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Dana Lloyd

Dana Lloyd is assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. She works at the intersection of religious studies, legal studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental humanities. Her first book manuscript, Arguing for This Land: Rethinking Indigenous Sacred Sites, is under contract with University Press of Kansas.

Symposia

Law, Religion, and Paradoxes of Sovereignty

We are excited to bring Spencer Dew, Nicholas Shrubsole, and Méadhbh McIvor into conversation about the juridification of religion and the religification of law, about the network of relationships that are exposed to us when law and religion interact, about a shared skepticism toward religious identities, and more.

Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism: A Political Theology of Climate Change

These questions of environmental justice become even more urgent in the face of our current crisis, as we see the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on the same communities who suffer the most from other environmental harms.

American Indian Religious Freedom

Is the framework of religious freedom suitable for the protection of American Indian sacred lands?

Essays

Personhood

The conversation about nature’s personhood and rights is always political, often legal, and sometimes theological. Most importantly, it is a localized conversation about the boundaries of a given community – who is part of the community and who isn’t.

Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero’s feminist theory of nonviolence takes the biblical commandment of “Thou Shall Not Kill” as its starting point. This commandment is ethical (it is about one’s relationships with others) and religious (it is about one’s relationship with God), but it is also political (without it, political communities cannot exist).

The Coloniality of Wilderness

I am interested in exploring and critiquing the discursive implications of designating this area as wilderness, given the history of this idea and its role in dispossessing Indigenous communities.

A Hollow Freedom: On Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association

Neither the government nor the Court doubted the religiosity of the practice for which the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa nations sought protection. Yet, arguments about religious freedom obscured the true issues at stake and the need for sovereign freedom.