In 2024, participants gathered together at an interdisciplinary workshop at Villanova University, sponsored by Political Theology Network and the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, to share their perspectives on the complex relationship between religion and contemporary public life. Over the following year, they developed articles, book chapters, and presentations stemming from those initial conversations. This symposium is a collection of essays by several of the workshop participants, whose work developed from the dynamic engagement of interdisciplinary voices regarding the intersection of law and religion.
A collection of essays from the workshop on Religion and Public Life at Villanova University.
Luke Roberts is a PhD candidate in Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His scholarship focuses on the ethical, epistemological, and political dimensions of spiritual practice.
Ruslan Yusupov is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Sociocultural anthropologist by training, he is currently working on a book manuscript that explores how a community of Chinese Muslims, most of whom are former drug addicts, engage in social volunteering as a way to imagine futures in securitizing Chinese modernity. Among the cases that this work focuses on is the way Muslim volunteers rethink the religious as well as the political role of Islamic prohibitions in their lives.
Peng Yin teaches at Boston University School of Theology and is the author of Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics.
Teresa Smallwood is a lawyer, Associate Professor, and Dean at United Lutheran Seminary. She co-edited Moved by the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives.
Symposium Essays
Religion and Public Life
Luke Roberts introduces the essays in the symposium on Religion and Public Life.
How Do We Misread One Another?
Coming
The Montage of Privation: Islam and the Architecture of Sinicization in China
Islam in China is going through a period of architectural amputation called Sinicization. The result is a haunting landscape where dome-less and minaret-less mosques visualize deficiency as a definition of what it means to be Muslim in China today.
Coming
Freedom of Religion, the American Way
Coming