Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar

The Religious Reflections on Friendship Seminar invites proposals for papers and panel presentations that address the intersection of religion/s and friendship from any scholarly perspective and religious tradition. We welcome papers that broaden contemporary perspectives on friendship and challenge dominant perspectives on friendship, as they bring friendship and religion into dialogue with contemporary issues, needs, and challenges. Our focus in 2023 will be most specifically on the study of friendship from interreligious/interfaith perspectives.

The following themes, amongst others, may be engaged from the perspective of two or more religious traditions:

• Interfaith friendship
• Friendship and ethics
• Friendship and the arts
• Friendship and the land; friendship and nature
• Friendship, religious practice, and decolonization
• Theological and/or mystical perspectives on friendship
• Friendship, crisis, discernment, and dark nights of the soul
• Friendship within religious texts and/or historic time periods
• Friendship-informed pedagogies for the teaching of inter-religious/inter-faith studies
• Civic friendship, political friendship, prophetic friendship, activism, and the common good

Echoing 2023’s presidential theme “La Labor de Nuestras Manos” (The Work of Our Hands) we also invite papers that consider the role of friendship practices and interfaith dialogue in the work that we do in the study of religion and theology including scholarly work, pedagogical practice, and alternatives to traditional academic roles.

Ideally seminar participants pre-circulate papers and come to the seminar’s Annual Meeting session ready to discuss them. Papers should be submitted to co-chairs for pre-circulation by mid-October.