For the past two summers, the Political Theology Network and the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy have co-sponsored an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars interested in the intersections of law and religion. For one week at the end of July, we came together at the Inn at Villanova University to discuss the complicated place of religion within contemporary public life. We spent our days presenting our research, discussing common readings, touring religious and artistic centers in Philadelphia, and sharing meals and pedagogical tricks at lively tables.
Vincent Lloyd and Michael Moreland led this cohort of anthropologists, philosophers, legal scholars, theologians, and historians. The idea behind this gathering was simple: bring together exciting thinkers from various disciplines who would normally never collaborate and see what the abundance of different competencies would do. To no surprise, we were not disappointed.
Running this workshop for two consecutive years created the possibility for deeper intellectual friendships to form, but it also enabled collaborative, sustained engagement on the same projects. In 2024, participants were asked to bring a primary source they were studying for discussion. The sources ranged widely. They included selections from the journal of an 18th century lawyer involved in France’s very first gender identity case; transcripts of interviews with East African refugees navigating the tensions between religious, national, and ethnic identity in the midst of war; several court documents limping towards an understanding of the publicness of religion; official theological pronouncements from the Vatican; and many other types of sources aimed to help us examine the complicated religious formations, alliances, and struggles in a “secular” world.
Our conversations that summer proved productive; one year later we gathered again. This time, though, we shared the fruits of our time together and the hard work in the intervening months. Participants came with a draft of an article, chapter, or upcoming presentation. By letting our ideas cook in the interdisciplinary cauldron of the prior year, our group offered fresh and innovative approaches to questions that might grow stale when cordoned off within the clutches of a single discipline.
Neena Mahadev looked to the “ecumenical” dimensions of early liberation theologies in Asia to better understand their complex and transregional development as well as the theologies that informed and were shaped by it. Brandon Paradise noted the more contemplative, prayerful dimensions of social struggle by tracing a genealogy stretching from Eastern Christian practices of prayer through Tolstoy and Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
Other colleagues helped us think about the rise of a certain, patriarchal brand of “cultural Christianity” (Ludger Viefhues-Bailey) and how legal institutions and actors construct the concept of motherhood through a complicated dynamic of ideas surrounding care and neglect (Dana Lloyd). Together, we interrogated the limits, ambivalence, and potency of theological language; the encroachment of state power; and the complicated ways religious and political belonging conflict, converge, and create.
In addition to the closed discussions among the members of the cohort, we were joined by visitors for presentations. In 2024, Jeffrey Greene joined us for a discussion of his book on Bob Dylan and the role of prophetic figures in American history. Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart also came for a conversation about the importance of religion in her work with the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement in the city of Philadelphia. In 2025, Dmytro Vovk and Pavlo Smytsnyuk delivered a presentation on the theological, political, and legal dimensions of the war in Ukraine, detailing how deeply disputes over ecclesial authority and theological language were bound up with the current conflict.
One of the most generative aspects of our gathering was the discussion of teaching. While the 2025 meeting featured more informal pedagogical conversations, our larger 2024 workshop dedicated a day to conversations on the strategies, risks, and joys of teaching religion. Veteran teachers shared hard-won tricks of the trade, and junior colleagues brought insights from a fresh perspective of the classroom. These pedagogical conversations included philosophical considerations of the fraught situation of the humanities in the contemporary university, practical advice on constructing a syllabus, and a healthy amount of laughter.
In the symposium presented here, four of the workshop’s participants generously share some of their work that grew out of our conversations for a wider audience. Peng Yin, a theological ethicist, offers a thoughtful perspective on the place given to China in the conceptions of Western intellectuals in “How Do We Misread One Another?” Self-reflectively stepping back after completing his recent book project, Yin identifies and describes these general trends and their problems as a way into a deeper examination of the all too human experience and dangers of intellectual work.
Teresa Smallwood, in “Freedom of Religion the American Way,” examines how the contemporary resurgence of a specifically American mode of Christian nationalism threatens to erode both constitutional protections and a social imaginary, arguably, more amenable to difference. Smallwood, a lawyer and theologian, helpfully points to instances where the law, politics, and theological imagination converge to form particularly potent expressions of the mode of nationalism she identifies.
In “The Montage of Privation: Islam and the Architecture of Sinicization in China,” sociocultural anthropologist Ruslan Yusupov calls our attention to a fascinating recent architectural phenomenon in China. His description of how Chinese Muslims must perform national belonging through a complicated “normalization of lack” reveals some of the underlying logic behind Xi-era cultural politics.
Hafsa Oubou’s contribution examines what it is about Islamic veiling that causes such moral concern in Europe. Oubou’s anthropological work largely focuses on Muslim educators in Belgium who are asked to simultaneously promote democratic values while being racialized as threats to the very democratic order they construct. In this piece, she astutely puts her finger on the complexity of a secular logic that creates a social virtue out of visibility and, commensurately, a vice of veiling.
Each of these pieces demonstrates the depth and complexity of our conversations over the last two summers. We are grateful to the contributors as well as all of those who participated in our gatherings and hope the conversations and friendships begun there have long afterlives.
