. This presentation underscores the Islamic genealogies of freedom that inform these women’s discourses, as counterweights to an Enlightenment understanding. Islamic ethics of non-compulsion, of consent and testimony, and of training the soul are essential ways to understand freedom and choice as “Islamic secular,” decolonial feminist, and pious sensibilities.

The concept of ummah is often misrepresented in Western discourse as a transnational Muslim solidarity that undermines the nation-state. Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques ummah as “toxic cosmopolitanism,” claiming it prioritizes religious loyalty over universal moral obligations. However, this critique oversimplifies ummah and ignores its historical evolution, particularly among marginalized Muslim communities facing structural injustice. This study critically engages Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, highlighting its Eurocentric assumptions and its detachment from political struggle, which fail to address systemic exclusion and the lived experiences of racialized Muslim minorities.

Through a field study of Indonesian Muslim immigrants at Al-Falah Mosque in Philadelphia, this research examines ummah as an ethical practice of recognition and resilience. By centering lived experience, it challenges reductionist portrayals and argues that ummah functions as an alternative cosmopolitanism—a moral praxis of solidarity, liberation, and justice in response to systemic exclusion.

This paper examines the tripartite dialogical paradigm of Church–dialogue–Christ, first established by Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council, that informs the Catholic Church's approach to interreligious dialogue today. A study of Nostra Aetate and subsequent magisterial documents on dialogue reveals that the Church’s understanding of itself as missionary affects its approach to dialogue, and the content of this dialogue is determined by the Church’s understanding of Jesus Christ, who is both the Word professed in dialogue as well as the source of this very mission. Moreover, as the universalizing message of Nostra Aetate 'broke open' each point of this paradigm to the world, I argue that this paradigm of universal Church–universal dialogue–universal Christ still maintains efficacy, still speaks truth, in our current pluralistic context.

When Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on non-Christian religions, absolved the Jewish people of collective responsibility for the death of Christ, the church at last renounced an ancient prejudice. Among the American bishops at the council, the most vigorous advocate for this historic step was Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing. Drawing on untapped archival sources, this paper examines the context of Cushing's pivotal intervention, tracing his grassroots diplomacy with Jewish communities and his cultivation of Augustin Cardinal Bea, the Vatican official who led the charge for the declaration. Cushing's own zeal for Jewish-Christian relations arose in part from his encounter with anti-Semitism in his own archdiocese, particularly in the right-wing Catholic movement led by Father Leonard Feeney. Cushing's clash with traditionalists, and his belief that interfaith charity takes priority over doctrinal precision, mirrors ideological tensions in the church today, sixty years after the close of the council.

Based on over 100  (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) archival collections, this paper re-examines the "Jewish origins" of Nostra Aetate. Surveying the recent literature, published since the last two council anniversary (>2005), it first outlines and then challenges how our current narrative has strongly entangled memory with history in the past decades. Going against the grain and back to archival collections, it elaborates a more nuanced, complex and pluralistic account of Vatican II, through the many immediate "non-Christian" perspectives, which have remained lost or largely unknown to a mainly Catholic scholarship on VaticanII. 

As it tries to account for Jewish and Muslim voices on VaticanII in an emic perspective, decentering the narrative from its traditional historical and theological background, context and audience, the paper addresses 60 years of solid scholarship on VaticanII with a daring question: what remains indeed from VaticanII if we tell "what happened there", based on non-Christian sources only? 

This paper will examine how Nostra Aetate uses Mary as a bridge figure between Christians and Muslims and how it influenced subsequent Popes and religious figures to reference her in various speeches and statements.  It will examine how Muslims have been receptive to this initiative through visiting Meryem Ana Evi in Turkey as well as writing about her in academic and scholarly settings.  It will conclude by critically examining this use and ask how Mary can open doors to new theological inquiry, shared devotion and Christian-Muslim dialogue.  

This paper investigates the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks (d. 2025), the first “openly-queer” imam in the world. It argues that while dominant clerical groups (ʿulamāʾ) in Cape Town condemned the extra-judicial killing of the imam, they spread a toxic theology of violent exclusion. For the last ten years, members of the ʿulamāʾ advocated a position of virulent exclusion or takfīr based on a theological reconciliation between Islam and queerness. This form of excommunication presents a religio-cultural system of marginalization, legitimating the murder of the imam, and even proposing it as a form of cleansing the “moral corruption” in the broader Muslim community. This paper investigates how religious forms are deployed in service of hegemonic sexual scripts legitimating exclusion. Therwsfater, it will analyze the constructive theological work of Imam Muhsin as a form of reimagining Islam. 

This paper examines the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative religious leaders and politicians to promote their exclusionary visions for religious norms or the state. This paper considers anti-trans discourses as an expression of white Christian supremacy relying on the marginalization of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities such as Muslims. First, it draws parallels in anti-trans rhetoric between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim preachers and the bills and executive orders of conservative white Christian politicians. Thereafter it theorizes the use of discourse for neotraditional Muslim preachers.  Lastly, this paper ends with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation.

This paper will explore examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to better understand the ways that queerness is being mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. What are the possibilities borne of a refusal to align with the political role ascribed to Jewishness by, for instance, the Trump administration's privileging of campaigns to combat anti-semitism on college campuses? What is the role of queerness in religious and liturgical performances of this refusal? How is queerness sparking re-imaginations of Jewishness, Jewish life, and Jewish ritual in direct opposition to political violence and Zionism as an attempt to enclose and emplace Jewishness? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a reading of queer anti-Zionist Jewish communities through the lenses of queer theory, theories of space and place, and religious studies

This paper examines the works of two queer artists in U.S. Chinatowns who imagine alternative spaces and alternative futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns. In these cultural communities that are increasingly forced into spatial visions of futurity offered by capitalism and carceral violence, queer Chinatown-based artwork (many of whom employ religious and mythical symbolism) instead opens up alternative futures that redefine what safety and freedom look like: they instead illustrate queer visions of freedom and safety through kinship and community that reject mass incarceration or cultural assimilation as means to queer diasporic safety. Reading these queer artwork through the lens of both queer theory and theological aesthetics, this paper considers how these queer/feminist artworks reimagine futures of freedom for Chinatown communities and open up “sanctuary spaces” for queer and minoritized subjects.